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Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why, exactly. But I don't pay any attention to news like this from Google. I don't know if there's some marketing which has me writing them off or if it's something else.

What I do know is that the Gemini integration into sheets is surprisingly incapable of performing basic tasks. This is where I expect Google to really shine. I expected Sheets + Gemini to be magical like Google Photos was. I hardly try anymore besides some basic math questions when I don't feel like inputting the formula myself.

The other thing I know is Google's propensity to sunset products. For many things, it's not a huge deal. And it may not be for this. But, why? When there are alternatives - both open and closed.

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Not sure if this is connected, but I've found Gemini pretty hopeless within its own notebooks. I've been doing some job applications, and added cv and docs into a notebook. I then create a new chat to say "here is a job description, help me write a cover letter" or some such.

After about 3 messages in any given chat, a follow-up to "rewrite that with a more friendly tone" will result in a letter for a completely different job from another chat within the notebook.

This might be a blessing in disguise though, as the thing you've tasked it to do is something you should not offload to an LLM.

I told this exact thing to my gf few days ago and somehow she was mad at me for it

On your Sheets + Gemini integration point, I've genuinely tried to give the Gemini integration into Google Docs & Google Sheets a chance. It is so incompetent that it is fully useless to me. I have not gotten a single correct solution each time I tried to use it, even something I consider table stakes. I often write my work reports in Vim in Markdown format, but they need to go to the corporate Google space. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many prompts I have, it was completely unable to manage the command to "convert the Markdown format markers into native Google Docs markers". And I want to note, this was 2 pages of extremely simple Markdown with no "advanced" patterns, like tables or quotes, I think all I used was heading-marks, bolding, italicizing, and code blocks. This is something I would expect even GPT 3.5 to succeed in, and even more so Luna, but somehow it destroyed the formatting throughout half the document. This leads me to believe that they apply the absolute cheapest model they have there, or they have the model a harness which can barely be considered working. I found it absurd when I found out that they suddenly made this Gemini integration an additional paid plan recently, there's absolutely no way I can consider that in good faith.

sorry if this isn't it. there is a hidden global setting that defaults to off that lets docs play nice with markdown. it's in file > settings i think. super annoying even if this is no help

This is an Apache 2.0 open source project

Making Kubernetes a centre of everything. This one, they won’t sunset, because it helps selling GCP services.

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