Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Thursday, June 26, 2025

ChatGPT vs Gemini

 ChatGPT (paid) advantages:

  • Better image generation than Gemini
  • Audio chat is more personable than Gemini, less stiff/businesslike/terse
  • Unlike Gemini, ChatGPT's Deep Research asks clarifying questions before starting. 
  • Really good analysis of people relationships 

Gemini (paid) advantages:

  • Better video generation (with audio)
  • 2 TB Google Drive space
  • Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets integration
  • Automatically does web searches without having to click a Web button
  • 1-2M context window vs 128K
  • Handles large amounts of spreadsheet-type data pasted in - ChatGPT misses a lot 
  • The Gems feature is really good, especially one in which I asked it to be "a Catholic spiritual director, drawing on the wisdom of the saints and Catholic tradition." The advice was a lot meatier than when I tried the same in Claude.
  • Can add an event to Google Calendar via screenshot or picture
  • Can ask questions of the current spreadsheet, PDF, or doc in Google Drive. 
  • More comprehensive and precise answers than Claude for "how to" questions

Claude (paid) advantages:

  • Integrations feature lets me query Atlassian Confluence
  • Audio chat is more personable than Gemini, less stiff/businesslike/terse  Audio chat is customizable with instructions in Claude Project. Gemini Gems don't have audio chat.
  • Unlike Gemini, Claude's Deep Research asks clarifying questions before starting. 

Friday, June 13, 2025

Zen Browser

 I have been trying out Zen Browser for a few days and am quite liking it as a replacement for Arc Browser for which support seems to be getting discontinued.

 Zen is better than Arc for:

  • Seems to use less memory
  • Open source 
  • Extensions are shared between Spaces - you don't need to reinstall extensions for each Space 

Arc is still better than Zen for:

  • Cmd+T can access extensions 
  • Little Arc windows 

General reasons to prefer Zen/Arc over other browsers:

  • Vertical tabs
  •  Spaces (dedicated space for a profile and its tabs)