Live data from Hacker News

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

blog.google

451–460 of 699 posts

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#451
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.

Also puzzling: in the "reasoning" section preceding, that is described as an example of "a one-line self-replicating program."

When I typed "Are we not pure noon, ergo, we play life; yet, we hate bad fear" into Google, I got more weird results from Gemini: it claimed, incorrectly, that it is an anagram of the "well-known philosophical statement" (?), "We are not pure nature, we are history".

https://share.google/aimode/wJosKnHig6oVYaG18

(?): the reference seems to be to Jose Ortega y Gasset's line, "El hombre no tiene naturaleza, lo que tiene es historia" -- "Man[kind] has no nature, what it has is history."

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we add a third one to check the second one which is checking the first? Asking slightly tongue in cheek but at what point does this stop making sense if we can't trust the output, the people creating the models are already getting surprised in bad ways (if we take their words at face value) with how the models are behaving already etc. We have the folks over here saying "AI is amazing" and the other other folks ov…

YMMV, I’m pretty AI-pilled in the sense that I think AI is one of the most pivotal things humanity will ever invent, and it’s going to radically change our civilization over the next few decades (not necessarily for the better!)

But I wouldn’t say I “trust” these agents. The degree to which I double check their work depends heavily on the consequences if it gets something wrong. Not too dissimilar from another human dev in that sense.

So for the SaaS that supports my family, there are some things I have it build where I glance at the PR for a minute or two, but if it broke something on this admin page that only I see, there’s no real downside and I’ll find out pretty quickly next time I use it. And it’s fine 95% of the time, so it doesn’t feel like the best use of my time to double-check it carefully.

But for some of the complex internal flows where a bug could be both catastrophic and difficult to even discover for awhile, I still check it very carefully.

For a little one-off vibe coded demo thing like OP shared, I wouldn’t look at the code at all, I’d just have another agent check it and fix anything it finds. Very low stakes.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#453
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…

[deleted]

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you do the proxy thing?

I use OpenCode with my ChatGPT subscription, which is officially supported on both sides and a damn good deal (OpenCode Go is great too).

OpenCode has “providers” for many (many!) other services, but these are almost all unofficial and against ToS (Anthropic being famous for ban-hammering people).

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google One plans are quite a good value actually - for a few bucks you get more Gemini plus space in Drive and other extras. Even through API, $3.75 for nearly Sol-level quality isn't that bad. And let's not forget you can use it for free in AI Studio, and in the user app (even free accounts get tons of usage, though it's still 3.6 there), and in Antygravity.

That's the thing. I am completely lost because there are so many redundant paths to get the same thing and I'm trying to figure out which one is the best deal

That's Google at its best :)

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean no offense but these pelicans are a bit tiresome and a very meaningless benchmark. There's no real difference between any of these svgs across models and model versions anymore.

If everyone agreed with you, the comment would disappear near the bottom of the thread I like the benchmark. Yes, it's near saturation for SotA models, but still quite good to show where smaller models stand in relation to SotA In this instance, I see a great image, but consistently clipping mudguards (both in 3.8 flash and 3.7 flash)

> If everyone agreed with you, the comment would disappear near the bottom of the thread

If only it were true that things that are tiresome are unpopular. But witness "6 7", "first post", ... remember the "in soviet Russia" jokes on Slashdot"? It seems like there are a subset of people that simply don't get tired of tiresome things.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we add a third one to check the second one which is checking the first? Asking slightly tongue in cheek but at what point does this stop making sense if we can't trust the output, the people creating the models are already getting surprised in bad ways (if we take their words at face value) with how the models are behaving already etc. We have the folks over here saying "AI is amazing" and the other other folks ov…

Humans are also not trustworthy. So we build systems to capture their nondeterministic output and solve the issues that emerge.

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we add a third one to check the second one which is checking the first? Asking slightly tongue in cheek but at what point does this stop making sense if we can't trust the output, the people creating the models are already getting surprised in bad ways (if we take their words at face value) with how the models are behaving already etc. We have the folks over here saying "AI is amazing" and the other other folks ov…

It's agents all the way down

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do the proxy thing?

I use OpenCode with my ChatGPT subscription, which is officially supported on both sides and a damn good deal (OpenCode Go is great too). OpenCode has “providers” for many (many!) other services, but these are almost all unofficial and against ToS (Anthropic being famous for ban-hammering people).

But proxying via Claude CLI is OK? Or also not?
Post reply on HN