pkilgore

My whole thing here is that this is just as effective of a comment without the todo prefix.

Lint the TODO part before merging, then TODO becomes a nice thing you can grep for on your own branch, like a note to yourself.

Like the fact that Obama was following laws passed by congress?

https://web.archive.org/web/20141224180231/https://foreignpo...

Obama didn't do anything (other than follow the law at the time):

https://web.archive.org/web/20141224180231/https://foreignpo...

Congress cut funding by passing laws[1][2].

In 2011, Obama was just following the law enacted by Congress not his wild ass opinions, which I know is crazy given the current administration.

[1] Public Law 101-246 (1990)

[2] Public Law 103-236 (1994)

See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20141224180231/https://foreignpo...

I think we are reading separate implications from the same statement.

I (and others, and Google has not disabused anyone of this when asked), understand that to mean "Gemini always has access to a sliding 72 hour window of all your data, even if this feature is off".

You think it means: "Once you turn it off, Gemini has access for another 72 hours then it has no access".

The later is less alarming for sure, but the former appears what is actually happening.

Previously "off" meant "off". Now "off" means "only send/retain data for 72 hours".

The model is seeming trained to pick up on the existence of the words "bounding box" or "segmentation mask" and if so is pre-trained to return Array<{ box_2d: [number, number, number, number], label: string>, mask: "base64/png"}>, where [y0,x0,y1,x1] for bounding box if you ask it for JSON too.

Recommend the Gemini docs here, they are implicit on some of these points.

Prompts matter too, less is more.

And you need to submit images to get good bounding boxes. You can somewhat infer this from the token counts, but Gemini APIs do something to PDFs (OCR, I assume) that cause them to lose complete location context on the page. If you send the page in as an image, that context isn't lost and the boxes are great.

As an example of this, you can send a PDF page with half of the page text, the bottom half empty. If you ask it to draw a bounding box around the last paragraph it tends to return a result that is much higher number on the normalized scale (lower on the y axis) than it should be. In one experiment I did, it would think a footer text that was actually about 2/3 down the page was all the way at the end. When I sent as an image, it had in around the 660 mark on the normalized 1000 scale exactly where you would expect it.

I wish temperature was a dimension. I believe the Gemini docs even recommend avoiding t=0 to avoid the kinds of spirals the author was talking about with masks.

You have to unencrypt data to process it and as soon as you do that, the right Kernel APIs are enough to see whatever you want -- here the accessibility APIs are probably enough to read any text you would be able to read.

As the article states, "After turning it off, Google will still retain your data for up to 72 hours to "maintain safety and security of Gemini Apps" and allow Gemini to respond contextually.""

Which means, AFAICT, it doesn't matter if you turn it off or not, Google still collects information and stores it for 72 hours as part of the core functionality of the operating system.

Beyond the blog: Going to be an interesting world where these kinds of suggestions become paid results and nobody has a hope of discovering your competitive service exists. At least in that world you'd hope the advertiser actually has the feature already!

I'm scared the people who decide how I write Dune config files will see this and think its a good idea.

Terrified, really.

What I do not understand is this top-down mandate that people use specific tools.

Mandate productivity, mandate quality; the tools will be adopted if they are sharp.

But elevating the way work is performed above the work itself? Weird.

Where is the market for someone to get paid to pump water into a reservoir and let it fall down later for $$$?

Is this.... is this a joke?

Is your argument there are no LLM alternatives?

DOGE downloaded libraries to assist in data exfiltration, and did exfiltrate data (obtained via the superuser accounts).

Suggest reading the complaint: https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025...

Interesting. It strikes me that some of this rhymes with the platform abstraction of roc[1]

[1] https://www.roc-lang.org/platforms

Pleasant way to start today thanks for submitting.

Am a lawyer, this is an incredibly silly and unlikely thing to suggest for a for-profit company set up on behalf of an even mildly sophisticated party in the USA.

Nearly ever such company is "limited" to engage "in any lawful activity" so as avoid exactly this issue.

Be thankful you've never heard of Deel. It's the worst PEO I've ever used, by an extremely wide margin, having used 3 others.

Defector did it better (and included the videos): https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...

It's beautiful things like this exist for people and they are happy with them, but I cannot think of anything more stressful to me!

Flat system of tags + Search + Fuzzy Find + Scanner + OCR + Giant Pile has been the route to happiness for me.

My brain just isn't wired for hierarchy at all.

And gullible enough not to realize how disposable they are to prevent their leaders from getting in trouble.

I think the whole argument here is silly, but I do know kitty (terminal) and Calibre (ebook manager) are two rather popular cross platform python desktop apps.

Best Android browser hands down, entirely because of the extension support.

I don't know how people use phones with ublock or leechblock. I guess "with less battery life" and "more".

Fun scissor. Seems to depend on your personal definition of "error", with respect to time.

That's language failing us, not maths :-)

What point are you trying to make? Seems like a failure of government to enforce monopolization laws than individual consumers.

OP is in large degree one articulation of foundational mindfulness concepts that have been written about for centuries.

What about the OP specifically appeals? Happy to point you at some other things if I can.

> Looking back, the result looks almost trivial to achieve

I wish the author was a bit more gentle on herself! What a ride.