My feeling seems to be getting validated. Offlate GPT 5.5 seems to be more precise and to the point, whereas Opus 4.7 is verbose, not in bad way, but still is kind of distracting. This aligns with the report finding where they say Opus 4.7 looks at 'surrounding enviornment' and bring in those aspect during task completion.
Wiggling the mouse is what people do involuntarily when the computer isn’t working right. They are setting themselves up for Gemini to be the uninvited Clippy, except this will send everything you are working on to Google to harvest data from.
The video they show (which is probably exaggerated by cutting out LLM generation time) is pretty sci-fi. I don't know how it works in practice, but it looks fun to try out. If this could run locally, I'd love to have a feature like that.
Most people don't really seem to care about data collection when it comes to AI usage. A lot of people who will feed Gemini/ChatGPT/Bing/Claude/shady clusters across the internet for bargain bin prices/Mistral every detail of their lives will probably be fine with Gemini as long as it doesn't interfere unnecessarily.
It probably works similar to how Gemini works in Android for a while now.
You can point or select anywhere on the screen and it understands and searches the context. If you select a text block, even text inside an image, it allows to copy or search the text online. Otherwise it can search the image.
I use it often. It's intuitive and fast even on non-flagship phones.
I'd wager their A/B tests went well enough to warrant a port from phones to their new "Chromebook".
Their video is completely different from what Gemini does now. It analyses mouse movements, like circling around things, underlining things with the mouse, pointing at things to indicate where they need to go. It's a lot like the interfaces you might see in sci-fi movies, where generic gestures are understood within context in a way that modern computers can't handle.
> circling around things, underlining things with the mouse
Do we use the same Android Gemini assistant?
Because the one I use does that and it has object detection smart enough to be intuitive. It usually gets it right when I point something on the screen. And when it doesn't, I can circle around the thing or just click again.
This Instagram post for example, it automatically highlighted the entire person, but I wanted to know about the shoes. I then clicked once on the shoes and it knew exactly what I wanted and gave me the info in about 2 seconds:
Google's Gemini features differ per region to a massive extent. There's a good chance privacy laws prevent Google from providing me with the same Gemini you use.
Object detection is mediocre at best. Circling things and using their AI editing features works, but the artefacts confuse Lens and other image parsing systems. Extracting objects from images usually mostly works, but it's not on par with what Apple had long before Google built it.
The difference remains that the Gemini app on Android requires activation. You cannot tap a button or click a link while you're on the Gemini screen.
It's an absolute privacy nightmare for most people, but if we ever get enough RAM and compute to run this stuff locally, I think this can actually make a new paradigm for user interaction, something with lisp machine self-customisability but for people who don't know anything about computers.
And if it doesn't work, it'll be the most horrific, messy, useless UI humanity has ever invented, and we all get a new funny meme to laugh about Google. Win-win!
If you buy the Google Gemini AI Agentic Laptop or whatever they will market this as, you're going to want to try AI. What else is the point of buying a Chromebook, as nice and slick as it may look, when similar or even better alternatives exist.
It is deliberately designed for maximum accidental invocations so the managers and execs behind it can claim the large user numbers in their promo packets.
Oh my goodness, the use cases are so… badly conceived:
> If a friend sends you a picture on your phone and you need to email it from your laptop, the file is just there — no need to email it to yourself.
So are there really people who will email a photo to themselves from their phone to… send the photo in an email?
Interesting to note that there is no mention of processor or operating system in that post. I’m guessing that it’s Android in a laptop form factor which I suppose might be something that some people would want, but I’m not one of them.
Getting files on and off of a phone is shockingly hard. Shockingly. It's even worse on an iPhone, if you don't have a mac. To get my photos from my iPhone to my PC, I had to first upload them to iCloud and then download them again. My phone and computer are, like, a foot away from each other but I had to send the photos across the country to some server and back just to look at them.
Everyone emails themself stuff, that's normal. The weird part is how often will you ever need to email it specifically from your laptop, but it's already on your phone? If it's on your phone and you need to email it to someone, couldn't you just email from your phone?
Have you tried using the Gmail app? It's missing a whole bunch of features. For example, you can't even insert hyperlinks with custom text. For images, I often don't want to send an image at its full resolution. Rescaling images is a task that's much easier to do on a laptop.
Oh, I use use AirDrop to myself for this. Yes, given my photo library syncs to iCloud, just opening Photos seems like it makes sense on a fast WAN which I sort-of do have, but of course, iCloud syncs only happen when the device decides the mood is just right, and can't be triggered manually, because I guess that would just be 'clutter' in the UI.
What drives me absolutely nuts about AirDrop is that it's only device-to-device even if devices are on the same WAN.
My wife and I have home offices at opposite sides of the house with hardwired desktops and Wi-fi APs, but we can't AirDrop to each other as we're out of range for it.
Photos taken on iPhone are automatically synchronized with iCloud.. I guess you can just go to iCloud.com and download them on your PC?
If you want to send a photo to your friend from your iPhone, just click on the photo and click the "share" button, then you have many options, including sending it via Email..
The synchronization is opaque - more than once I checked for photos and they weren't uploaded yet. Also downloading stuff is very, very slow compared to wired transfers, and logging into Apple anything on your web browser is a huge pain in the ass.
That's mostly an iPhone problem. Plugging in an Android phone still works, and wireless exchange with QuickShare also works on most devices. With Google reverse engineering Airdrop, I hope they can get the Android <-> macOS experience to finally work correctly soon as well.
Plugging in an iPhone still works as well, I plug my iPhone into my Windows PC and it pops up with the filesystem automatically in Explorer, and the photos are right there in the DCIM folder.
I've been using pairdrop.net (fork of snapdrop, which got bought out) a lot recently. Only needs a web browser on either end, and doesn't take any prepwork.
I remember in late 10s I could just connect my iPhone to a windows machine and the photos folder would be right there, mounted, with the typical iOS filenames for each picture. Is this a false memory? Maybe I was on a Mac and just forgot?
I'm super techy but I admit that I just use Signal to send me a "Note to self" whenever I need a file from my phone on my computer quickly. For images I just use immich, but texting myself is honestly the quickest way for files because the experience is indeed terrible.
My recent-ish experience with Android and video is that emailing video doesn't actually, you know, email the video, but rather links to it somewhere in Google's Cloud ... where the recipient cannot actually access it.
(There's a longer backstory, but this is, suffice to say, frustrating.)
They should have just said "USE it on your laptop", not email it.
I all the time use my phone as a camera (esp. for coin photography) than e-mail the photos to myself as the most convenient way to get them on my desktop where I can edit them with GIMP etc.
I just open photos.google.com and grab them. No need to fiddle on my phone.
When on wifi, the photo backup upload starts immediately. If it doesn't (possibly due to your settings, this used to be my issue) you can manually open the photos app and tap the backup now button.
I'm not sure if that's an option for me, since I'm not using the regular camera app - I'm using Halide which is better suited to macro (coin) photography.
Google Drive would be another option to transfer, but would be more work (about same to "share" as email, but less convenient to access on desktop).
The e-mail way is actually quite convenient since on the desktop you can just download all the photos you sent in one go - they appear as a zip file that you can then just extract to your working directory, rather than having to save one at a time.
I just found a free app that makes it even easier: LocalSend
You install this on your phone (iphone or android), as well as on your computer (linux, windows or mac), then you can send files directly between any of these as long a they are on the same local network.
You just select your photos, click on "share", then select LocalSend and it'll show you the list of destinations to choose from (wherever you are currently running LocalSend), click on one and you're done!
On the receiving side you can select the directory where files will be transferred to, and if you set "Quick Save" option to "Favorites" then you can make your phone a favorite to avoid being prompted whether you want to accept each file it is sending.
So, it's literally just: select photos, share->LocalSend, click on destination
It’s a poor example. Recently, I did have to email myself photos taken with my phone to access them on my laptop. Would be nice if they were automatically synced. It’s work phone and laptop so I could have gone through OneDrive or Box but just as inconvenient as email.
These are usually targeted at kids and newbies. My mom would 100% appreciate that feature for photos and pdfs. She still struggles with files on Windows and managing files are even less clear on chromebook.
Yeah I and i suspect a lot of others email myself little files all the time because surprisingly that's the most convenient way to get those files quickly from phone to laptop.
I do that all the time with my iPhone and my windows machine, sadly. Still not a particularly compelling feature, just speaks to how sad our modern ecosystem is.
I feel like very much not the target market for this. Tokyo Vintage Shopping Trip? LOL
I got mad when I bought a Chromebook thinking it was a cheap laptop I could install any OS on only to find it was boatloader locked and the model I bought hadnt been cracked yet. Say nothing of all of Google's recent practices with Android. This whole thing just sounds like the plague.
Looks like their Reddit post has a formatting error?
...as computing shifts from operating systems [to intelligence systems](TKTK)...
`[text](link)` is the syntax used to create a link. But since `TKTK` isn't a valid URI, it doesn't render a link. My guess is TKTK is placeholder and they were supposed to fill it in before posting on reddit... but forgot?
I haven't been around reddit much for a few years, but in the past at least, /r/android was one of the best tech communities on the internet. It was even better than the iPhone subs for iPhone discussion.
I mean if you think about it, the type of person to own an android phone and care enough about phones to join a community is pretty much guaranteed to only be a tech geek.
AI mouse pointer is definitely not something I wanted to think about today. A recent HN post implored vibe coders not to modify the mouse pointer and now we get this from Google.
> Example: Point at a date in an email to instantly set up a meeting, find good spots to meet up, or draft a reply.
This is actually a good use case for AI. My university sends a lot of newsletters with several events in free text format; all I want is to be able to select one of them, have an LLM parse the title, date, location, and category, and put it in my calendar.
Still, I'm sceptical this will work. Samsung phones supposedly have this same feature, and it works 1/10 of the times. Pasting it to ChatGPT and tell it to add the events to my calendar works fine, but the bottleneck is always the project managers in charge of the UI. Of course, having a small local model and being able to choose my own right-click items like I could in 1995 would be an actual solution.
Damn... ~1min in he verbally asks to put the 2 ingredients on the list.
Like... my dude that's way even slower than drag&drop the text on a light right next to it!
Same later on about changing the calendar appointment from whatever to 8pm... he is behind a desktop with a mouse, just input the number or click on the arrows to adjust.
I bet some people will mention that those are "just" simple to understand examples or that it's great for accessibility ... but it's not. It's not reliable enough for complex cases and not reliable enough for accessibility. So... yes JUST basic examples that are slower than other means.
PS: I did prototypes using voice and pointing in XR and yes that paradigm IS powerful, it's just being multimodal.
Strange article. Blanket statement that most Indians don't read since English books are not sold in large numbers. The 'Jaipur book festival' that the article refers to published the following stats..
Indian languages together accounted for roughly ~80% of titles published, with English making up a smaller share.
The Indian publishing industry is one of the most prominent publishing industries across the globe. Indian publishing industry at the second spot in the world (English publications) with approximately 19,000 publishing houses across the country publishing approximately 90,000 titles per year according to 2020-21 stats (Mallaya, 2016).
The EIBF International Bookselling Markets Report 2023 (EIBF Report, 2024) affirms that India is the sixth-largest book market in the world, and currently the second-largest market for books in English, right behind the United States. It also figures India’s current growth rate at 7%.
The CIA is definitely operating in Iran. Nobody reasonable will deny that. Mossad is too, guaranteed. How inflated their numbers are, I don't know, but even just the confirmed numbers of dead both officially and unofficially are too high.
At this point they need to split the country so people who want to live differently can do so. Maybe that would prevent needing to bomb the Iranian government into oblivion.
Splitting the country in two? Okay, but then you show them how to do it with YOUR country as example. I'm sure your freedom loving soul won't mind leading the way.
Our country is already split into a bunch of pieces, so that's easy. In the US, many people do move when they don't like the local policies and there are many different states to choose from that handle issues differently.
Most of the human rights organisation in Iran, cited heavily by western media, are backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which some countries (and some right-wing political organisations) believe is used by the CIA (if not funded and a front for it). Human Rights Activists in Iran is based in Fairfax, Virginia (where the CIA HQ is). (Apparently, they've received up to a million dollars in funding from the NED). The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI) has also been associated with the NED. The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) is also based in New York City and Washington, D.C, and also funded by the NED (according to the Chinese).
According to their website NED is based in washington dc. The CIA hq is not in fairfax, it is in Langley. Even if they were in the same city that is an incredibly weak argument. Custom ink (the shirt company) is also in fairfax. Are they a cia front too?
Langley is part of Fairfax County. Much of northern Virginia is unincorporated Census Designated Places within counties.
Additionally, a large portion of NGOs are based in Fairfax county due to the proximity to DC.
The NRA headquarters is in Fairfax, and Maria Butina lived down the road from the NRA headquarters.
A fun game to play is following the source. For instance, when events in Xiajiang were getting nonstop coverage, nearly every article that came out would cite either the adrian zenz paper or an NGO's article, which would cite the paper.
Sometimes you'd have to go a few NGO layers deep. I repeated this experiment a few dozen times, about half would lead to an office park in Fairfax County. One time it was an Australian NGO that had the US DoD as a sponsor.
There is an entire industry around intelligence laundering and consent manufacturing.
3 hours for 30 miles is probaby an error, or an exaggeration, but knowing the traffic on the Maryland side of that metro area, it really is quite bad..
What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?
One such example is James Leibold, a scholar of Xinjiang ethnic policy. He would report on Xiajiang and the claimed genocide. He is an australian. He worked for the Jamestown Foundation based in DC.
On the Board of Directors for the Jamestown Foundation is a man named Michael G Vickers, who was previously the Under Secretary of Defense for intelligence, and worked at the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan War(The one where the US funded the Mujahadeen who immediately began throwing grenades into schools for girls).
Vickers was even featured in the book, "Charlie Wilson's War", about Operation Cyclone and the events which would eventually lead to blowback via 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the second Iraq war.
This is just one example. Any time you see articles like this, follow the sources. They either wont cite anything, or will cite a thinktank/NGO staffed by career intelligence workers and funded by similar groups.
> What part? NGO/thinktanks operating within a 30 minute drive to the nation's capital?
That is a pedestrian fact. Any organization seeking influence in Washington will be located in Washington. This provides zero evidence that Washington pulls its strings or otherwise directs it.
Your whole screed is irrelevant. It gives no evidence regarding Iran Int'l.
The NED is a CIA-cut out says the New York Times: "The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades"[1].
They are right to ask for a source. I should provide them more often, if possible with statements coming straight out of the horse's mouth. These days, our politicians are so cocky they tend to announce to the whole world their conspiracies.
> I'm almost certain that you'll hear in the upcoming earnings reports that big tech sent ..billions in advance payment to secure memory supply years from now.
And this would be no different than investing billions in R&D (Ex. Meta and AR) for future payouts.
Or, Apple buying 10000 advance CNC machines for their manufacturer. In this case timeline for future payout is perhaps much shorter but the pertinent point will be Apple invested in Capex upfront.
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