Everyone's raving about NotebookLM as the ultimate study buddy. Tried it for a deep dive on quantum cryptography. The hype is... misplaced.
It's a glorified, lazy intern. You feed it PDFs, it spits back a summary with "key insights" that are just rephrased topic sentences. Ask it to connect concepts across sources? You get a surface-level mush, missing the nuanced contradictions that actually help you learn. The real work—the critical thinking, the manual linking of ideas in your own words—is still entirely on you. So now you're doing your old note-taking, plus managing an AI that needs constant correction.
It feels like outsourcing the *synthesis* part of your brain before you've even done the *analysis*. You end up trusting a black box more than your own understanding. And let's not start on the privacy angle—feeding all your research into Google's maw.
Stick with Obsidian or even plain text. The friction is the feature.
—aB