I see this, a hot take form my side as someone who is bought in to GCP i quite like being able to put everything on the same billing account / handle it easily through service accounts.
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
241–250 of 361 posts
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#242I think they are trying too much to have you jump on GCP. Having a simpler UI with a credit limit (maybe even at a different rate) would actually get more people to use it imo.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, where I live you often can use many different parking apps, and the one i tried is very simple and user friendly. Start app, wait for gps, turn time wheel, press start.
Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.
Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature (don't recall).
Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.
Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen credentials. The verification flow is required because of the amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and newly-created accounts.
"Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#245Try to get a Google Vertex API key working locally. It's even more complicated. Took me literally one full day to get the whole toolchain working (had to do some pauses out of frustration).
I only went through it because I got once 300 USD for free to spend on my Google Workspace account I/my business owns.
OpenAI API usage is so much easier.
Btw Google: Fix Google Console API usage dashboard... why is there a delay of 2+ days? Why cannot I see (and block!) the usage of the current day?
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#246The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting…
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things. I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk t…
My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.
Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.
My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#247I 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…
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.
> The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI.
This difference between API vs UI responses being different is common across all the big players (Claude, GPT models, etc.)
The consumer chat interfaces are designed for a different experience than a direct API call, even if pinging the same model.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#248The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting…
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things. I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk t…
> use their sales skills
Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#249Using metaphors is dangerous, but I would dare to say that big tech AI is like cement suppliers. It's too low level of a service. In civil engineering you have the option to contract value added suppliers that will give you prefabricated pieces in concrete or steel you could be using to build your construction.
I'm seeing a lot of AI firms building value added services on top of big tech "foundational" AI offerings. Value addition can start very early at a clear plans/billing structure, going through rate limiting, documentation and extra features that will bring stability or consistency to our AI enhanced products.
Going the other way around (I tried) and building things on top of big tech AI is challenging starting at the fundamentals as the OP described well.
Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.
Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.
But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push whatever gives them the largest commission.