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Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

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Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#401

Everyone is censoring models now with anything remotely resembling cyber or bio. I already have problems with my research in mathematical epidemiology because of that - both Sol and Fable simply refuse. They keep pushing people towards Chinese models that can be decensored.

Supposedly Fable 5.1 is better, but I haven't tried it yet. I've run into the same thing with mundane work that is barely bio/cyber adjacent. Re: Chinese models, even if the model itself isn't censored, some of the big model providers have guardrails now that you can't exceed, which somewhat defeats the purpose.

"Uncensored" means "weights modified to remove refusals". Abliterated. Providers do not serve such models, at least not frontier-grade. You have to run the weights yourself. For Kimi K3, this is about $60/hour for hardware rental. But you can have about 100 sessions simultaneously.

And yes, Fable 5.1 has the same refusal rate, and significantly nerfed reasoning.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#402
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?

Pi [1] is amazing. Since using it I've felt no need to switch harnesses anymore.

Or choose Oh My PI [2] for batteries included

[1] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi [2] https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started trying out 3.7 Flash this week and it is competitive with opus/fable and also FAST. It is getting work done that anthropic models were struggling with and the speed with which it does is quite a bit noticeably faster. Beginning to think Google is a dark horse in this race and some of Anthropic's "everything feels janky and rushed" karma is going to catch up.

I use Gemini because I feel like Google will win the AI race, and it’s Good Enough

I want to believe this, but every time I try Gemini coding assistance within Colab it's utterly dire. Code gen in a cell is OK, but things fall apart when you try to get into a feedback loop. The system prompt/harness fails to inform the agent about what it can and can't do, or does and doesn't have access to. It will confidently tell you it's done a thing, and then you ask, it admits can't actually do that but will happily try and fail again. Very frustrating, because I really like Colab as a platform for little reproducible experiments that may or may not require CUDA.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#404

Wow this comes after what - 3 or 4 weeks since 3.7 Flash, which was also 3 or 4 weeks after 3.6 Flash IIRC? I eagerly wait more info but sounds like Deepmind without Demis calling the shots has been unleashed and are operating at full speed? Shocker! At this point it is a meme of course, but where is 3.5 Pro :)

Now i am awaiting Gemini 3.11 "For Workgroups" to be released early December...

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#405
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.

That’s… bonkers. I’m not even sure what it’s trying to say

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#406
post #97

The most interesting thing about the Gemini models is still their multi-modal support: they accept audio and video input, OpenAI and Anthropic's flagships are still image-only. Gemini Flash is also pretty cheap, so it's a great family for performing media analysis, like extracting structured data from images and video.

Interesting side note: although Opus is still image-only, you can still drag videos into Claude Code and it doesn't blink an eye; it just strips it down to a series of images to parse. True multimodal support would be way better, but I have no issues pasting in full screen recordings while QA'ing games and having Claude identify and fix issues in the video.

Agree - I do video editing via Claude Code and it does the job just fine. A lot of my tasks involved frame accurate cutting and to do so it will make a composite image of several consecutive frames in a single image and analyse it that way.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do not understand how some of y’all are not under water with fragile code that is too massive to possibly parse. Every engineering team I know is currently trying to undo the damage of the last 6-12mo when they all got more serious into adopting these tools (usually Claude). It hasn’t completely screwed them over, but the the debt is substantial and cannot be put off anymore it seems.

They argue the net is positive but clearly the “100x productivity multiplier” claims have been dashed on the shoals of reality for these groups.

This is anecdotal, but it’s across the board in my vicinity. I’m curious how common this is and if it’s just “the new normal” to adopt the nauseating Covid phrase.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. That's a wild conclusion from his comment! Understand that it's not an "either/or". 2. I'd wager the majority of HN commenters don't read their own comment before posting (pre-LLM days).

I can read my own comment twice over and still somehow miss seemingly obvious wording errors.

And if you do a 3rd pass with an LLM, people will accuse of you not reading your own comment...

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#410
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...

Why do all LLMs do a particle simulation when you ask them this prompt ? Qwen3.6, Qwen3.8 and Ling 3.0 Tiny all did the same thing !

I find Ling 3.0 tiny particularly interesting as it looks really nice for a tiny model with 7.9B total parameters, with only 1.3B parameters activated per token. Here is the result https://coolthing-ling-3-tiny.tiiny.site (sorry for the weird hosting, first I found that worked)

(it cost me almost 0 cents and done in 49 seconds)

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