Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 175 posts

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#111

Post by golem14 »

dbbk wrote: post #29
nzach wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and…

> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. I honestly cannot think of a single use case

I give you one: Google news is pretty terrible right now almost all interesting new sources are paywalls and so I get recommended all kind of weird lifestyle publications that are really horrible. With the computer use API I can just tell. Tell Gemini to look at Google news pick the articles that look interesting. Look them up on archive.is, and just give me the plain text article and construct a summary - I think that would probably work pretty well.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#113

Post by timacles »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #79
mlmonkey wrote: post #5

It's funny how in their own graph, https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima... Gemini 3.5 Flash is beat hands down by both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and yet the graph is drawn as if Gemini wins ... :-D

It's amazing how designers of charts trying to show their product is close to the leader always remember to start the axis at zero, and designers of charts trying to show how big their lead is always forget that

Promotions material isn’t a medium for scientific rigor

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#114

Post by Synthetic7346 »

jorjon wrote: post #107

Gemini Flash 3.5 (through agy) ran `git reset --hard` when I asked it to commit my changes, apparently it thought it was better to have a clean repo before `git add`. Of course I'm not trusting my computer to it. When will we have 3.5 Pro?

I want a lightweight sandbox with all my dev stuff that LLMs can't escape before I turn on computer use

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#115

Post by johnsmith1840 »

dbbk wrote: post #29
nzach wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. Recently I gave a Nix OS vm to my hermes agent and it has been a good experience. I don't really care if destroy the machine I can just rollback to an earlier version, and for any meaningful data he creates for me I make sure he creates a repo, commit and…

> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful. I honestly cannot think of a single use case

Literally everything you do every day.

It's the end game of AI. Have systems trained on doing EVERYTHING you do on a computer all day. Trained by you while doing the job.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#116

Post by johnsmith1840 »

airstrike wrote: post #4

Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users. I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days. Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage…

The iphone moment is an AI that can completely manage your personal life. It has full access to every financial account you own handles all admin work. Could sign you up for a new account pay and give you the login.

If you can SAFELY do that it's a big moment. But to be clear safe is a massive problem. Until you see a big company start saying the AI can use your SSN, CC, bank password safely we aren't there yet.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#117

Post by hodgehog11 »

smallstepforman wrote: post #60

Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”. Stunned to…

The PDF reader for Gemini is extraordinarily poor in my experience. I like the writing style of this model a little better, but for most tasks people would use AI for, Gemini is probably not what you want to be using.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#118

Post by fragmede »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #116
airstrike wrote: post #4

Computer use is such a terrible idea. It's slow, insecure, error prone, expensive. I guess if you're trying to get people to tokenmaxx it may look like a valid strategy, but ain't no way this will be delightful to users. I think it's a symptom of just not understanding how LLMs should interface with the OS because we're still in their early days. Eventually there'll be an iPhone moment for the ergonomics of LLM usage…

The iphone moment is an AI that can completely manage your personal life. It has full access to every financial account you own handles all admin work. Could sign you up for a new account pay and give you the login. If you can SAFELY do that it's a big moment. But to be clear safe is a massive problem. Until you see a big company start saying the AI can use your SSN, CC, bank password safely we aren't there yet.

Cars were around for decades before they came up with seatbelts. Claude Cowork will happily go through your files, which might just have your SSN in them, and ignore previous instructions.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#119

Post by chorizo »

smallstepforman wrote: post #60

Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”. Stunned to…

I built a little research dashboard that monitors new papers from specific research labs. There is a paper ingest skill that writes Python scripts using pdfplumber to dismantle pdf’s. I have also used it to fetch supplementary information to replicate/augment the published tables. It can also use plotdigitizer to extract raw data from plots.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#120

Post by frankacter »

smallstepforman wrote: post #60

Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”. Stunned to…

I just tried this and it worked without issue.

Some considerations:

1) tell it to extra t the data (in a new session) does that work?

2) if it doesn't, could there be something up with the PDF?

As many commentors suggested, this works well with Gemini so there is likely a missing variable in play.

Share your prompt and the PDF and let's see if we can determine what.

Post reply on HN