OpenAI launched Prism - an AI LaTeX IDE. It’s a boon for anyone writing LaTeX documents. All the nitty-gritty of formatting, syntax, etc. is handled by AI. You can collaborate, too. It brings the power of AI code editors to scientific document editing. It still has some way to go, though. I asked it to convert a portion of this paper into LaTeX. Here’s the image I passed: … and here’s the LaTeX output it generated: ...
Google has released a huge number of AI tools. Not all are useful, but some are quite powerful. Here’s a list of the tools ChatGPT could find. 🟢 = I find it good. 🟡 = Not too impressive. 🔴 = Avoid. Assistants, research, and knowledge work 🟢 Gemini is Google’s main AI assistant app. Use it as a meeting-prep copilot: paste the agenda + last email thread, ask for “3 likely objections + crisp rebuttals + 5 questions that sound like I did my homework.” 🟢 Gemini Deep Research is Gemini’s agentic research mode that browses many sources (optionally your Gmail/Drive/Chat) and produces multi-page reports. Use it to build a client brief with citations (market, competitors, risks), then reuse it for outreach or a deck outline. 🟢 Gemini Canvas turns ideas (and Deep Research reports) into shareable artifacts like web pages, quizzes, and simple apps. Use it to convert a research report into an interactive explainer page your team can share internally. 🟢 Gemini Agent is an experimental “do multi-step tasks for me” feature that can use connected apps (Gmail/Calendar/Drive/Keep/Tasks, plus Maps/YouTube). Use it to plan a week of customer check-ins: “find stalled deals, draft follow-ups, propose times, and create calendar holds-show me before sending.” 🟢 NotebookLM is a source-grounded research notebook: it answers from your uploaded sources and can generate Audio Overviews. Use it to turn a messy folder of PDFs into a decision memo + an “AI podcast” you can listen to while walking. 🟡 Pinpoint (Journalist Studio) helps explore huge collections of docs/audio/images with entity extraction and search. Use it for internal investigations / audit trails: upload contracts + emails, then trace every mention of a vendor and its linked people/locations. 🟢 Google AI Mode exposes experimental Search experiences (including AI Mode where available). Use it for rapid competitive scans: run the same query set weekly and track what changed in the AI-generated summaries vs links. Project Mariner is a Google Labs “agentic” prototype aimed at taking actions on your behalf in a supervised way. Use it to prototype a real workflow (e.g., “collect pricing from 20 vendor pages into a table”) before you invest in automating it properly. Workspace and “AI inside Google apps” 🟢 Google Workspace with Gemini brings Gemini into Gmail/Docs/Sheets/Drive, etc. Use it to turn a weekly leadership email into: (1) action items per owner, (2) a draft reply, and (3) a one-slide summary for your staff meeting. Google Vids is Workspace’s AI-assisted video creation tool. Use it to convert a project update doc into a 2-3 minute narrated update video for stakeholders who don’t read long emails. Gemini for Education packages Gemini for teaching/learning contexts. Use it to generate differentiated practice: same concept, three difficulty levels + a rubric + common misconceptions. Build: developer + agent platforms 🟢 Google AI Studio is the fast path to prototyping with Gemini models and tools. Use it to build a “contract red-flagger”: upload a contract, extract clauses into structured JSON, and generate a risk report you can paste into your workflow. Firebase Studio is a browser-based “full-stack AI workspace” with agents, unifying Project IDX into Firebase. Use it to ship a real internal tool (auth + UI + backend) without local setup, then deploy with Firebase/Cloud Run. 🟢 Jules is an autonomous coding agent that connects to your GitHub repo and works through larger tasks on its own. E.g. give it “upgrade dependencies, fix the failing tests, and open a PR with a clear changelog,” then review it like a teammate’s PR instead of doing the grind yourself. Jules Tools (CLI) is a command-line interface for running and monitoring Jules from your terminal or CI. E.g. pipe a TODO list into “one task per session,” auto-run nightly maintenance (lint/format/test fixes), and have it open PRs you can batch-review in the morning Jules API lets you programmatically trigger Jules from other systems. E.g. when a build fails, your pipeline can call the API with logs + stack trace, have Jules propose a fix + tests, and post a PR link back into Slack/Linear for human approval Project IDX > Firebase Studio is the transition site if you used IDX. Use it to keep your existing workspaces but move to the newer Studio flows (agents + Gemini assistance). Genkit is an open-source framework for building AI-powered apps (workflows, tool use, structured output) across providers. Use it to productionize an agentic workflow (RAG + tools + eval) with a local debugging UI before deployment. Stax is Google’s evaluation platform for LLM apps (prompts, models, and end-to-end behaviors), built to replace “vibe testing” with repeatable scoring. E.g. codify your product’s rubric (tone, factuality, refusal correctness, latency), run it against every prompt/model change, and block releases when key metrics regress SynthID is DeepMind’s watermarking approach for identifying AI-generated/altered content. E.g. in an org that publishes lots of content, watermark what your tools generate and use detection as part of provenance checks before external release SynthID Text is the developer-facing tooling/docs for watermarking and detecting LLM-generated text. E.g. watermark outbound “AI-assisted” customer emails and automatically route them for review if they’re about regulated topics Responsible Generative AI Toolkit is Google’s “safeguards” hub: watermarking, safety classifiers, and guidance to reduce abuse and failure modes. E.g. wrap your app with layered defenses (input filtering + output moderation + policy tests) so one jailbreak prompt doesn’t become a security incident Vertex AI Agent Builder is Google Cloud’s platform to build, deploy, and govern enterprise agents grounded in enterprise data. Use it to build a customer-support agent that can read policy docs, query BigQuery, and write safe responses with guardrails. Gemini Code Assist is Gemini in your IDE (and beyond) with chat, completions, and agentic help. Use it for large refactors: ask it to migrate a module, generate tests, and propose PR-ready diffs with explanations. PAIR Tools is Google’s hub of practical tools for understanding/debugging ML behavior (especially interpretability and fairness). E.g. before launch, run “slice analysis + counterfactual edits + feature sensitivity” to find where the model breaks on real user subgroups LIT (Learning Interpretability Tool) is an interactive UI for probing models on text/image/tabular data. E.g. debug prompt brittleness by comparing outputs across controlled perturbations (tense, style, sensitive attributes) and visualizing salience/attribution to see what the model is actually using What-If Tool is a minimal-coding tool to probe model predictions and fairness. E.g. manually edit a single example into multiple “what-if” counterfactuals and see which feature flips the decision, then turn that into a targeted data collection plan Facets helps you explore and visualize datasets to catch skew, outliers, and leakage early. E.g. audit a training set for missingness and subgroup imbalance, then fix data before you waste time “tuning your way out” of a data problem 🟡 Gemini CLI brings Gemini into the terminal with file ops, shell commands, and search grounding. Use it as a repo-native “ops copilot”: “scan logs, find the regression, propose the patch, run tests, and summarize.” 🟡 Antigravity (DeepMind) is positioned as an agentic development environment. Use it when you want multiple agents running tasks in parallel (debugging, refactoring, writing tests) while you supervise. Gemini for Google Cloud is Gemini embedded across many Google Cloud products. Use it for cloud incident triage: summarize logs, hypothesize root cause, and generate the Terraform/IaC fix. Create: media, design, marketing, and “labs” tools Google Labs is the hub for many experiments (Mixboard, Opal, CC, Learn Your Way, Doppl, etc.). Use it as your “what’s new” page-many tools show up here before they become mainstream. 🟡 Opal builds, edits, and shares AI mini-apps from natural language (with a workflow editor). Use it to create a repeatable analyst tool (e.g., “take a company name > pull recent news > summarize risks > draft outreach”). 🟡 Mixboard is an AI concepting canvas/board for exploring and refining ideas. Use it to run a structured ideation sprint: generate 20 variants, cluster them, then turn the top 3 into crisp one-pagers. Pomelli is a Labs marketing/brand tool that can infer brand identity and generate on-brand campaign assets. Use it to produce a month of consistent social posts from your website + a few product photos. 🟡 Stitch turns prompts/sketches into UI designs and code. Use it to go from a rough wireframe to React/Tailwind starter code you can hand to an engineer the same day. 🟡 Flow is a Labs tool aimed at AI video/story production workflows (built around Google’s gen-media stack). Use it to create a pitch sizzle reel quickly: consistent characters + scenes + a simple timeline. Whisk is a Labs image tool focused on controllable remixing (subject/scene/style style workflows). Use it for fast, art-directable moodboards when text prompting is too loose. ImageFX is Google Labs’ image-generation playground. Use it to iterate brand-safe visual directions quickly (e.g., generate 30 “hero image” variants, pick 3, then refine). VideoFX is the Labs surface for generative video (Veo-powered). Use it to prototype short looping video backgrounds for product pages or events. MusicFX is the Labs music generation tool. Use it to generate royalty-free stems (intro/outro/ambient) for podcasts or product videos. Doppl is a Labs try-on style experiment/app. Use it to sanity-check creative wardrobe ideas before you buy, or to mock up “virtual merch” looks for a campaign. 🟢 Gemini Storybook creates illustrated stories. Use it to generate custom reading material for a specific learner’s interests (and adjust reading level/style). TextFX is a Labs-style writing creativity tool (wordplay, transformations, constraints). Use it to generate 10 distinct “hooks” for the same idea before you write the real piece. GenType is a Labs experiment for AI-generated alphabets/type. Use it to create a distinctive event identity (custom letterforms) without hiring a type designer for a one-off. Science, security, and “serious AI” AlphaFold Server provides AlphaFold structure prediction as a web service. Use it to test protein/ligand interaction hypotheses before spending lab time or compute on deeper simulations. Google Threat Intelligence uses Gemini to help analyze threats and triage signals. Use it to turn a noisy alert stream into a prioritized, explainable threat narrative your SOC can act on. Models 🟡 Gemma is DeepMind’s family of lightweight open models built from the same tech lineage as Gemini. E.g. run a small, controlled model inside your VPC for narrow tasks (classification, extraction, safety filtering) when sending data to hosted LLMs is undesirable 🟡 Model Garden is Vertex AI’s catalog to discover, test, customize, and deploy models from Google and partners. E.g. shortlist 3 candidate models, run the same eval set, then deploy the winner behind one standardized platform with enterprise controls Vertex AI Studio is the Google Cloud console surface for prototyping and testing genAI (prompts, model customization) in a governed environment. E.g. keep “prompt versions + test sets + pass/fail criteria” together so experiments become auditable artifacts, not scattered chats Model Explorer helps you visually inspect model graphs so you can debug conversion/quantization and performance issues. E.g. compare two quantization strategies and pinpoint exactly which ops caused a latency spike or accuracy drop before you deploy Google AI Edge is the umbrella for building on-device AI (mobile/web) with ready-to-use APIs across vision, audio, text, and genAI. E.g. ship an offline, privacy-preserving feature (document classification or on-device summarization) so latency and data exposure don’t depend on the network Google AI Edge Portal benchmarks LiteRT models across many real devices so you don’t guess performance from one phone. E.g. test the same model on a spread of target devices and pick the smallest model/config that consistently hits your FPS/latency target TensorFlow Playground is an interactive sandbox for understanding neural networks. E.g. use it to teach or debug intuitions—show how regularization, feature interactions, or class imbalance changes decision boundaries in minutes Teachable Machine lets anyone train simple image/sound/pose models in the browser and export them. E.g. prototype an accessibility feature (custom gesture or sound trigger) fast, then export the model to a small web demo your stakeholders can try Directories (“where to discover the rest”) Google DeepMind Products & Models (Gemini, Veo, Astra, Genie, etc.)-best “canonical list” of what exists. Google Labs Experiments directory-browse by category (develop/create/learn) to catch smaller experiments you didn’t know to search for. Experiments with Google is a gallery of interactive demos (many AI) that’s great for prompt/data literacy and workshop “aha” moments. E.g. curate 5 experiments as a hands-on “AI intuition lab” for your team so they learn failure modes by playing, not by reading docs
I tried vibe-code a CSV to colored HTML table converter using this prompt. Create a tool that can convert pasted tables into colored HTML tables. Allow the user to paste a CSV or tab-delimited or pipe-delimited table. … Create an HTML table that has minimal styling. … Add a button to copy just the HTML to the clipboard. Codex built this. Which is perfect. AWS Partyrock built this. Which is a joke, because it didn’t write the code to do the conversion. It uses an LLM every time. ...
In 1995, I wrote down the specs for my "dream machine". Comparing it against the machine I have today: Item19952025IncreaseRAM32 MB64 GB2000GPU RAM16 MB8 GB500HDD4 GB1 TB250HDD speed10 MB/s2 GB/s200Processor150 MHz5.10 GHz34Monitor21"27"1.3Resolution2048x15361920x12000.73 Clearly, RAM has seen the biggest growth. Low cost, high demand.Followed by the hard disk - both on capacity and speed. The processor speed increase, in comparison, is modest. What's surprising is that my monitor today isn't that much bigger than what I wanted. The resolution is actually lower than what I wanted 30 years ago! Clearly, I overestimated how important screen resolution would be. ...
Windows PowerToys is one of the first tools I install on a new machine. I use it so much every day that I need to share how I use it. I’ve been using it for a long time now, but the pace at which good features have been added, it’s edged out most other tools and is #4 in terms of most used tools on my machine, with only the browser (Brave, currently), the editor (Cursor, currently), and Everything are ahead.) ...
Arun Tangirala and I webinared on “AI in Education” yesterday. This post isn’t about the webinar, which went on for an hour and was good fun. This post isn’t for my preparation for the webinar, which happened frantically 15 minutes before it started. This post is about how I created the annotated talk at https://github.com/sanand0/ai-in-education-webinar (inspired by Simon Willison’s annotated presentations process) – a post-processing step that took ~3 hours – and the tools I used for this. ...
My most-used apps in 2020 were: Everything. Locates files. Like Finder. Fast and brilliant. Chrome. But Edge is pretty good, and I’m using it for secondary accounts. Visual Studio Code. It’s my note-taker, TODO list, outliner, and IDE. Minecraft. I’m addicted. PowerPoint. I use it to make & edit videos, not just slides. Zoom. Thanks to the lockdown. Breakout rooms are great. Mail. It uses under 50MB. Gmail takes 250MB. VLC. It still plays all formats, but I’m looking for a replacement. Seafile. Our private Dropbox. AutoHotKey. The best macro tool, but hard to use. The new utilities I started using recently are: ...
With Office 365, PowerPoint supports SVG editing. This is really powerful. It means you can draw in PowerPoint and render it on the web – including as interactive or animated visuals. For example, the SVG in this simulator was created just with PowerPoint. The process is simple. Draw anything. Select any shapes and right-click. Select Save As Picture… and choose SVG. For example, you can use PowerPoint to create Smart Art, export it as SVG, and embed it into a page. See this example on CodePen. ...
I maintain my (extensive) notes in text files. I’ve explored Evernote, Onenote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, and many other platforms. But text files work. I store them as Markdown and sync them on DropBox. They used to be relatively large files (50-100KB) each, on broad topics. For example: todo.txt was a consolidated list of things I had to do people.txt was a list of everything I knew about people (addresses, birthdays, etc) towrite.txt was a list of everything I wanted to write about notes.txt was where I tracked notes about any topics … and more This led to a couple of problems. ...
This year, I’ve converted the bulk of my content into Markdown – a simple way of formatting text files in a way that can be rendered into HTML. Not out of choice, really. It was the only solution if I wanted to: Edit files on my iPad / iPhone (I’ve started doing that a lot more recently) Allow the contents to be viewable as HTML as well as text, and Allow non techies to edit the file As a bonus, it’s already the format Github and Bitbucket use for markup. ...
I’ve updated Mixamail to access Google search results via e-mail. For those new here, Mixamail is an e-mail client for Twitter. It lets you read and update Twitter just using your e-mail (you’ll have to register once via Twitter, though). Now, you can send an e-mail to [email protected] with a subject of “Google” and a body containing your query. You’ll get a reply within a few seconds (~20 seconds on my BlackBerry) with the top 8 search results along with the snippets. ...
Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do. ...
Writing a program to draw or change slides is sometimes easier than doing it manually. To change all fonts on a presentation to Arial, for example, you’d write this Visual Basic macro: Sub Arial() For Each Slide In ActivePresentation.Slides For Each Shape In Slide.Shapes Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Next Next End Sub If you didn’t like Visual Basic, though, you could write the same thing in Python: import win32com.client, sys Application = win32com.client.Dispatch("PowerPoint.Application") Application.Visible = True Presentation = Application.Presentations.Open(sys.argv[1]) for Slide in Presentation.Slides: for Shape in Slide.Shapes: Shape.TextFrame.TextRange.Font.Name = "Arial" Presentation.Save() Application.Quit() Save this as arial.py and type “arial.py some.ppt” to convert some.ppt into Arial. ...
The Random Quotes Generator is a simple tool that creates quotes by mixing up words on a web page. The results are often funny, but sometimes surprisingly insightful. Yes, this is the equivalent of a million monkeys typing Shakespeare, except that they’re using the works of Shakespeare as a starting point. And it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare. It could be you or your friends. ...
Creating motion charts in Excel is a simple four-step process. Get the data in a tabular format with the columns [date, item, x, y, size] Make a “today” cell, and create a lookup table for “today” Make a bubble chart with that lookup table Add a scroll bar and a play button linked to the “today” cell For the impatient, here’s a motion chart spreadsheet that you can tailor to your needs. For the patient and the puzzled, here’s a quick introduction to bubble and motion charts. ...
It’s been a good movie month for me, and I’ve managed to nudge closer to my target of watching the IMDb Top 250. But one tool I had in the past, that I sorely miss, is twofifty.org. It’s a now-defunct site that kept track of the IMDb Top 250, and let you strike off the movies that you had watched. You could see which movies you hadn’t seen, keep score, and discuss the movies. Since it’s demise, my movie watching slowed down as well. Earlier this month, I set up a similar site at 250.s-anand.net. It has the same basic function. You can log in, strike out movies that you’ve seen, and keep track of what’s left to see. For the more technically minded, the source-code is at two-fifty.googlecode.com. ...
UPDATE: 13 Jan 2026: Scott Adams passed away. RIP. UPDATE: Mar 2023: Dilbert.com was closed but archives are accessible via the Wayback Machine (slow). Search does not work well. Dilbert viewer is an alternate interface via Reddit. UPDATE: 2012: dilbert-search.appspot.com died, likely of old age. – Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to search through the Dilbert archives using text? This used to be possible at Dilbert.com some years ago, as a paid service. In late 2003, I needed to find some Dilbert strips for a client, so I’d subscribed for a year. I could then search for the quotes (I happened to be looking for “outsourcing”, so you can guess the context). ...
Watch Hans Rosling's TED Talks on debunking third world myths and new insights on poverty and ask yourself: could I do this with my own data? Yes. Google has a gadget called MotionChart that lets you do this. Now, you could put this up on your web page, but that's not quite useful when presenting to a client. (It is shocking, but there are many practical problems getting an Internet connection at a client site. The room doesn't have a connection. The cable isn't long enough. You can't access the LAN. Their proxy requires authentication. The connection is too slow. Whatever.) ...
I read about Google AppEngine early this morning, and applied for an invite. Google’s issuing beta invites to the first 10,000 users. I was pretty convinced I wasn’t among those, but turns out I was lucky. AppEngine lets you write web apps that Google hosts. People have been highlighting that it give you access to the Google File System and BigTable for the first time. But to me, that isn’t a big deal. (I’m not too worried about reliability, and MySQL / flat files work perfectly well for me as a data store.) ...
When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems: I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer) I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற) I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil. The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?) ...