mwest217 (u/mwest217)

mwest217 commented on Nano Banana Pro blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

losvedir · a month ago

I'm sure Apple will roll something out in the coming years. Now that just anyone can easily AI themselves into a picture in front of the Eiffel tower, they'll want a feature that will let their users prove that they _really_ took that photo in front of the Eiffel tower (since to a lot of people sharing that you're on a Paris vacation is the point, more than the particular photo).

I bet it will be called "Real Photos" or something like that, and the pictures will be signed by the camera hardware. Then iMessage will put a special border around it or something, so that when people share the photos with other Apple users they can prove that it was a real photo taken with their phone's camera.

mwest217 · a month ago

This exists, the standard is called C2PA, Google added support for it in the Pixel 10. I was surprised and disappointed that Apple didn’t add support for it in the most recent iPhone! A few physical cameras are starting to support it too (https://yawnbox.eu/blog/c2pa-camera/)

mwest217 commented on Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing ricklamers.io/posts/gemin... · Posted by u/ricklamers

jedberg · 2 months ago

> Gemini 3.0 is one of the most anticipated releases in AI at the moment because of the expected advances in coding performance.

Based on what I'm hearing from friends who work at Google and are using it for coding, we're all going to be very disappointed.

Edit: It sound like they don't actually have Gemini 3 access, which would explain why they aren't happy with it.

mwest217 · 2 months ago

Gemini 3.0 isn't broadly available inside Google. There's are "Gemini for Google" fine-tuned versions of 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash, but there's been no broad availability of any 3.0 models yet.

Source: I work at Google (on payments, not any AI teams). Opinions mine not Google's.

mwest217 commented on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account theverge.com/news/793579/... · Posted by u/josephcsible

eimrine · 2 months ago

Is it possible to run anything from apple without any accounts?

mwest217 · 2 months ago

Both possible and trivially easy. Just don’t sign into an Apple account.

mwest217 commented on Improved Gemini 2.5 Flash and Flash-Lite developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

bogtog · 3 months ago

> Today, we are releasing updated versions of Gemini 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Flash-Lite, available on Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, aimed at continuing to deliver better quality while also improving the efficiency.

Typo in the first sentence? "... improving the efficiency." Gemini 2.5 Pro says this is perfectly good phrasing, whereas ChatGPT and Claude recognize that it's awkward or just incorrect. Hmm...

mwest217 · 3 months ago

ChatGPT and Claude are mistaken if they think it is incorrect. The parallelism in verb tenses is between "continuing to deliver" and "improving the efficiency". It's a bit wordy, but definitely not wrong.

mwest217 commented on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds npr.org/2025/07/24/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/andsoitis

swat535 · 5 months ago

> The sample dataset explicitly excluded 'athletes', so would exclude people that _are_ outrunning a bad diet.

You can't outrun a bad diet. This is such a myth and I have no idea where it's coming from. Perhaps it's a nice lie one can tell himself to continue eating junk and not feel guilty about it.

Athletes, especially body builders require a lot of calories but their diet is surprisingly healthy. They eat plenty of protein, carbohydrates minerals, vitamins and healthy fats.

mwest217 · 5 months ago

For high level endurance athletes, eating enough can be a difficult task. I wouldn’t quite categorize diets like the one described in https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/sports/olympics/cross-cou... as “a bad diet”, but it’s certainly a quantity and density of calories that would make it a bad diet for most people with a normal energy expenditure.

An anecdote from my experience with long trail hiking is that essentially everybody loses weight hiking long trails for months. Turns out when you’re hiking 25-30 miles / day, it’s awfully hard to not be in a calorie deficit (especially when you’re also trying to optimize for lightweight food)

mwest217 commented on Gemini CLI: your open-source AI agent blog.google/technology/de... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

krzyk · 6 months ago

This, how does one get API key?

I wanted to use it in opencode.

mwest217 · 6 months ago

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key

mwest217 commented on Cloud Run GPUs, now GA, makes running AI workloads easier for everyone cloud.google.com/blog/pro... · Posted by u/mariuz

anonymousab · 6 months ago

I remember going out to dinner, years ago, with a fairly senior AWS billing engineer. An acquaintance of a coworker.

He looked completely surprised when I asked about runaway billing and why there wasn't any simple options to cap a given resource to prevent those cases.

His response was that they didn't build that because none of their customers wanted anything like that, as far as he was aware.

mwest217 · 6 months ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on cloud. Opinions my own.

I think the reason this doesn’t get prioritized is that large customers don’t actually want a “stop serving if I pass this limit” amount. If there’s a spike in traffic, they probably would rather pay the money to serve it. The customers that would want this feature are small-dollar customers, and from an economic perspective it makes less sense to prioritize this feature, since they’re not spending very much relative to customers who wouldn’t want this feature.

Maybe if there weren’t more feature requests to get prioritized this might happen, but the reality is that there are always more feature requests than time to implement them, and a feature request used almost exclusively by the smallest dollar customers will always lose to a feature for big-dollar customers.

mwest217 commented on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model · Posted by u/owendarko

robviren · 8 months ago

"If I can dry two towels in two hours, how long will it take me to dry four towels?"

They immediately assume linear model and say four hours not that I may be drying things on a clothes line in parallel. It should ask for more context and they usually don't.

mwest217 · 8 months ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro gets this right:

https://g.co/gemini/share/7ea6d059164e

mwest217 commented on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model · Posted by u/owendarko

codingdave · 8 months ago

"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

So far, all the ones I have tried actually try to answer the question. 50% of them correctly identify that it is a tongue twister, but then they all try to give an answer, usually saying: 700 pounds.

Not one has yet given the correct answer, which is also a tongue twister: "A woodchuck would chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

mwest217 · 8 months ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro gets it right first, then also cites the 700 pounds answer (along with citing a source). https://g.co/gemini/share/c695a0163538

mwest217 commented on Gemini 2.5 Flash developers.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

ks2048 · 8 months ago

If this announcement is targeting people not up-to-date on the models available, I think they should say what "flash" means. Is there a "Gemini (non-flash)"?

I see the 4 Google model names in the chart here. Are these 4 the main "families" of models to choose from?

- Gemini-Pro-Preview

- Gemini-Flash-Preview

- Gemini-Flash

- Gemini-Flash-Lite

mwest217 · 8 months ago

Gemini has had 4 families of models, in order of decreasing size:

- Ultra

- Pro

- Flash

- Flash-Lite

Versions with `-Preview` at the end haven't had their "official release" and are technically in some form of "early access" (though I'm not totally clear on exactly what that means given that they're fully available and as of 2.5 Pro Preview, have pricing attached to them - earlier versions were free during Preview but had pretty strict rate limiting but now it seems that Preview models are more or less fully usable).