Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking on Tuesday, a day after Apple released Siri AI. Both aim at home and personal users, both are free to start. And hindsight being 20/20, it appears Gemini and Siri AI (i.e. built with Google’s Gemini) are losing to Claude and Codex on performance. I would argue Gemini is chasing a different axis entirely. A model that is faster, auditory, and personal. And as it stands for the time being, there is no automatic delegation between them.
Tagged Gemini
AI Satellite Photo Editor Nobody Asked For
Google pulled the Nano Banana 2 image tool from Google Earth one day after shipping it, once a researcher demonstrated that a one-sentence prompt could drop a nuclear facility into Iran. The safety failure is the obvious story. The more interesting one is that nobody, before or since, has said what the feature was for.
Gemini 3.6 Flash Released
Over the last few weeks, my main takeaway with the Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 releases was their respective costs and cost performances. Neither company particularly hides the fact that the real models they offer are paywalled. It creates a distinct entry barrier for those who simply are not the target audience of the marketing materials surrounding the AI hype: vibe coding, content creation, and so on.
What Remains of Fable 5 Ban
Apple said Apple Intelligence would bring AI to its brand. It was a broken promise, unless Genmoji is to be considered a success. Apple is now saying the new Siri AI will deliver the promises they made back in 2024. Neither iOS 27 nor macOS Golden Gate has been officially released (available only in beta), but this definitely marks the beginning of the full transition toward AI-centrism in consumer OS. The dependency is real now — local or cloud, there’s no opting out.
Google Announced “Honey” Dipped in AI
Just last year, browser extension Honey suffered an infamous scandal. Now owned by PayPal, the extension promised to find the best deal, including finding the best coupon codes. The exposé revealed Honey’s business model focused more on being a man in the middle in both security and transaction. And it also reveals a gap, a bias between what buyers think they do and what they actually do.
Coding with Gemini was Fun Short-Lived
During my migration from Pi to NAS via all things Docker, one of the problems I immediately faced was how I was going to handle my aging databases. All these eBooks, magazines, articles, and etc. I have accumulated since high school had to go somewhere. I know there would be some people shouting I should simply throw them out like the 90s memorabilia in the attic. But I took this on as my personal DIY project.
Apple Intelligence, AI Subscriptions, and AI Store
After the whole debacle I had with Zadok the Priest on the previous post, I received some spams suggesting I should subscribe to their pro or plus models. I take it my search had used up most of free queries I had for the day. As far as I know, neither Google nor OpenAI openly publish the limit of their respective free tiers. From the literature I could find, it appears both companies have no fixed plan for free tier. For those of us who wish to cut subscriptions, having one less pricing info makes it untenable to plan a…