a hack you this went to a can go to you so good hahahahaha§hah§aha
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
201–210 of 361 posts
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicag…
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.
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Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Baring them using specific marketing terms (so you have EC2 for what are basically virtual machines), for which both the docs and the portal itself provide helpful information, what do you mean? I find GCP's console and whole set up to be slightly better, but both it and AWS are fine. Now Azure, or anything made by VMware, you just know they hate you.
I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when the latter isn't even a single portal, it's many , each of which shows just one product in one region. Oh, you needed a VM with a network and some storage, including access to blobs somewhere else in the world? Just open up a dozen tabs and join the randomly generated gibberish resource identifiers yourself manually like a savage!
> I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when the latter isn't even a single portal, it's many, each of which shows just one product in one region
Yep, which means that even an entire AWS region being down has no impact on anything else. Unlike Azure where a single DC in Texas being out meant no auth for anyone, anywhere in the world.
And aren't Azure and O365 infamous for having a convoluted web or multiple portals to such an extent that there are multiple websites trying to help you navigate them with direct links?
And in any case, Azure is not a serious cloud provider and anyone picking it is at best not paying attention, at worst negligent at their job (yeah I know, Azure is the cloud your bosses' boss picks after some golfing and a nice dinner). They have a ~quarterly critical, trivial to exploit, usually cross-tenant, vulnerability. Often with Microsoft having no mitigation and having the the faintest idea if it was exploited. And stalling the security researchers for weeks if not months.
The security posture of Azure is so appalling it's clear nobody at that org who has any power cares about security in the slightest. And it has been obvious for a few years now. Search Wiz's blog just for their collection of ~10 Azure CVEs. For the latest horrific one, cf: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-55241
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#204I was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings: 1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lac…
Also, usage and billing takes a DAY to update. On top of that, there are no billing caps or credit-based billing. They put the entire burden on users not to ensure that they don't have a mega bill.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#205The experience feels fragmented because Google has multiple overlapping developer consoles and product boundaries. Gemini just exposes that underlying fragmentation more clearly than other APIs.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#206I avoid using Google because their cloud service product is so badly designed.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#207I love Google's product managers. I love product managers in general but Google's product managers are at a whole another level. And it shows.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some other fun things you'll find: - The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI. - The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory. - API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.
I have also had some super weird stuff in my output (2.5-flash). I'm passing docs for bulk inference via Vertex, and a small number of returned results will include gibberish in Japanese.
I had this last night from flash lite! My results were interspersed with random snippets of legible, non-gibberish English language. It was like my results had got jumbled with somenone else's.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#209Oh, another Google API rant.
I knew I never want to use another Google service as soon as I got rclone running with my Google Drive: https://rclone.org/drive/
I rather not waste my time with such abominations. And I don't mean rclone. I don't care about the "history" of that API, or any API. It's like strangers telling you their live's story at the first meeting. Awkward.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#210The difficult process is on purpose. You're too small. You're just going to waste their customer support resources and only give them maybe a couple hundred dollars. They're hoping you give up and go away.