16 ms·
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
by Zsfe510asG 2mo ago
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
- burky 2mo agoI can’t agree more! It feels really smooth to drive, kind of buttery compared to other frontier experiences, at least in antigravity 2.0 or whatever. I’ve been doing some web app coding with it and I’m happy with the results.
- WarmWash 2mo agoFor heavyweight work I have been using Astra, but for rabbit holes and brain storming Gemini is far more enjoyable to interact with. I'm worried in their push to catch up on the SOTA front, it's going to lose that natural sounding touch it currently has.
- martythemaniak 2mo agoGood news then, I don't think they're in a hurry to catch up to SOTA.
- drivebyhooting 2mo agoMostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times). Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.
- mapontosevenths 2mo ago> Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos. Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
- copperx 2mo agoYup. Reality is full of special cases.
- drivebyhooting 2mo agoAnd sometimes that’s what trying to sound smart sounds like.
- Someone1234 2mo agoThis is commonly why, on Reddit in particular, you can get eaten alive. Someone confident but incorrect, can often sound more convincing than someone with actual expertise. The expert must add caveats/hedge, because those are the facts on the ground, whereas the person reciting google can be entirely confident. Of course the people judging aren't experts, so they side with confidence and simplicity. Heck, just writing shorter replies on Reddit is rewarded. Nobody reads the articles, let alone a paragraph-long reply. That all being said though, there are limits. Sometimes LLMs on high-thinking go off on full tangents based on little, and don't have the self-awareness to bring it back.
- nostrebored 2mo agoIn my experience actual experts don’t hedge because they have a perspective. They might say “I think”, but avoid weaseling.
- mapontosevenths 2mo agoMy experience has been very much the opposite of yours. To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets. Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question? A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication.
- JW_00000 2mo agoI consider, on the contrary, caveating and hedging annoying 'typical redditor'/internet behaviors: they care more about being "technically correct" than conveying the message. On the internet, if you make even the tiniest mistake or simplification, someone will criticize you, so you're trained to always hedge. In normal discussions with friends you can just make general statements and people get what you mean.
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoYea. I have asked it to verify my ideas with experiments sometimes. And it cheats and warps the results so that the results are reached
- re5i5tor 2mo ago“caveats and provisos” makes me think of Robin Williams’ genie imitating William F. Buckley Jr.
- indymike 2mo agoThis is accurate.
- jakderrida 2mo ago"couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos." When you're a ChatGPT Projects or Claude Projects user, those caveats and provisos are your worst enemy because they'll change caveats into hard rules (either for the session or committed to memories) and you end up in absolute hell having to make it investigate to figure out why it can no longer produce anything but read-only pre-check code that never actually does anything but keeps performing stupid safety checks.
- ankurshv 2mo ago[flagged]
- avereveard 2mo agoYep the only way out is hooks to forbid what can be detected by ast and second model to prune comments, flatten pyramids of fallback, and squash the test suite removing quirks maintaining wanted behaviors.
- alansaber 2mo agoAgreed. My impression is that the more verbose output of sol, astra etc is that it helps it steer itself on long running tasks (but is worse for the human user to read)
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoYes, when post training models for long tasks this happens gradually. It is not easy to prevent it as such.
- lilbigdoot 2mo agoYes I've noticed there's also this drive to implement and start talking about how it would write specific portions of code in response to design/trade off questions. I have to prompt Sol/Astra almost every time with a note that I am not looking for implementation advice since I mostly use them as a rubber duck in the design phase
- lxgr 2mo agoFor rabbit holes, how do you get Gemini to do any research before answering? I've very recently had it hallucinate on me like it's 2023, and that was on Pro/Thinking, as far as I remember.
- pkulak 2mo agoIs Google still chasing frontier? Seems like they haven't had a "Pro" model in forever. I think a good niche for them would be right where they are now.
- spwa4 2mo agoThese are native speech-to-speech models, so I think they've decided not to do that anymore.
- kylecazar 2mo agoThey are. They were supposed to release 3.5 Pro over the summer but haven't because of persistent architectural/technical issues allegedly. Which is better than releasing it in that state imo. Their AI leadership team has taken some hits recently too, in the form of departures. I believe when they get their bearings they will be competitive again. 3.8 Flash has been a great model for me.
- amelius 2mo agoHow do you know you're using Astra? My ChatGPT env only says "low", "medium", "high". Is this a "pro" thing? I have totally no idea what I'm talking to, so actually I'm thinking of stopping my plan. Gemini and Claude are much more clear about it. Anyway, I like the speed at which Gemini responds so indeed for simple things it is preferable.
- comex 2mo agoFor me (Plus plan, iOS app), Astra only shows up under the Work tab. I’ve been using Work for all my queries, since it seems to just be the same interface as Chat but with more features. I don’t understand why they’re two separate things.
- chicagobuss 2mo agoIt's entirely possible that in their testing of newer models, the whole problem is that even if it's doing better in benchmarks, maybe it's insufferable to work with, thus they're not releasing it.
- ympb121 2mo agoWondering if people have managed to have Gemini in-front of other models like claude/codex models and only interact with that. Having Gemini act as a pure human/llm translator.
- saurik 2mo agoNot in the principled sense you mean but I have in fact recently started having Gemini explain to me what Claude is talking to me about, lol.
- dlss 2mo ago[flagged]
- saurik 2mo agoBTW, as kind of a follow-up to this, I think the most important finding to report--for those who only use one model, as many people seem to--is just how much more often Claude seems to be extremely confidently (and even insufferably) wrong than any of the other three big models (all of which I use quite often... yet I only pull out Claude when I've given up hope in a problem and are looking for out-of-the-box brainstorming). And like, it does this despite it speaking in extremely dense math, which both makes it sound correct and requires a lot more effort to prove when it is wrong... yet, it isn't actually correct more often, and so that time sink just isn't worth the benefit. I then think many people--including people who can speak math (as can I)--just stop bothering to check everything, as if you come across a human who speaks like this it probably does correlate with slow and careful thought that helps prevent errors. Instead, Claude has the mistake rate of a somewhat accelerated beginner impossibly combined with the language of an expert professor; and we as humans just aren't good at that combination: it becomes very dangerous and makes it take longer to spot its egregious mistakes and trained-in biases. If you have to use Claude, I thereby claim you really need to have a team of not-Claudes to help insulate you from this, and Gemini (while being a bit senile) is a lot more collaborative and approaches problems in ways that makes it harder to get tricked. (To translate this into more of an engineering analogy: Claude always feels to me like the engineer who put more effort into learning how to program in functional languages than into how to actually develop working code, and then confidently presents you answers in Haskell or Lisp that never quite work. To find their errors is then very costly. In contrast, Gemini feels more like a Java or Go developer who knows they are a cog... that's helpful! <- Which maybe just goes to show that AI has finally turned me into a manager, omg.)
- throwaw12 2mo agoDoes anyone know if there is a dedicated model which makes Claude output nore human readable and less slop? Lately it became load-bearingly-reality-difficult to not only read, but to comprehend the Claude output
- phenomen 2mo agoIt's also the only model that generates accurate translation and localization. No other frontier model comes close. Although Gemini's coding capabilities are subpar, its natural language processing is top-tier.
- thisgoodlife 2mo agoI’m curious how you guys keep track of each model’s coding capabilities. The landscape keeps changing. I don’t suppose you benchmark all frontier models every other month, right?
- riddlemethat 2mo agoI use them. Daily. Gemini hasn’t been a contender by comparison for a long time.
- baq 2mo agoTrue but it has a niche in SQL reviews for me. Looks like Google has a lot of good sql in their corpus and in their RL digital lobotomy factory.
- safog 2mo agoI wonder if it's a harness thing or a model thing at this point. I feel all coding models are quite capable for most tasks I want them to do. Most of the time I don't need what the bench tests and I'm not really giving them completely ambiguous tasks without any refinement. I only find marginal differences between models at this point and it almost feels like personality quirks in each model than anything.
- BenzeneDream 2mo agoWhen comparing OpenAI and Claude thats pretty much true, but not Gemini... And have you tried Antigravity? Yikes
- 2mo ago
- flyinglizard 2mo agoWe have an agentic system that produces insights for end users, and runs most of its work on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but as an output stage transforms the resulting text through Gemini 3.8 Flash for readability, and it works. On my TODO is try and run all of the analysis pipeline in dense "machine speak" to save on tokens and just let Gemini sort it out at the end.
- ghoshbishakh 2mo agoIn my experience, with minimum prompting, deepseek also generates very decent text.
- gunalx 2mo agoNot at all in mine. Deepseek has some of the worst prose of the close to frontier models in my opinion.
- chpatrick 2mo agoI find its style the most sycophantic and annoying personally.
- popcorncowboy 2mo agoNever has it been brought so clearly into light how brilliant I am, than in correspondence with Gemini.
- schainks 2mo agoTry Gemini live in a multi lingual environment. It can pick out speakers and live translate to you. Truly underrated for its capabilities.
- BeetleB 2mo agoI actually did (was going to travel internationally), and it wasn't as useful as you'd think. I would be talking to someone, and in the background someone else would be talking, and it would translate both people. Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place. Still, can't complain for free.
- tonyhart7 2mo ago"Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place" well then its not model problem
- BeetleB 2mo agoIt's not a model problem, but it is a SW problem. It should be able to distinguish nearby people from people farther away and give me options to set a threshold on who to include.
- bahmboo 2mo agoAs sister comments have pointed out, I find that it's very much dependent on the phone you're using. If it can't even show me a waveform then I don't think it's going to be able to tease out any sort of speech
- BeetleB 2mo agoI was using Google's Translate app.
- bahmboo 2mo agoSorry I wasn't clear. It's about the hardware microphone. They're usually optimized to filter out far field sounds and only focus on near field sounds. So if you're trying to understand a conversation from even 10 ft away, it can be a problem. Not saying that's the situation that you encountered, but it does make sense that a $50 phone versus a $500 phone might have different capabilities when it comes to the microphone
- cromka 2mo agoI find Astra's prose very good, too. I have been using it to rewrite all my LLM-generated docs as of lately.
- NBJack 2mo agoI was surprised when (finally) trying out Claude how much I preferred Gemini's way of communicating. I wont argue Claude is better at coding, but for knowledge work, I had to dig through Claude output to find what I actually wanted. At times, it even felt borderline incomprehensible.
- hiimkeks 2mo agoJust today I had Sonnet 5 generate this (asking about always-on display in the iPhone e-versions): > This mirrors how Apple has always segmented Pro vs. non-Pro iPhones: base models got LTPS panels while Pro models got LTPO, and only with the mainline iPhone 17/17 Plus did that gap close the standard versions previously lacked the smoother 120Hz ProMotion technology and the always-on display feature, unlike the Pro models — the 17e is the one model line still using the older, cheaper panel. (emphasis mine) I mean, I can guess what it is trying to say, but who RL'd this nonsense?
- malshe 2mo agoFable 5.1 even today inundates prose with "it's not this, it's that" type of garbage. I had to rewrite two paragraphs from a generic class announcement which I was planning to post on the LMS. Not sure where that productivity gain is that everyone is talking about.
- avereveard 2mo agoOpus specifically talks as if having a stroke. 4.6 was the last version that was pleasant to work with
- robotmay 2mo agoI couldn't even stand 4.6 by the end. 4.5 was very usable, 4.6 started alright and somehow got more annoying. 4.7 made me quit my subscription and ditch their services entirely - it's an honourary member of my quite short "Coworkers I'd like to throttle if I didn't work remotely" list. Infuriating to instruct or communicate with.
- bilsbie 2mo agoChatgpt doesn’t seem so bad lately. At least as a Claude refugee.
- spider-mario 2mo agoYeah, I set it to “warm: less”, “enthusiastic: less” and “emoji: less” and it was much more bearable than I remembered it being before. Although it does love to “separate” questions when it thinks.
- paradox460 2mo agoTerrible for code, amazing for prose I've set my documentation sub agent to Gemini and my code agent to Luna
- asdfman123 2mo agoI work for Google and we have the choice between Gemini models and Opus. Opus is slightly better than Gemini flash but I find the style unbearable. It reminds me of a pedantic grad student.
- YoumuChan 2mo agoNot only that, Opus likes to invent arcane jargons. And the longer the task runs, the harder it is to understand its output. The conversation will be filled with uncommon word choices and awkward sentence structure.
- popcorncowboy 2mo ago"Watermarking"
- FranzFerdiNaN 2mo agoThe 4.5 models were the last Anthropic models that were actually pleasant to read. Especially Sonnet 4.5 was really fun to use for non-coding purposes. I liked having it generate silly short stories while waiting for deployments to finish. Haiku 4.5 still has a small bit of that charm, but 4.6 and later models are all unbearable unless you want a simple 'this is the answer' to a question.
- Yizahi 2mo agoIt also doesn't anthropomorphise itself, like at all.