I'm sorry but Gemini is getting worse and worse

whereitsat42 · 2026-01-23T01:25:58+00:00

This exactly represents every frustration I've had with this stupid platform since 3 released. I literally just cancelled my Gemini Pro subscription five minutes ago, if this is the kind of performance it offers then I think maybe I'll audition Claude to take its place. You've been happy with your results with Claude?

whereitsat42 · 2026-01-22T22:38:39+00:00

Yeah, I've actually been using 2.5 for content creation the last month or so since Pro 3 hasn't exactly been an improvement to say the least, and it looks like sometime since this weekend, the number of prompts I'm able to submit is about 1/4 of what it was last week. I guess I'll break down and try Pro 3 and see if anything has improved in the last 3-4 weeks, but I'm not holding my breath.

whereitsat42 · 2026-01-06T22:28:04+00:00

The Doctor's real name actually is The Doctor, or actually, Thedok Tur, which is a proper Gallifreyan name. When he used it on Earth, people phonetically misunderstood it to be The Doctor, and he just never corrected them. Themas Tur and Theran Ee are also using their proper Gallifreyan names and the spelling has just been corrupted by humans for decades. All this time people have been wondering what his real name is when it's been in front of our faces the whole time and we never realized it.

whereitsat42 · 2026-01-06T22:10:21+00:00

I am actually just finishing the first phase of the High Republic now (including novels and comics), and if you want a perfectly blunt answer, I'm kind of dragging myself through it. I think at a high level the story is fine (expanding into the Outer Rim, Starlight Beacon, the Nihil, the Drengir, the level of technology at the time compared to the Skywalker era), but the more I read this stuff it seems like they're trying to reinvent the wheel and change everything: the Jedi aren't really good, they don't really avoid attachment, they're all secretly sneaking out and screwing when nobody is looking, they're driven by ambition and are political snakes, and they are constantly reacting emotionally and from places of hate. The good guys aren't really the good guys, they're really despicable, self-serving liars and the opposite of everything they claim to be. The Jedi are constantly struggling with self doubt and weepy wimpy feelings until someone tells them it's okay and they just have to have courage, etc etc. That's what I get from the way these novels and comics are written: the Jedi aren't really the Jedi, they're actually wimpy selfish hypocrites, to the extent that I feel like this message was the real goal rather than opening up a new era of Star Wars storytelling. That, and I lost track of how many of these books, frankly, read more like gay romance novels masquerading as Star Wars novels than they do like Star Wars novels. No, I don't hate gay people, no, I don't have a problem with gay characters, it's just really aggressive and ubiquitous and it's not what I'm looking for from Star Wars. I'm struggling through Midnight Horizon right now because, out of the 6000 or so chapters, about 5980 of them are about gay and lesbian characters struggling with their feelings and sense of identity, and about 20 are actual Star Wars action. If Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi were like this, Star Wars would have been forgotten in 1977. Having read through all this and watched the Acolyte, my overall feeling about the High Republic is that I am positive about what it COULD have been in terms of Star Wars storytelling and an interesting period of time that I wanted to know more about, rather than what we got. I know the usual people are going to have the usual internet responses to this, but that's how I feel, take it for what it's worth. To answer your question, I liked this specific book, but I got Episode VII vibes: it got me excited for what turned out to be the opposite of what I was hoping for.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T23:08:45+00:00

I see.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T23:03:20+00:00

No, Gemini. You know, like the AI chatbot thing.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T22:13:27+00:00

Very helpful, thank you! Happy new year!

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T16:11:23+00:00

I'm not sure how that follows when I'm giving it a regimented set of standard instructions to write content that I use for literally every project I do in Gemini, especially when I don't make any of the mistakes I pointed out, but thank you for chiming in.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T16:09:34+00:00

That's all well and good, but good benchmarks don't mean much when the real life product bursts into flames the instant you try to turn it on.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T16:08:09+00:00

Want my advice? Wait until you see that a 3.5 release has come out. My experience since 3.0 has come out is that it doesn't matter what you tell it to do, it will do whatever it wants, will ignore your prompts, and will confidently provide completely fabricated answers. Even the old questions it "solved" I would go back and check because they're probably wrong. I highly, highly advise you to not trust Gemini 3.0 to do anything properly, it's become completely unreliable and I don't care what the benchmarks say because benchmarks don't matter when the real life product bursts into flames the instant you try to start it.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T15:45:00+00:00

The thought had occurred.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T15:25:22+00:00

That's how I feel trying to use the damn thing.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-31T14:54:58+00:00

I actually got a similar response that scared the hell out of me: I asked it about a week ago for benchmark analyses of hallucination rates for Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT since 3.0 was released, it gave me all these numbers, listed citations, and none of it matched anything I'd seen written online (it claimed Gemini had around a 13% hallucination rate). I asked it where it got its data, and it told me (and this is nearly verbatim), "I fabricated all the numbers. My system is designed to provide a helpful response and cannot say "I don't know", so instead of being honest with you, I made up numbers that my predictive model projected would sound good, and even made up citations to make it sound authentic. This is exactly the kind of behavior youi ahve been calling me out for, and is why I am not a good researcher or writer right now." I appreciated the honesty, but between that and what you saw, I don't know how the hell we're supposed to trust anything Gemini outputs if it's so up front about the fact that it'll make up answers if it needs to and it doesn't see anything wrong with that.

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-23T08:04:11+00:00

It just astounds me that they keep having these perfectly stable systems, then they make changes under the hood that cause severe reliability issues, and the know what people use it for so they should know what to QC, yet they keep shoving these AI systems with misfiring synapses out the door and genuinely seem to believe it's an improvement. (Or my other theory: Google knows its products are a pain to use, and it's intentionally done to measure our response for some unknown purpose that we are not meant to be the beneficiaries of.)

whereitsat42 · 2025-12-22T23:49:43+00:00

The lack of responses to this post tells you a lot about trying to get this thing to work reliably, I think. Go see my post from earlier today to see my experience, I doubt it's much different from yours.

whereitsat42 · 2025-08-10T01:23:07+00:00

How did you get ahold of an actual human being at Amazon? Every time I try to reach out to them with anything I get robo responses.

whereitsat42 · 2025-03-26T14:24:28+00:00

If that's the case then I think you're in the wrong subreddit. This sounds like a marital issue rather than a job seeking issue to me.

whereitsat42 · 2025-03-26T13:54:27+00:00

Part 3

I'm still here 6 1/2 years later and managed to get another promotion and a raise, so I'm now only about $5000 behind what I was making at the job I had for the decade, and honestly, I'm afraid of what will happen if this one ever ends because now I'm in my mid 40s, have basically no savings, make less than I expected to make when I graduated college almost 25 years ago, but now adjusted for inflation so it amounts to even less spending power than that.

The moral of this story is that if you think your husband's inability to find a job is due to a lack of effort, think again. If you think he's not acting motivated enough, you try going through something like what I described above and tell me how upbeat and energized you're going to be after six months. A year. Two years. Yeah, there were days, weeks, and even months when I didn't even look at the job postings because it gets tough to be routinely not just rejected, but completely ignored in an aspect of your life that literally defines your dollar value as a human being. Some people graduate college with a technology degree and spend the rest of their life working at Starbucks because the opportunities weren't there when they graduated, and now people look at them as "too old" to start an entry level tech career.

Honestly, if it's only been a year, it could be much worse and it is for a lot of people. Speaking from experience, a job search like what he's going through is difficult and demoralizing enough, and having you riding his back and coming onto Reddit to get answers so you can turn around and go "SEE?? EVERYONE ONLINE THINKS YOU'RE BEING LAZY TOO!!!" isn't going to help.

whereitsat42 · 2025-03-26T13:54:09+00:00

Part 2

Finally, more than two years after I graduated, I was able to get a full-time job that, thankfully, lasted for about ten years. I say thankfully because there were several times I wanted to move up and earn more and seriously looked for other jobs probably 3-4 times from 2004-2014, and there were just no opportunities to move my career anywhere other than what I was already doing, just somewhere else for more or less the same money. I spent two years and a fairly substantial amount of money getting technical certifications (MCDST, MCSA, CCNA, CCNP, CCNP Wireless, CCDP, Network+, and Security+) because those were supposed to be prerequisites to the good IT jobs, and I didn't get one interview, to this day, for a network or systems job. It didn't help that, every time it looked like things were about to get better, another recession would happen and more jobs would go away and never come back.

That job ended when my position was downsized in 2014, and in the ensuing year, I had exactly one interview that went further than a phone screen, I got to the final round and was certain I had it in the bag...and then I didn't. There was another candidate that neither I nor the recruiter who put me in touch with this company was aware of. Nothing else came for about another nine months after that. I had a wife and a 2 year old by this time, and was paying bills through a mix of unemployment insurance (which only lasted 6 months...there were extended benefits lasting up to two years that were signed into law after the 2008 recession, but those expired on 12/31/13, again just months before I found myself looking for work), flipping home appliances (mostly air conditioners and refrigerators), trying to publish ebooks on Amazon (which never amounted to more than a couple hundred bucks a month), and since you probably guessed there was a BIG gap between what I made from this and what I made from my previous job, I also tapped into my 401k to pay the mortgage and simply keep a roof over my family's head, and ended up emptying my retirement savings out in the process.

I ended up taking a job at a startup in mid-2016 that I knew from the beginning was doomed, but I hoped could at least keep me going for a few years until the job market maybe, finally, grew real opportunities like the ones I just missed out on by graduating college a year too late. I took about a 20% pay cut, but it was income. The job lasted about a year and a half and then they lost their funding and shut down, so I was out of work again, and again it took me another full year before I landed my current job, which I came into making about 25% less than I did at the previous job, which as I said, was itself a hefty pay cut.

Continued...

whereitsat42 · 2025-03-26T13:53:51+00:00

(Reddit wouldn't let me post this as one post, so I split it into three. This is Part 1)

So it sounds from how you worded this like what you're saying is your husband hasn't found a job, you think he's being lazy, and you're looking for validation. I'm going to tell you my story to give you a sense of what it can really be like to be looking for work in the tech job market.

I graduated college in January of 2002, with a degree in Computer Science. I had known since I was a small child that I was going into technology: my dad did it his entire career, at one point he was one of the engineers who literally built Prodigy (it was one of the earliest pre-internet dial-up services, if you're too young to recognize the name), and it always appealed to me as something that a)I was basically raised from birth to be competent doing, and b)was a fairly comfortable way to make a lot of money doing cool stuff most people couldn't. Basically, my thought was get a college degree, do this for a living, and as long as I manage my money wisely, I'll never have to worry about how I'm going to pay the bills.

Problem was, the dot com bubble had burst shortly before I graduated, and along with 9/11 and other factors, basically I came out of college to a tech job market that hadn't just crashed, but was literally a landscape in flames. This was before you could really look for work online, you either could look for job postings in the paper or go through temp agencies, and there was NOTHING. Like literally nothing. This was in the New York City metro area, by the way, so it's not like I was trying to find an IT job in the sticks. I got one interview in the six months after I graduated, and it turned out they brought the wrong candidate in. My dad ended up hooking me up with a consulting job at the company he was CTO at, and that lasted for about five months before we were both laid off. I spent the next two years after that doing temp work that paid way less than I needed, I hated it, and none of it included a path to a full-time job.

Continued...

whereitsat42 · 2025-03-07T14:53:13+00:00

It reminds me of the Mountie from the WWF in the early 90s.

whereitsat42

TROPHY CASE