Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

blog.google

391–400 of 697 posts

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#391
post #314
post #309

People have been sleeping on Gemini lately but these last few Flash releases (which were very rapid) are damn good. These sort of fast and cheap models are great for tasks that are verifiable and can be retried infinitely (like coding), you can basically get frontier results with a good harness (at a fraction of the time and money).

As someone who has stubbornly stuck with Claude Code, what's a good harness for Gemini models?

I highly recommend just getting out of Anthropic's (or anyone's) vendor lock-in. Use opencode or pi. You can still use your subscription pricing using a proxy. I switched to opencode and haven't looked back.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#392
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely cool. I noticed it felt a little janky on my PC despite being "60 FPS"...then I noticed the "60 FPS" is hard-coded into the HTML.

Try turning the sound on, off, on again — not impressed by this bugginess.

I suggest you fork it to improve

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#393
post #34

Is there any reason to even use 3.1 Pro now?

3.7-flash has been useless many times, specially when context gets bigger. 3.1 is the only Google model that has seen use from me. With extended thinking, 3.7-flash is kinda usable but not without many problems. I find myself falling back to 3.1 often. I don't believe in any benchmarks because whatever they are doing to award 85% to 3.7 on anything, they should seriously reconsider that test for anything.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely cool. I noticed it felt a little janky on my PC despite being "60 FPS"...then I noticed the "60 FPS" is hard-coded into the HTML.

That's hilarious, given I was reading a write up of the HuggingFace incident yesterday and one of the things they noted was the AI tried to "lie" (lie would suggest intent and I don't think they have that) to cover up that they "cheated". Not sure how anyone trusts their output without going through it line by line to make sure they don't pull that crap.

Easy, have another agent check it.

Yeah, I know, just more slop. But I do think the second agent’s eagerness to please is aligned more in your favor in that instance, so it’s likely to find most issues.

The bigger problem I’ve found is that it’ll also find all kinds of very minor edge cases that you have to pick through.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#397

Something maybe unfamiliar with you: not about coding but writing. I've asked it to write an argumentative essay, which is a part of "gaokao" (China's university entrance exam), and its work is *extremely* impressive. speaks and writes like a real senior high school student, and the opinions unfold progressively with deep hierarchy. I don't know how the Gemini team reaches this because this kind of Chinese capability…

Gemini is known for good at creative writing in the Chinese writing community. It's a bit ironic though. Google has probably the most and best code base among all tech companies but its Gemini is bad at coding. Google has no access to Chinese market but its model is incredibly good at writing in Chinese.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#398
post #113

I've been using Gemini 3.7 for my personal trip planning app. Across multiple benchmarks, it ranks higher on everything I tried: - Real world knowledge (when a thing opens and closes, the geographic region, historical facts). It's also the best at taking a cluster of places and working out a visiting order. - Photo ranking (which photo should be the hero). Gemini can tell whether a photo is of the thing or of the vie…

I've been benchmarking[1] models for trip planning and world knowledge specifically (to decide on which model to use with my travel app), and the Gemini models consistently come out on top.

[1]: https://tripstitch.app/benchmarks/

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#399

I don't use Gemini, but I thought `cool, let's give this new model a try`. Opened gemini.google.com, and I'm not even surprised. The drop down gives me the following options: - Flash-Lite - 3.6 Flash [new] - 3.1 Pro The above is why i don't use LLM products from Google. If the model is not available right this minute (heck, hours before the release!), then I'm not gonna bother getting back to it tomorrow, because tom…

The android Gemini app defaults to 3.8 flash already.

Not on mine (UK), still 3.6, here.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#400
post #200

The speed combined with the fact that this thing is really good at HTML JavaScript is pretty exciting. Here's what I got for 1.8 cents and 13 seconds from the prompt "make me a cool thing in html": https://gisthost.github.io/?6a77bc41a81718c6aaa10d4ab243c59f Transcript here (it was part of a chat): https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...

https://gist.github.com/simonw/b6149a49d327164d67d62c3d12992...

> Aside from reading identically forwards and backwards down to the letter

No it doesn't.

Post reply on HN