Search Rag
Elicit and Consensus are AI tools built specifically for academic research — searching, reading, and synthesizing scientific papers. They occupy a niche that Google Scholar plus an LLM handles passably but not well, and the question is whether dedicated tools justify their existence. The short answer: for serious literature reviews, yes.
Search Rag
NotebookLM is Google's source-grounded research tool — you upload documents, and it gives you an AI that only answers from those documents. As of March 2026, it is the best free tool for synthesizing information from a specific set of sources you control. That sentence sounds like marketing, but
Search Rag
Google now puts an AI-generated answer above the search results you came for. These are AI Overviews — LLM-generated summaries that appear at the top of the page for an increasing number of queries, synthesizing information from indexed web pages into a paragraph or two of confident prose. If you'
Search Rag
Perplexity is the search engine that answers your question instead of giving you ten blue links and hoping you figure it out. It synthesizes information from multiple sources, cites those sources inline, and presents a coherent answer in a few paragraphs. As of 2026, it is the most usable AI-native
Search Rag
No single AI knowledge tool does everything well. Perplexity is great at synthesis but weak on recency. Google is unbeatable for local and shopping but buries useful results under SEO slop. NotebookLM is excellent for closed-corpus research but can't search the open web. RAG pipelines give you control
Publishing Stack
Google has said — repeatedly, publicly, on the record — that it does not penalize content for being AI-generated. Google has also rolled out a series of updates that obliterated sites publishing large volumes of AI content. Both statements are true. The distinction that matters is between AI content and mass-produced thin
Publishing Stack
Self-hosting Ghost on a Hetzner VPS managed through Coolify is the cheapest way to run a professional-grade publishing operation — under $10/month for what Ghost(Pro) charges $25-199/month to deliver. You get full ownership of your data, your code, and your infrastructure. The trade-off is that you become the
Publishing Stack
You can write the best newsletter in the world and none of it matters if your emails land in spam. Email deliverability — the percentage of your sends that reach the actual inbox, not the junk folder, not the promotions tab, not the void — is the infrastructure problem that sits underneath
Publishing Stack
These are the three platforms that come up every time someone decides to start publishing online. The comparison gets done wrong almost every time because it starts from the assumption that they're interchangeable — that you can line up features in a table and pick the winner. They are
Publishing Stack
Beehiiv was built by people who scaled Morning Brew to millions of subscribers, and the product reflects that origin story down to its bones. Every feature — referral programs, an ad network, recommendation engines, granular analytics — exists to make the subscriber number go up. This is not a writing tool that
Publishing Stack
Kit — the platform formerly known as ConvertKit, rebranded in 2024 — is an email marketing tool that evolved into a creator publishing platform. The key word is "evolved." The email list is still the center of gravity. Landing pages, digital product sales, automations, and the Creator Network all orbit
Publishing Stack
Substack made starting a newsletter a zero-friction decision. You sign up, you write, you hit publish, and your post goes to inboxes and lives on the web. No DNS configuration. No theme selection. No Mailgun setup. No hosting bills. The trade-off for that simplicity is a 10% cut of your