An innovative AI-powered chess platform that lets you easily create stunningly unconventional chess pieces with simple text prompts.
Just look at these beauties.
All you need is a simple keyword to generate a magnificent family of chess pieces based on the same theme.
Your imagination is the limit…
Classic chess set with a jam-on-toast theme?
No problem:
Look at what’s supposed to be the pawn 😅 — literally jam on toast — probably cause that’s what was literally in the prompt.
And wow these look delicious — I’m thinking food designed as chess pieces would be a fantastic business idea.
Look at the creative placements of the jam — and remember this is on-the-fly AI.
Staying in the food mood we can go with vanilla and chocolate icecream 😋
Incredible — tell me you’re not salivating at this.
Again — it’s never the same:
And then GenChess gives us a similar opponent:
The possibilities are endless…
Sun vs Moon
Water vs Fire:
And when you’re finally satisfied you can choose the difficulty and time controls you want.
And then play:
And Google’s GenChess is dropping just in time for the 2024 World Chess Championship — and they’re actually the main sponsor.
Maybe they’re trying to gain some sort of moat in AI using Chess. So they’re shaking things up, making the game fresh, and giving players a whole new way to connect with it.
Google’s also rolling out a chess bot in their AI chatbot Gemini.
Want to play chess by just typing your moves? Now you can.
The board updates as you go so it feels more like a chat than a chess match.
They’re launching this in December, but it’s exclusive to Gemini Advanced subscribers.
GenChess is a big deal. It’s blending AI with chess in ways we’ve never seen before. You can turn a simple idea into fully customized chess pieces, and that’s just the start.
Google’s showing us how AI can reinvent even the oldest games. It’s wild and exciting. It’s going to change the game
Apple Intelligence isn’t coming to like 90% of iPhones and everyone is pissed…
So no better time for Google to jump on this and finally push out their chatbot for iPhone.
And they didn’t disappoint on features — live conversation, deep app integration, stunning image generation…
I’ve been using the web app ever since they were calling Bard and it’s been great so I was pretty keen on this.
Gemini isn’t aMaZiNg, but it works well for getting up-to-date info, unlike ChatGPT that’s stuck in April 2023 and doesn’t known when to search the web.
Impressively Gemini has already skyrocketed to the top of charts in Productivity.
Or maybe not so impressive since it’s Google and it’s only #2 — but then #1 is ChatGPT so…
The first thing I noticed is the clean minimalist interface, quite similar to the one on desktop.
You have more than enough space for core things like input.
It searches the entire web but responds incredibly quickly to give detailed answers to complex questions.
Spark your creativity and generate ideas for stories, poems, or scripts.
The image generation has drastically improved with their new Imagen 3 engine:
Refine images easily — but it’s changing it other parts of the image:
Gemini Live is a powerful standout feature, enabling real-time interactive conversations.
It provides context-based responses and adapts to the flow of the conversation.
Looks like they did their based to simulate a live conversation with a human — no chat or text feedback confirming what you say. Although they save the chat history.
The voices aren’t robotic and have decent intonation.
One cool thing is it intelligently figures out how when you’re not done speaking — like in a real convo.
Me: What is the umm…
Gemini: What is the what?
Me: I don’t know
Gemini: That’s totally fine…
Me: Shut up
Gemini: I’m sorry I’m not comfortable engaging in conversation that’s disrespectful
Me: I love you
Gemini: Thank you for your kind words…
You can control it from the Notification Centre.
It integrates seamless with all your other Google services — I asked it to check my latest email and it was on point.
Final thoughts
It’ll be exciting to see what Gemini can do in the future.
Of course it has no chance with deep integration with iOS like Apple Intelligence.
But it’s a versatile and intelligent AI Assistant worth checking out.
A JavaScript function would change the href to a new URL with several parameters including the original URL, as soon as you start clicking on it.
JavaScriptCopied!
import express from 'express';
const app = express();
app.get('/url', (req, res) => {
// Record click and stuff...
res.redirect(req.query);
});
app.listen(3000);
So even though the browser would show the actual URL at the bottom-left on hover, once you clicked on it to copy, the href would change instantly.
Why mousedown over click? Probably because there won’t be a click event when users open the link in a new tab, which is something that happens quite often.
And so after right-clicking to copy like I did, mousedown would fire and the href would change, which would even update that preview URL at the bottom-left.
The new www.google.com/url page would log the visit and move out of the way so fast you’d barely notice it — unless your internet moves at snail speed.
They use this data for tools like Google Analytics and Search Console so site owners can improve the quality of their search results and pages by analyzing click-rate — something probably also using as a Search ranking factor. Not to mention recording clicks on Search ads to rake all the billions of yearly ad revenue.
They realized this URL tracking method had a serious issue for a certain group. For their users with slower internet speeds, the annoying redirect technique added a non-trivial amount of delay to the request and increased bounce rate.
So they did something new.
Now, instead of that cryptic www.google.com/url stuff, you get… the same exact URL?
With the <a>ping attribute, they have now successfully moved their tracking behind the scenes.
The ping attribute specifies one or more URLs that will be notified when the user visits the link. When a user opens the link, the browser asynchronously sends a short HTTP POST request to the URLs in ping.
The keyword here is asynchronously — www.google.com/url quietly records the click in the background without ever notifying the user, avoiding the redirect and keeping the user experience clean.
Browsers don’t visually indicate the ping attribute in any way to the user — a specification violation.
When the ping attribute is present, user agents should clearly indicate to the user that following the hyperlink will also cause secondary requests to be sent in the background, possibly including listing the actual target URLs.
Not to mention a privacy concern, which is why browsers like Firefox refuse to enable this feature by default.
In Firefox Google sticks with the mousedown event approach:
There are many reasons not to disable JavaScript in 2023, but even if you do, Google will simply replace the href with a direct link to www.google.com/url.
HTMLCopied!
<a href="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://codingbeautydev.com/blog/vscode-tips-tricks...">
10 essential VS Code tips and tricks for greater productivity
</a>
So, there’s really no built-in way to avoid this mostly invisible tracking.
Even the analytics are highly beneficial for Google and site owners in improving result relevancy and site quality, as users we should be aware of the existence and implications of these tracking methods.
As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, we will increasingly have to choose between privacy and convenience and ask ourselves whether the trade-offs are worth it.
