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Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

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Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#161

Post by seanhunter »

lxgr wrote: post #149
seanhunter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it really depends on what sort of pdfs you are trying to extract (ie what the content is). For regular pdfs that have been produced in a “normal way” (ie using latex or a modern application with a “save to pdf” function) will contain the text and for those I’ve had a lot of success on general pdfs using pypdf. “Image” Pdfs that have been produced via a scan so don’t actually contain a text transcript…

> regular pdfs that have been produced in a “normal way” (ie using latex or a modern application with a “save to pdf” function) will contain the text Producing "normal PDFs" that way actually requires specific LaTeX options to be enabled in my experience. Without that, PDF viewers have to perform all kinds of ugly hacks to even figure out what Unicode codepoint a given glyph is supposed to represent! PDFs are much mo…

Hmm. Not sure what I'm doing that's special but both latex pdfs I produce and others that I read generally work just fine with pypdf, and I really am not adding any flags at all (my makefile says I just go

   latexmk --lualatex -aux-directory=output -output-directory=output $
). Maybe latexmk is adding some magic?

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#162

Post by lxgr »

seanhunter wrote: post #161
lxgr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regular pdfs that have been produced in a “normal way” (ie using latex or a modern application with a “save to pdf” function) will contain the text Producing "normal PDFs" that way actually requires specific LaTeX options to be enabled in my experience. Without that, PDF viewers have to perform all kinds of ugly hacks to even figure out what Unicode codepoint a given glyph is supposed to represent! PDFs are much mo…

Hmm. Not sure what I'm doing that's special but both latex pdfs I produce and others that I read generally work just fine with pypdf, and I really am not adding any flags at all (my makefile says I just go latexmk --lualatex -aux-directory=output -output-directory=output $ ). Maybe latexmk is adding some magic?

\usepackage{cmap} is usually what does that:

> The cmap package provides character map tables, which make PDF files generated by pdfLATEX both searchable and copy-able in acrobat reader and other compliant PDF viewers.

(from https://ctan.org/pkg/cmap)

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#163

Post by infecto »

arjunchint wrote: post #134
infecto wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse engineering APIs is just a recipe to get blocked sooner. Good luck!

its been working fine on LinkedIn/IG, the trick is to make the requests from the main world of the website itself.

Like I said. Good luck with it. You’re most likely violating ToS and it’s always a game of cat and mouse.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#164

Post by citizenpaul »

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…

This comment appears to

1. be made up.

2. have successfully nerd sniped HN

To what purpose I'm not sure.Testing an LLM bot?

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#165

Post by seanhunter »

lxgr wrote: post #162
seanhunter wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Not sure what I'm doing that's special but both latex pdfs I produce and others that I read generally work just fine with pypdf, and I really am not adding any flags at all (my makefile says I just go latexmk --lualatex -aux-directory=output -output-directory=output $ ). Maybe latexmk is adding some magic?

\usepackage{cmap} is usually what does that: > The cmap package provides character map tables, which make PDF files generated by pdfLATEX both searchable and copy-able in acrobat reader and other compliant PDF viewers. (from https://ctan.org/pkg/cmap )

I don't use cmap or pdflatex. Weird.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#166

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

arjunchint wrote: post #133
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when you need to control something that isn't a web page?

Honestly with Fable I think anyone is going to be able to reverse engineer a desktop app and get the coding agent to automate it. The Codex computer use functionality actually uses OS level accessibility trees, so thats also possible without screenshots.

I can't tell if you're saying that you think every native app in the world can be vibe-replaced with a web app (they can't) or if you're saying it will be easy to vibe-code a reverse-engineered replacement for every native app (you can't)

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#167

Post by namuol »

roygbiv2 wrote: post #140
namuol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be sorting the models by performance on the horizontal axis.

Why would they make their own product look worse?

Didn’t say it would, it’s just a better way to illustrate how each model fares in comparison.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#168

Post by Rebelgecko »

airstrike wrote: post #82
Rebelgecko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a sweet spot- a lot of the time you're probably better off with "reverse engineer this web page and build me an API or personalized chrome extension to meet my needs". I have an agent doing price checks for me for an item on a certain website. Instead of blasting through a zillion tokens processing the DOM over and over, it loaded the page once and figured out how to download a json with the price.

Does it have to view the page now repeatedly to download the JSON?

It curls the page. I think the approach it took won't actually wouldn't work in my local browser- its getting the value from some conversion reporting code that I'm guessing my ublock extension would hide.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#169

Post by hashta »

jatora wrote: post #91
hashta wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting because my experience has been almost the opposite. A few months ago I tested Gemini on converting screenshots of tables from PDF files into CSV. I tried it on several different tables and it got every one right. It consistently outperformed ChatGPT.

anyone who has used both knows this is inaccurate or dishonestly stated (ie. you were using gpt nano or some nonsense)

I used chatgpt's web app and I have pro subscription.

Re: Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

#170

Post by antonvs »

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

> beat hands down

The difference from GPT 5.5’s score is 0.3 points, hardly “hands down”.

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