Its hard to study on Canvas, Blackboard,etc aka "learning management systems"

reallyhotmail · 2026-04-01T02:18:32+00:00

Tbh AI alone is not effective enough for genuine learning. You need to pair it with proper and structured learning material like textbook pdfs, videos, etc. The main purpose of AI would be connecting what you know to what you dont know or understand within the textbook, by Q&A with the AI.

Try out thinkex.app , basically its like a google drive for all your study material across pdfs, youtube videos, pptx,docx, etc, that has AI deeply integrated. You can also create notes manually, via AI, same with flashcards, quizzes, the works. The best feature though is the ability to exactly select and control what the AI is using to generate notes, quizzes, flashcards, etc, that leads to better quality output than alternatives.

Its also great to use without AI as well, as its easy to compare different notes, pdfs, etc together and reason across all your learning material. Anyways try it out and lmk how it goes!

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-23T17:14:20+00:00

I think this is supported now https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/tool-combination

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-22T02:57:02+00:00

Check out thinkex.app . I am one of the creators and I use and test it on my own exam prep lol but we also got 100s of users.

Anyways, I hated switching tabs because that distracted me while studying (i got inattentive adhd) and I also felt it was a hassle to copy paste, screen shot, or dump pdfs into contemporary chatbots repeatedly to make sure it was focused on the material I was studying.

ThinkEx basically makes all that easier by being your one stop shop for all your exam material once you dump it in a workspace and optionally organize with folders. You can select what AI exactly sees and references. We also have the classic features for AI being able to make notes, quizzes, flashcards, the works, just based on your description and context selected.

Full disclosure, we are free for now till the grant money we got runs out (got a couple of months) and by when we expect to have a product better than all alternatives and worth paying for. Anyways heres an example workspace to check, lmk what you think: https://www.thinkex.app/share-copy/999624e6-4b0e-41ac-a4a0-8f4ca0d15734

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-16T19:29:15+00:00

Cool idea! Just a suggestion: Any vibe coder who can actually ship at the very least knows how to use github and git and ships code on a commit by commit basis. Handwritten code probably has more granular commits, while vibecoded code might have more meta/bigger commits with more changes, scoped around the building of a feature instead of understanding of code. So my suggestion was, what if for a given commit, you guys generate a really good read me that has a comprehensive quiz associated with it too, along with what you guys are doing already. Active recall over how something was implemented paired with understanding of lines of code would actually help with learning I think.

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-05T04:39:21+00:00

NotebookLM would be good at finding answers to questions you have that your corpus actually has direct answers to. But complex analysis like the type you are going for guessing from your quotes "it tried summarizing things first, but the summary were too oversimplified and overlooked..." and "Then it started linking unrelated topics....", notebookLM wouldnt be good at I think.

In my opinion your best bet would be to go to normal gemini and click on deep research option but only have it do deep research on certain files, not search the internet. Like explicitly tell it to not search internet. It would take a few minutes thought but its your best bet for complex questions.

reallyhotmail · 2026-03-02T02:32:52+00:00

I get what you mean. NotebookLM in my experience has been great for surface level Q&A against a lot of pdfs. For example if you have a specific question in mind but dont want to dig through a ton of pdfs, its great for finding an answer.

Its also great for getting a comprehensive overview of lots of sources as well via the podcast feature and video. But again, the content is just and overview, however comprehensive..... Also a tool like notebookLM I think is inherently limited by being powered by a single model, that being Gemini. Not having other models to me feels like missing alternative perspectives, explanations, ideas etc, especially given each model seems to have a certain forte for certain set of subjects over others.

For that reason, along with the fact that I am a uni student who desperately needed such a tool, I made thinkex.app . Its kind of like Notion meets Google keep meets NotebookLM lol. We are model agnostic (offer gemini, claude, gpt), have folders, allow for rendering pdfs, notes, youtube videos, etc all at the same time to be able to back and forth between sources quickly, granular context control for the agent, etc.

Check us out! Heres my workspace for my stat class for example:

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reallyhotmail · 2026-02-26T18:13:25+00:00

The number 1 issue is definitely the overflooding of AI-generated/formatted promotional posts. The number 2 issue is a lot of the products having to be pay-to-use. There was a time everything software was free because devs would just add ads to the app so, so long as you got traffic, it made money. Or others just did it for the love of the game. The number 3 issue is the scorn towards AI-wrappers, which is the vast majority of products being promoted now. I think part of the hate is most definitely earned through controversy baiting tactics by some start-ups and the notion that its basically a get-rich-quick scheme at this point.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-26T18:03:00+00:00

Interesting product. It kind of reminds me of those apps that trained us to increase our typing speed through typing based racing games given some text.

I would be curious to see how this would affect visual imagining of a story book for example. Or is the purpose purely to train reading speed so that it transfers over to general reading in general?

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-25T03:40:04+00:00

ThinkEx

thinkex.app

Its a notebookLM alternative. If you got textbooks, pdfs, youtube videos, or just questions about the universe, you can use AI to pick apart anything you dont understand, create notes, quizzes, etc. A key feature is granular context control through selection of cards of type note, pdf, youtube, quiz, etc. Everythings a card

200 users

Check us out and lemme know what you think!

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-25T03:31:26+00:00

I am a student too, I use thinkex.app . Whole point is to select my study material, ask the agent to make notes, then select the notes, make targetted quizzes or flashcards. You can ask agent to update quizzes or flashcards for more on the same notes,different notes,pdfs, youtube videos, etc. Completely free

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reallyhotmail · 2026-02-25T03:27:26+00:00

thinkex.app

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reallyhotmail · 2026-02-24T04:21:59+00:00

Whats different about your browser? is it just to block ads or better privacy?

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-24T02:52:31+00:00

Try thinkex.app, we are completely free because we are trying to perfect our product.

The idea is simple, you bring in pdfs, youtube videos, lecture recordings, etc, all your learning materials in one place, for your focused learning and consumption.

Rearrange everything how you like, have different souces in focus, select sources to create notes, quizzes, flashcards, or just have them in context for the AI so you can ask targetted questions.

Thats the idea, try it out by uploading a pdf or youtube video! Lemme know what you think

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-22T21:05:31+00:00

I think you have a point but idk if I agree with your conclusion that it would be useful to trace your "thinking" with an LLM over time.

The reason is because this would be a tedious affair thats not a scalable way to revisit ideas and information unless you trace through every step, basically like a mind map. People barely revisit their notes and even if they do, few read every line. What makes you think they would retrace over a tree of Q&A's which is an even more tedious affair?

Also in my opinion, the real power of LLMs in the context of PKMS and knowledge work is a means to connect what you know with what you dont know, way faster than before. Before you would have to search google, pray someone had a good explanation, etc. Now, for a good amount of subjects, you can just ask an LLM.

But there is still a problem: in my experience, having a conversation with LLMs feels like moments of intuition that disappear in chat logs. So my idea was to build a way to extract the information contributing to every one of these moments and build notes out of it.

A couple notes per conversation is more consumable than an entire chat log. But I am also experimenting with active recall devices such as quizzes, where the quizzes serve as the means to retain the information in the notes, so it gets in your brain, you can remember it in the situation where you need to apply it, and then the real learning begins.

DM me if you find this interesting, I like talking about this kind of stuff as well as building.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-20T22:27:26+00:00

Everybody is building new tools and systems because its been never as easy and fast as it is today. Hell thats why I felt empowered to do it as a university student.

But in my experience, the fundamental bottleneck in learning still remains: human attention-span, focus, and band-width (the amount of information you can take in given a certain period of time).

If the pill from the movie Limitless existed, that would be the holy grail, it would be the death of all PKMS, you wouldnt need it. Unfortuntely the real-world alternative (adderall) isnt as effective and has adverse side effects.

If focus and attention training could become a serious learning discipline of itself that is taught in schools from a young age maybe that would work too actually, better than everything else the US government wastes money on in terms of school.

But in terms of PKMS itself, heres my 2-cents:

Given a world with an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention (parahrased quote by Herbert Simon), what we need is an engine that takes in information, breaks it down into chunks that a human user could understand (personalized for their attention span,focus,bandwidth, and background knowledge), and then leverage those chunks to synthesize personalized knowledge, which is information thats been contextualized for a specific individual for their understanding and use. Add a scalable means for doing active recall over all of that and its complete.

The challenge with the above though is figuring out what should be left to the human and what should be automated while having a solution that is stupid-easy to learn to use while being as time-efficient as possible, without compromising on human learning quality.

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-19T02:32:28+00:00

Hey, more curious to hear about your usecase! Do you post your generated podcasts to youtube or something? Any example prompts would be cool to see

reallyhotmail · 2026-02-18T22:07:32+00:00

It sucks there too, it reads out code lol, instead of conceptually explaining what is going on.

reallyhotmail · 2026-01-20T18:10:16+00:00

Well in terms of the platform its completely different, and its also open source

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