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Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

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Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#151

Post by lxgr »

TightFibre wrote: post #145
frankacter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Long shot, but I wonder if an image of the pdf would do better if it did get unstuck on internal formats.

It definitely does. PDF is a vector-based image format historically, and all add-ons that make it behave a bit more sane as a text-oriented document format are optional, so your mileage using tools like pdftotext will vary greatly depending on who created a given PDF.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#152

Post by antiloper »

gdudeman wrote: post #26
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…

Computer use is a great idea. It gets the job done when nothing else will. If you're a person trying to get their job done at a big company, but half your job is in 1-2 proprietary tools or is stuck behind an API you can't program against, computer use can allow you, a non-techie, to do your job more efficiently. I think it's an awesome way to circumvent gate keepers and the IT department to let people accomplish the…

Computer use is very useful for developing GUI applications since claude code can build and test the entire app end-to-end (accessibility APIs exist but depending on the UI framework of your choosing you can run into walls very fast).

I run it in a VM using a headless wayland compositor, I'd never trust even fable with access to my real system.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#153

Post by chrsw »

trees101 wrote: post #123
hodgehog11 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what is a good way to read PDFs using AI?

In the broadest sense, I don't think we're there yet. I asked an SoC vendor to provide their chip documentation in Markdown. They refused. So, I went ahead and tried to do myself with AI.

I tried various AI tools and the results ranged from absolute garbage to something-but-not-something-but-not-quite.

I went ahead and did a section of a huge PDF by hand, just to see if what I was asking for was even feasible. After more than several hours of painstaking work spread across multiple days, I got several chapters to look identical to the source PDF in some Markdown renderers. I had to use some HTML for the more complex tables. I converted some diagrams to Markdown and some to images linked to from the Markdown.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#154

Post by th0raway »

anigbrowl wrote: post #103
kakugawa wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antigravity CLI (which replaced Gemini CLI): https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-cli

So a couple weeks ago I decided to pay some money for the Gemini API cause I'd found myself getting a lot of use out of the free tier chat and figured they deserved some of my cash. First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'. Second headache was a lot of frustration with the Continue plugin in my IDE. Gemini chat suggests I try the Antigravity app. I do so. IT's OK. La…

On one end we have Coase's theory of the firm, but then we have the realities of the modern tech megacap company, which is 20+ companies in a trench coat, and where it's clear the alignment between the best interest of a middle manager, the company as a whole, and of the consumer have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But pointing at one working thing in an investor call seems quite valuable, so we aren't seeing investors actually demanding to spin off companies with minimal actual synergy.

So we end up with companies acting in ways that don't help themselves or the consumer, but which have no reasonable mechanisms to correct any of this. So we end up with the two best entrants in the AI space being independent companies, all while we know that, in case of significant cuts, it's the companies that are attached to other huge, unrelated sources of revenue that will have easier time surviving. Gemini can mess up all they want as long as management still has Ads and youtube sitting there subsidizing them.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#156

Post by ok123456 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #2

There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.

Use gemini-cli for mcp support.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#157

Post by kristjansson »

ok123456 wrote: post #156
satvikpendem wrote: post #2

There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.

Use gemini-cli for mcp support.

deprecated last month

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#158

Post by NortySpock »

Synthetic7346 wrote: post #114
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

I have been looking at this sandbox tool, but haven't quite figured out how I want to deploy it, and anyways I haven't found an agent I like yet.

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#159

Post by peab »

mitchell_h wrote: post #25
satvikpendem wrote: post #2

There's still no MCP support in the Gemini app, which is very useful to get various pieces of info as a user just via chatting. For example I recently wanted to get an Airbnb and wanted to filter by specific criteria including house image analysis and Gemini couldn't do it so I had to do it in Codex.

I'm fairly convinced Claude's strongest point is the app. AI users aren't anywhere near as mature or smart as youtube/hn would have folks believe. The claude app is amazing for bridging that gap.

I agree - and I'm also confused why other's haven't simply copied every feature. It really doesn't seem that complicated.
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