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Tag: Gemini

  • Week 7.26

    Week 7.26

    One of my irrational fears that hasn’t gone away with growing older is that of going to the dentist. I’ve put it off over and over, and was pretty sure I’d make it last year but didn’t. I’ve done my best to handle things at home, even flossing daily which they always say you should do but I’m convinced no one actually does. This week I finally made an appointment to go, and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. They did find a cavity that needs patching up, but the appointment for that is only in a couple of months.

    One thing that felt off was a recommendation that I get a certain procedure done — not only because I’d like to avoid pain wherever possible, but because it was prescribed before they’d even looked in my mouth. I’d only just said that it was my first visit in a while, and they said ‘okay you should get this done’.

    Because it’s 2026, I uploaded my x-rays to Gemini 3 Pro for a second opinion. It analyzed the scans confidently (but of course) and told me the same things, but in even greater detail. It did not think the procedure was necessary, and gave me clarifying questions to ask the dentist next time. When it comes to a nervous person like me, it provided a better experience than a human dentist could because it was available to answer my many more follow-up questions, at all hours. This longer “consultation” made me feel better, although I’m well aware that taking medical advice from a machine that just says things isn’t the smartest move. But I know people do and will because it’s really easy, and so once again I’m saying this is really dangerous territory.

    Why am I using Gemini so much, and what happened to Claude? Google decided to play dirty, I guess. They’re offering three months of their Pro AI plan (essentially Google One with 2TB of storage + access to Gemini Pro, Nano Banana Pro, and Veo) at a 90% discount. That’s about S$2.80 a month. These models are all so incredibly close in raw performance, that for someone like me who’s not using them for coding, the main differences are down to tone, character, and perhaps ethical alignment. I’m already sold on Claude for text-based work, but I thought I should spend some time getting a feel for how Gemini differs. Especially since it’s going to be at the heart of Apple’s AI features at some point this year.

    Friend and former colleague Rob is back in town for Chinese New Year. I thought I’d last seen him maybe two or three years ago, but it’s actually somehow been closer to four. The quickening pace of time’s slipping through the fingers at this age is alarming. The last time he was around, I’d just printed off some stickers of my Misery Men drawings and given him one. I had just gone back to work after my brief sabbatical. We were still wearing masks indoors (as seen in the linked post’s featured photo). Is there a German word for how relationships can pause and park themselves outside of regular time, so that four years feels like so much less?

    A few of us met up for craft beers and Thai food on Sunday, with the reminiscing and catching up going past midnight. Here’s a privacy-preserving photo-turned-courtroom sketch made with Gemini’s help.

    Media activity

    • I finished watching all 48 episodes of The Apothecary Diaries anime series on Netflix. It’s about an unusually educated girl, raised in a red light district, who gets kidnapped and sold to the imperial palace as an indentured maid where she gets to flex her skill with poisons and medicines. It’s set in a fictional country resembling China in the Tang Dynasty. Nothing about this should appeal to me, but it was one of the more enjoyable low-stakes shows I’ve seen recently.
    • I still haven’t finished reading Sleeping Dogs. But I did finish playing The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case a few weeks ago but forgot to say so. As a faithful remake of a retro game, it can’t be blamed for some of the dated gameplay. The art could definitely be better though — it would be a fine game for $20, but unfortunately is priced at $44.99.
    • It’s been a year since we were in Tokyo and I bought the Japanese supernatural murder mystery game Paranormasight, largely because it was set in the Ryogoku/Sumida district where our apartment was. In last week’s Nintendo Direct, a sequel was announced and so I decided it was finally time to get started on the original. It’s turned out to be quite good, with a dynamic visual presentation that goes beyond the usual VN style of talking figures in front of different backgrounds. The gameplay is constantly breaking the fourth wall as well: one challenge where you die after hearing a cursed sound is solved by going into settings and turning the volume down.
    • While feeling stressed out about the dentist, I played Jusant on the PS5. It’s a beautiful, dialogue-free game where you slowly climb a massive mountain and put together what happened to the people who used to live on it. It was fairly quick to finish and now I’m curious about Cairn, another game about scaling a mountain, albeit more realistic about the physical difficulties involved. Jusant’s nameless hero is practically superhuman and his arms are way too skinny for the insane amount of climbing he has to do.
  • Week 4.26

    Week 4.26

    Trump spoke at the WEF in Davos, and we watched it live despite wanting to turn it off many times. I intermittently tuned into Bloomberg TV over the week to try and keep up with all the repercussions. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and the memory of watching last year’s Davos coverage came back clearly — has it really been a year? Time flies when you’re watching chaos porn.

    My main accomplishment for the week, in which admittedly little else happened, was acting on an impulse to make a sardine-themed t-shirt. If you were here back in Weeks 49 and 50 of 2025, you’d know they’re kind of my current food obsession.

    How sad I was, then, to discover that canned fish has actually become a trendy thing now. Read this piece on the Taste Cooking site about how it’s hit the mainstream and now faces a backlash. It turns out that Big Sardine has been aggressively courting women. See the pretty illustrated boxes and tins coming out of Portugal and from new brands like Fishwife; they’re perfect for social media. As a result, prices for what was once a humble working man’s lunch are soaring.

    Sidebar: As a man on the internet, you have a non-zero chance of being targeted for red-pill radicalization by algorithms, and it’s something I try to be hyperaware of and on the lookout for on platforms like Twitter. Despite that, at one point this week I was told by friends that I’d said something borderline manosphere-y. It was an observation that dating someone older and wealthier in your 20s could lead to lingering lifestyle inflation (spending above your means, simplistically) after you broke up with them. And seeing how women date older more often than men, I thought it might be another reason for the statistical gap between men and women’s retirement savings (alongside lower wages, caregiving duties, parenting). I just want to record this observation in case you notice me starting to blame women for all of society’s ills.

    But back to the t-shirt I was talking about. I had the idea to draw a sprat, which is a species of fish commonly grouped under the sardine umbrella. I wanted to place it under with its Latin scientific name, Sprattus sprattus, on a black tee. I also had a mental image of what the lettering would look like, and managed to bring it to life with my own two hands (and an iPad). I’ve ordered a couple of shirts from a print-on-demand service for myself and Kim, thinking that maybe if they looked good and I felt like having more problems in life, then I could try selling some online.

    As soon as I had that thought, I got excited and started mocking up a product page. I had a defunct Etsy store for my Misery Men project, so I renamed it “Maison Misery” to serve as a brand for all of this as-yet unrealized merchandise.

    Next, I wrote up some funny copy for the sprat shirt, and then decided to put Gemini through its paces as an assistant copywriter to improve it. I wanted to spend more time with Gemini given this week’s rumor that Apple might not only use Google’s technology for the Apple Foundation Models powering New Siri, but also for an integrated chatbot debuting in this year’s OS updates.

    And yeah, it’s really not looking good for junior copywriters. Five seconds after being given the brief, Gemini came back with three options that made me laugh and then compliment it with “Fuck me, these aren’t bad!” Now, each one wasn’t really usable on its own, but there was enough there that I could cobble together a good result along with what I’d already written. And that’s really all a creative director wants a junior employee to do: produce a range of half-formed ideas to pick through and refine. Unfortunately for humans, the fastest and cheapest LLMs today can already do that for things like product descriptions. And they’ll be running locally on your iPhone by the end of the year. This would be great technology if we had a shortage of copywriters, but instead we have a surplus, all looking for work.

    But since I’m the writer Maison Misery is replacing with AI, it’s okay? Here’s the augmented final writeup that I’ll put next to this t-shirt.

    At Maison Misery, we believe in celebrating the small things — mostly because the big things are too overwhelming to think about. Enter the sprat or brisling: a tiny fish harvested in its delicate youth, then tucked into cozy tins of extra virgin olive oil to dream of the Portuguese coast. These are the fancy ones you bring out to impress a date you’ve just brought home. If they don’t like the ‘deenz’, then that’s a bullet dodged.

    This original tee pays homage to Sprattus sprattus with a hand-illustrated and lettered design placed over the heart, providing a conversation starter for marine biologists and a conversation stopper for everyone else. It’s a way to wear your passion for canned sardines on your sleeve, though technically we put it on the chest because sleeve printing is prohibitively expensive and we have a lifestyle to maintain.

    Media activity

    • Netflix pushed the show His & Hers onto us last week, claiming it was an “addictive” thriller. I say give it a miss, because I can’t remember a damned thing about it today. Instead, their self-declared “top tier” thriller The Beast In Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is a much better production. We finished it over the weekend, and while it’s no timeless classic, I’d agree it’s what you would find on the upper shelves if Netflix were a Blockbuster.
    • I watched the French animated film, Mars Express (2023) and came away very entertained. It’s a sci-fi story about robot/AI rights, a murder that defies the Three Laws, uploaded consciousness, and so on, borrowing from many existing works while having enough original ideas to justify itself. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and doesn’t seem to have gotten wider attention since. Check it out if you can find it.
    • We also finally saw Brendan Fraser in Rental Family (2025), a Japan-through-American-eyes sort of film that doesn’t come close to capturing Lost In Translation’s magic, but has enough heart to reward your time. Fraser plays a down and out actor living in Tokyo who falls into a job playing stand-ins for people who need to tell white lies. Except some of them are kinda gray. I appreciated how the film leans into the moral ickiness of these assignments and rejects smoothing them over completely.
    • I swore I wouldn’t buy any records this week, and lord it was hard. J Dilla’s Donuts album went on “Limited Time Sale” on Amazon, dropping about $15, but I still didn’t cave! It’s in my cart, though. Instead I played some vintage cuts from my dad’s collection: War’s The World is a Ghetto and Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 with the New York Philharmonic.
    • If you want to know how close AI-generated music is getting to turning out radio-friendly bops, check out this album I came across by Japanese technologist Tom Kawada. I don’t think many people would realize what it was if they heard it in the background of a store, or a movie scene, or their own living rooms.
    • Then, to restore your faith in the messiness of human artistry, watch the new HBO Music Box documentary, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? It covers the creation of their first two albums with a focus on Adam Duritz’s struggles with fame and mental illness. AI will probably write a chart-topping hit this decade, but can it ever write A Long December?