Hand-Picked Content
Gaming the AI System
Blog, 10 min
Website traffic is going down across the board. Every site on the web is influenced by the rise of AI assistants and LLMs. Just like in the early days of the web, people try to game the system. Examples: Researchers discovered they can manipulate AI answers by adding fake publication dates to signal content freshness. Others spam Reddit with 500 posts hoping AI will surface their brand. Some create endless listicles optimized for AI consumption. This blog post is a breakdown of these tactics and shares real examples.
Sora 2 Madness
Video, 7 min
Sora 2, the TikTok-style social network by OpenAI is made for posting AI-generated videos only. The setup is easy: Take a few photos of yourself from different angles, upload, and start creating AI videos. Will this kill creativity? There’s no quick answer. But here’s my guess: We’ll soon be fed up with endless AI-generated video. The novelty wears off fast. As AI content floods every platform, personal human connection becomes more valuable. In this video Casey Neistat explores this tension by creating AI videos himself, then wrapping them in his documentary style.
Hack your workflow
Searching past chats
Asking yourself (or your boss is asking you) what you’ve been working on? Just ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize your recent conversations.
Both AI assistants can look back through your chat history and pull together highlights, create a report, zoom in on details. No more endless scrolling to remember or refind what you were working on.
Practical uses:
- Fill out timesheets with short descriptions
- Create weekly progress reports
- Refresh your memory on complex projects
- Find information buried in old conversations
Your AI conversations are a searchable work log, not just disposable chats.
Tools & Apps
More than Bananas
AI Images
Want to try Google’s latest text-to-image model without creating an account? Nano Banana Starter lets you that without logging in.
The interface is simple: describe an image, upload files, or paste URLs. Choose your aspect ratio, hit run, and get results in seconds. It supports both text-to-image and image-to-image generation.
What’s striking it’s how far we’ve come. Two years ago, creating images like this required specific prompts and patience. Now it’s nearly instance and quality is often good-enough.
A great way to quickly prototype visual ideas or test what’s possible before committing to a paid tool.
(Is this the first time Google named an AI product we can all remember?)
AI on Your Machine
AI Assistants
The computing power of state-of-the-art hardware is sufficient to run LLM AI assistants locally on your machine. No data is leaving your network, and you can choose which AI model you wanna work with.
Three apps in this category are:
How do these work? You install a desktop app, and then download an open-source LLM model to your computer. I have successfully worked on simple tasks locally, such as text summarization and social media content. But it did not replace my AI subscriptions yet.
Fresh Reflections
How Tos, opinions, thoughts.
Google Banana Tested (+lots of examples)
We took Google’s new image generator through its paces with our own office photos, team portraits, and real-world creative briefs. Most interesting finding: Nano Banana works best as a first-draft tool, not a precision editor. Great for rapid prototyping, less reliable for iterative branding work.
But overall: Wow. Check the side-by-side examples in our blog post.
Classifieds
No-Nonsense Web Analytics
For too long, installing Google Analytics on a new website was the default option for many webmasters, but for most projects, it’s overly complex. Meet Fathom, privacy-first, cookie-free web analytics. We ditched GA for Fathom a long time ago.
The Smart Email Marketing Alternative
EmailOctopus is the email software perfect for creators and small businesses. Simple, intuitive, world-class support – all at a fair price point. And this newsletter also runs on EmailOctopus.
Wispr Flow really boosts productivity
Talking to computers instead of typing has been a decade-old dream. Now, thanks to AI, it finally works with Wispr Flow.
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Off-Topic Links
Cartography of Gen AI
Interactive Map
Ever wondered what’s behind that instant AI response? This interactive map shows the full supply chain of generative AI.