6 ms·

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a goo

I spent the last three days (off and on) using Gemini to configure my edge router 4 with my iOS devices on a vpn and it's been awesome. In the past I'd do a google search and read a few sources of documentation, do another google search and read another set of documentation. Now, Gemini aggregates multiple pages together so all of the work of reading source docs from multiple locations is now n a single step. Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me. It was 100% Gemini which I recognize as not long-term feasible.

ls612 1mo ago
I built a simple Claude Code container on my homelab to do the same. I can just SSH in and get tech support when I need it.
stringfood 1mo ago
no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s
- mrweasel 1mo ago
  Even with the /s I think you misunderstand. If you just want to configure your router, then AI is neat. If you want to learn and understand what's going on in the router as you set it up, then being given the answers basically teaches you nothing. It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.
  - stringfood 1mo ago
    Why would most people want to learn how a router works? It's the end goal that the vast majority of users want - i don't want to learn about routing tables, I just want to expose a port for plex, etc. Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results
    - NateEag 1mo ago
      > Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results And somewhere between ten and seventy percent of what it teaches you will be anywhere from subtly wrong in minor ways to utterly flaming bullshit, and unless you go through the boring, slow, old-fashioned learning methods, you'll have no way to know.
      - stringfood 1mo ago
        yes but last year it was between 20 and 80 percent, point being talk to me in 10 years and all errors around router behaviour will be completely missing from AI teaching tools
nixonpjoshua 1mo ago
Are you sure the lack of advertising isn't long term feasible? It seems to me that AI models have proven themselves to be something consumers ARE willing to pay a subscription - or even pay per use/token for.
- jjulius 1mo ago
  Are they profiting from these subscriptions yet?
- queenkjuul 1mo ago
  I've been using Gemini free tier exclusively for all my AI "needs" and would not be willing to pay for it
snapplebobapple 1mo ago
its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me
- KellyCriterion 1mo ago
  also great for Windows-Log Exceptions to decipher the mostly cryptic error messages :-)
paxys 1mo ago
All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- _dark_matter_ 1mo ago
  I wonder the same thing. I only imagine that what comes next is worse: AI companies using vast resources to develop new training data, in house, locked down. They are already doing this with developers and code at Meta. Information will become locked away behind AI paywalls and chatbots.
- jefftk 1mo ago
  > If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
  - exmadscientist 1mo ago
    The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous, are you?), and your idea might get embedded into a set of model weights somewhere. No human will see a byte of it. Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?
    - JKCalhoun 1mo ago
jjulius 1mo ago
And I've spent the last few days irritated that everything I ask Gemini is answered with something that's blatantly wrong and I'm not even a subject matter expert. A quick Google search for the same questions gives plenty of results that counter what the LLM gave me. YMMV.
- -0_0- 1mo ago
  Confidently wrong summaries are the bane of Google search, and unfortunately I'm finding the AI seems to bleed into the actual search results too now, often turning up pages that back up what the summary is (wrongly) suggesting instead of surfacing actually relevant results for what I'm asking.
theplumber 1mo ago
It took you 4 days because you used Gemini. Gemini is the worst AI model I ever used. It is way behind even open models. It looks like Google just reached its AOL moment.
- noosphr 1mo ago
  Gemini isn't great as a model, googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks. I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.
- queenkjuul 1mo ago
  Come now, copilot is worse in every way
  - JKCalhoun 1mo ago
    Guessing this is the relevant part: "worst AI model I ever used"
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    Copilot can use any model like Sol or Opus and is just a harness so not sure why people say this.
    - queenkjuul 1mo ago
      Personally it's because i used it when it was brand new and work paid for it and i had no idea what model it was using, my boss just turned it on for automatic PR summaries and code reviews and it was universally dogshit, and the auto complete in my IDE was awful as well.
      - satvikpendem 1mo ago
        Well it's much better now.
matt4711 1mo ago
There will be new ways and incentives for content creators to be compensated. Many AI search startups are already talking about this or have created programs that help incentivize content creation.
queenkjuul 1mo ago
I've been mostly enjoying Gemini, but it also clearly and definitively told me something i was trying to do was not possible with the library im using, so i wrote a different implementation, an hour later to discover that the library does in fact do precisely what i wanted in exactly the way i wanted with less headache. If I'd just gone right to the documentation instead, it actually would have saved me time.
indigodaddy 1mo ago
Believe me they're making money off you one way or the other
JKCalhoun 1mo ago
Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created. (I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)
- dualvariable 1mo ago
  They're probably going to figure out how to aggressively monetize and enshittify LLMs at some point. We're likely at the "golden age" of LLM-assisted web searching and summarization. Hopefully open models keep it cracked open, but expecting enshittification is always the safe bet these days.
  - badestrand 1mo ago
    For the free to use LLMs, for sure. But if I pay $20 monthly, why should they enshittify it?
    - archagon 1mo ago
      Because that’s what always happens? Because their raison d’etre is to squeeze you dry?
    - 0x262d 1mo ago
      look at every paid streaming service...
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        To be fair those enshittified because of copyright owners, not because of paid streaming services.
    - Eisenstein 1mo ago
      The amount of money you pay is irrelevant if you don't leave the platform once they starting adding revenue streams that degrade your experience.
laughing_man 1mo ago
I've run into major problems with LLMs as I maintain my home Linux systems. If I just copied commands they list, I would have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date. They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.
- arcfour 1mo ago
  What on earth LLM are you using and do you tell it which distro/version of Linux they are supposed to be working with + give them access to web search or man pages? I haven't had this issue in like a year and a half.
  - laughing_man 1mo ago
    By default I use Leo, and I do specify the distro. I tried to qualify by version, but when I do that I lose out on a lot of correct information for things that haven't changed in awhile.
    - rabid_0wl 1mo ago
      Leo is not even the LLM, its just a browser extension typically running a very weak/cheap model. Why not use claude code so it knows your system without relying on you to give it accurate info? I guarantee your results will be night and day
- Randor 1mo ago
  Have a look at https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.
- AussieWog93 1mo ago
  I've had the opposite experience giving claude code SSH/ADB access to my devices. Not sure if it's the model itself or the harness, but I haven't had to manually do a sysadmin task in months.
moralestapia 1mo ago
You deserve what's coming for you.
- cowboylowrez 1mo ago
  Thats probably the kicker. I think about this some, also being myself a gemini chat mooch. How good will gemini be in a years time? Its great now but will there be an incentive at some point for it to become shit? Free tier is awesome now, but is it a loss leader? Training on my chats, maybe in a year my chats won't be worth the free access?
nsonha 1mo ago
Imagine someone making an indie router and sell it too you then the AI not be able to surface their doc
keybored 1mo ago
AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame. But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.
renegat0x0 1mo ago
I hate to break it to you, but we are at the start of enshittification circle. Once Gemini has monopoly you will reminisce with joy google search results.
lopis 1mo ago
That only works when there's an abundance of documentation for your specific device. The moment you're on a more recent version of something and have a weird issue, all hope is lots. You get stuck in loops because all LLMs keep recycling old advice that no longer applies. This problem will only get worse and worse as people no longer as questions on public forums, so answers are not publicly available either.
lnrd 1mo ago
That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale. I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- rnd33 1mo ago
  Isn't this only a transitionary problem though? Right now, during the transition there is no incentive for humans to write anything, it will get drowned in AI slop. As time goes on, more and more people will recognize this problem and we'll develop new ways of measuring information quality and trustworthiness. Nothing about this problem is fundamental, it's just that we're in the middle of a very chaotic transition.
DrScientist 1mo ago
Yep - it's awesome, the problem is that Google isn't sharing the revenue with the context creators anymore - over time, unless fixed, this will decimate the knowledge base it feeds on. > Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me Are you sure about that? Even if you didn't see ads ( remember people pay even if you don't click - just like a billboard ) - they are still profiling you to better sell you ads in the future, and using your interaction as free training data.
- cowboylowrez 1mo ago
  Yeah I mooch gemini off of google but they've def made a few cents from me via ads. Also apparently I'm a rarity because I don't run ad blocking (except firefox itself does a bit according to a few websites). Its a very good deal for me though.
mvanbaak 1mo ago
While I understand that you feel good as you got the device configured, you would have been better off without gemini. The 'old' way as you call it would have resulted in you knowing the backgrounds and the inner workings of your router, making maintaining it a breeze and helps you actually understand your setup. Besides that, it would probably trigger you to rethink some of the things you now blindly have implemented because gemini did not show alternatives nor reasoning behind it. (something that most definitely would have been documented on the source pages)

ls612 1mo ago

I built a simple Claude Code container on my homelab to do the same. I can just SSH in and get tech support when I need it.

stringfood 1mo ago

no, no, no. you are supposed to romanticize the hunt for correct information /s

mrweasel 1mo ago
Even with the /s I think you misunderstand. If you just want to configure your router, then AI is neat. If you want to learn and understand what's going on in the router as you set it up, then being given the answers basically teaches you nothing. It's the same reason why we don't give students the answers to things, we teach them to find the answers.
- stringfood 1mo ago
  Why would most people want to learn how a router works? It's the end goal that the vast majority of users want - i don't want to learn about routing tables, I just want to expose a port for plex, etc. Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results
  - NateEag 1mo ago
    > Also, I could have AI craft a fascinating and engaging way of teaching router setup that actually helps me learn instead of wasting time searching through random forums form google results And somewhere between ten and seventy percent of what it teaches you will be anywhere from subtly wrong in minor ways to utterly flaming bullshit, and unless you go through the boring, slow, old-fashioned learning methods, you'll have no way to know.
    - stringfood 1mo ago
      yes but last year it was between 20 and 80 percent, point being talk to me in 10 years and all errors around router behaviour will be completely missing from AI teaching tools

nixonpjoshua 1mo ago

Are you sure the lack of advertising isn't long term feasible? It seems to me that AI models have proven themselves to be something consumers ARE willing to pay a subscription - or even pay per use/token for.

jjulius 1mo ago
Are they profiting from these subscriptions yet?
queenkjuul 1mo ago
I've been using Gemini free tier exclusively for all my AI "needs" and would not be willing to pay for it

snapplebobapple 1mo ago

its pretty good with logs too. i mostly paste a few pages i suspect hace a problem in them and let it go to town. its almost always correct and is way faster than me

KellyCriterion 1mo ago
also great for Windows-Log Exceptions to decipher the mostly cryptic error messages :-)

paxys 1mo ago

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
_dark_matter_ 1mo ago
I wonder the same thing. I only imagine that what comes next is worse: AI companies using vast resources to develop new training data, in house, locked down. They are already doing this with developers and code at Meta. Information will become locked away behind AI paywalls and chatbots.
jefftk 1mo ago
> If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? I write because I have ideas I want to share, and whether that happens with LLMs as an intermediary isn't important to me.
- exmadscientist 1mo ago
  The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous, are you?), and your idea might get embedded into a set of model weights somewhere. No human will see a byte of it. Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?
  - JKCalhoun 1mo ago

jjulius 1mo ago

And I've spent the last few days irritated that everything I ask Gemini is answered with something that's blatantly wrong and I'm not even a subject matter expert. A quick Google search for the same questions gives plenty of results that counter what the LLM gave me. YMMV.

-0_0- 1mo ago
Confidently wrong summaries are the bane of Google search, and unfortunately I'm finding the AI seems to bleed into the actual search results too now, often turning up pages that back up what the summary is (wrongly) suggesting instead of surfacing actually relevant results for what I'm asking.

theplumber 1mo ago

It took you 4 days because you used Gemini. Gemini is the worst AI model I ever used. It is way behind even open models. It looks like Google just reached its AOL moment.

noosphr 1mo ago
Gemini isn't great as a model, googles search and ability to cite textbooks down to the paragraph make it better than every other model for human in the loop tasks. I end up using the gemini api for with search enabled for the cases that I don't have access to good grounding data even in agentic tasks.
queenkjuul 1mo ago
Come now, copilot is worse in every way
- JKCalhoun 1mo ago
  Guessing this is the relevant part: "worst AI model I ever used"
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  Copilot can use any model like Sol or Opus and is just a harness so not sure why people say this.
  - queenkjuul 1mo ago
    Personally it's because i used it when it was brand new and work paid for it and i had no idea what model it was using, my boss just turned it on for automatic PR summaries and code reviews and it was universally dogshit, and the auto complete in my IDE was awful as well.
    - satvikpendem 1mo ago
      Well it's much better now.

matt4711 1mo ago

There will be new ways and incentives for content creators to be compensated. Many AI search startups are already talking about this or have created programs that help incentivize content creation.

queenkjuul 1mo ago

I've been mostly enjoying Gemini, but it also clearly and definitively told me something i was trying to do was not possible with the library im using, so i wrote a different implementation, an hour later to discover that the library does in fact do precisely what i wanted in exactly the way i wanted with less headache. If I'd just gone right to the documentation instead, it actually would have saved me time.

indigodaddy 1mo ago

Believe me they're making money off you one way or the other

JKCalhoun 1mo ago

Yes. When my kids wonder why I don't hate AI the way they do I tell them it's because I hate Google even more. To be more precise, I hate the SEO shithole the internet has become, that Google serves up, that Google facilitated, indirectly created. (I really don't have any tears to shed if there is a death of the Corporate Internet™.)

dualvariable 1mo ago
They're probably going to figure out how to aggressively monetize and enshittify LLMs at some point. We're likely at the "golden age" of LLM-assisted web searching and summarization. Hopefully open models keep it cracked open, but expecting enshittification is always the safe bet these days.
- badestrand 1mo ago
  For the free to use LLMs, for sure. But if I pay $20 monthly, why should they enshittify it?
  - archagon 1mo ago
    Because that’s what always happens? Because their raison d’etre is to squeeze you dry?
  - 0x262d 1mo ago
    look at every paid streaming service...
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      To be fair those enshittified because of copyright owners, not because of paid streaming services.
  - Eisenstein 1mo ago
    The amount of money you pay is irrelevant if you don't leave the platform once they starting adding revenue streams that degrade your experience.

laughing_man 1mo ago

I've run into major problems with LLMs as I maintain my home Linux systems. If I just copied commands they list, I would have a near 100% failure rate, as most of the information they have has been gleaned from forum posts that are years out of date. They're a good jumping off point, but I need to delve into the original sources just like I did when I used Google.

arcfour 1mo ago
What on earth LLM are you using and do you tell it which distro/version of Linux they are supposed to be working with + give them access to web search or man pages? I haven't had this issue in like a year and a half.
- laughing_man 1mo ago
  By default I use Leo, and I do specify the distro. I tried to qualify by version, but when I do that I lose out on a lot of correct information for things that haven't changed in awhile.
  - rabid_0wl 1mo ago
    Leo is not even the LLM, its just a browser extension typically running a very weak/cheap model. Why not use claude code so it knows your system without relying on you to give it accurate info? I guarantee your results will be night and day
Randor 1mo ago
Have a look at https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh https://github.com/ThorOdinson246/whatisit-nl2sh It seems to get shell scripts right most of the time.
AussieWog93 1mo ago
I've had the opposite experience giving claude code SSH/ADB access to my devices. Not sure if it's the model itself or the harness, but I haven't had to manually do a sysadmin task in months.

moralestapia 1mo ago

You deserve what's coming for you.

cowboylowrez 1mo ago
Thats probably the kicker. I think about this some, also being myself a gemini chat mooch. How good will gemini be in a years time? Its great now but will there be an incentive at some point for it to become shit? Free tier is awesome now, but is it a loss leader? Training on my chats, maybe in a year my chats won't be worth the free access?

nsonha 1mo ago

Imagine someone making an indie router and sell it too you then the AI not be able to surface their doc

keybored 1mo ago

AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame. But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.

renegat0x0 1mo ago

I hate to break it to you, but we are at the start of enshittification circle. Once Gemini has monopoly you will reminisce with joy google search results.

lopis 1mo ago

That only works when there's an abundance of documentation for your specific device. The moment you're on a more recent version of something and have a weird issue, all hope is lots. You get stuck in loops because all LLMs keep recycling old advice that no longer applies. This problem will only get worse and worse as people no longer as questions on public forums, so answers are not publicly available either.

lnrd 1mo ago

That works now because there are human made sources that the AI can find and summarize for you. But now there are no incentives at all for humans to write anything on the internet and if they do the content will be buried by hallucinated content someone else posted at a larger scale. I had the similar experience to yours yesterday and it lead nowhere. Funnily enough I was also trying to configure a vpn on a router, google didn't return anything useful (besides a blog post clearly written by AI and with absolutely no information in it). Claude managed to give some interesting pointers, but its suggestions were not working and I also noticed that it started to hallucinate badly about ipv6 and gave me some suggestions that were just plain untrue. Claude Opus is smart, usually when it gets so convinced about something is after researching the internet and not just based on its training data. I wonder where it got so convinced about it. Maybe reading some other hallucinated blog post like the one I stumbled upon?

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
rnd33 1mo ago
Isn't this only a transitionary problem though? Right now, during the transition there is no incentive for humans to write anything, it will get drowned in AI slop. As time goes on, more and more people will recognize this problem and we'll develop new ways of measuring information quality and trustworthiness. Nothing about this problem is fundamental, it's just that we're in the middle of a very chaotic transition.

DrScientist 1mo ago

Yep - it's awesome, the problem is that Google isn't sharing the revenue with the context creators anymore - over time, unless fixed, this will decimate the knowledge base it feeds on. > Oh, I should mention though. There was no advertising at all. They didn't make any money off me Are you sure about that? Even if you didn't see ads ( remember people pay even if you don't click - just like a billboard ) - they are still profiling you to better sell you ads in the future, and using your interaction as free training data.

cowboylowrez 1mo ago
Yeah I mooch gemini off of google but they've def made a few cents from me via ads. Also apparently I'm a rarity because I don't run ad blocking (except firefox itself does a bit according to a few websites). Its a very good deal for me though.

mvanbaak 1mo ago

While I understand that you feel good as you got the device configured, you would have been better off without gemini. The 'old' way as you call it would have resulted in you knowing the backgrounds and the inner workings of your router, making maintaining it a breeze and helps you actually understand your setup. Besides that, it would probably trigger you to rethink some of the things you now blindly have implemented because gemini did not show alternatives nor reasoning behind it. (something that most definitely would have been documented on the source pages)