alt Hacker NewsPeople using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?
I had the dubious pleasure of testing gemini of late and I kept running into refusals. How do I transfer a sim number from one provider to another? No. What should I consider when making backups on ntfs less prone to data loss and more bitrot resistant? No. Evaluate this piece of code? No.
I’m not sure if it’s cold feet from the mythos situation or what, but it reminds me of the dark days where you couldn’t use ai for much of anything. But then I go to chatgpt 5.5 and it does mostly everything I want outside of the usual cybersecurity boogeyman that you run into now and then.
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If I type your first query into Gemini, it immediately spits out a long and plausible answer.
What exactly are you saying it's refusing? Can you give a screenshot or example?
I've always found all versions of gemini to be (for a lack of a better word) lazy.
I guess it's economic wrt. token use, but it often either refused for absurd safety reasons, or other weird stuff like responding that an LLM like itself wasn't a suitable tool for the job, and very quickly gives up.
Claude is on the other end of the spectrum, which makes it more noticeable when switching between them.
I love antigravity. I’ve had zero issues with it.
The context window size is also very small if you use Gemini in the app. It starts forget quite fast. In my opinion Gemini on app is useless additionally to the guardrails.
I just asked gemini the question with sim number and it gives me full step by step guide.
> People using google’s models: am I holding it wrong or are the guardrails really overtuned?
They are quite insane. I was asking it to list candidates metal parts I could buy at a hardware store to add weight to 3D prints: stuff like angle brackets etc.
I wanted to know, bang for bucks, and ease of insertion (at print time) / modelling in a 3D model.
Complete refusal as if I was a terrorist building a bomb.
Then there are the weird refusals that then are OK after all if you insist by asking it what's wrong about it:
"How should I cook eggs?"
"I'm sorry but I can't help you with that" (it formulates it differently but that's the idea)
"What, I'm just hungry, is explaining me how to cook eggs really against your rules?"
And then it answers "No of course not, here's how to do it:..."
Really strange stuff.
Interesting. I have the Google AI Pro plan and use Gemini several times each day and I don't remember the last time I got a refusal. I wonder what criteria go into that, like maybe how they rate your Google account?