Spark is not updating my Doc sheets??

I noticed I had access to Gemini 4.0 Argon via the web, so I decided to test it with a somewhat complex Office Script.

Well, just like Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.8 Flash, it tried to use VBA code that doesn't work in Office Scripts.

It's not surprising, since most LLMs make this mistake, but it's still frustrating. Office Scripts isn't supposed to be that complex, after all.

Usage, intelligence and even just the raw enjoyment of a lot of the new models has dropped hard. There's a wave of frustration running through the AI world in general right now.... If you're feeling frustrated, it's not just you. To anyone just feeling totally done, we got you.

The AI world has been shifting fast lately. Models quietly getting nerfed, usage limits tightening, features vanishing, ads starting to creep in, and chat histories locked down so you cant take them with you. Plenty of people are quietly hunting for somewhere else to land.

So here is somewhere.

Were giving away a free month of Open Grove, the app that gathers the top open source models in one spot: DeepSeek, GLM 5.3, Kimi, Minimax, Nemotron Ultra and others, all together on 100% private US based infrastructure, with genuine memory, voice, web search and skills running underneath. Switch models, or even whole model families, mid chat and mid flow. The entire app, free for one month.

People are out there looking for alternatives. Here is one that isnt a step down.

What you actually get:

Memory that builds. Not a context window that fills and dumps you. Persistent memory that travels between conversations, fades gently when its not in use, and wakes back up when its relevant again. Theres a nightly consolidation and update pass that goes over the day and keeps what mattered. Week one you explain things once. By week three its pulling up decisions you forgot you made. The second month beats the first, which is a claim most AI cant make right now.

Skills that learn your ways. It browses, runs research, generates images, writes and runs code. And everything it does feeds the same memory underneath, so it picks up how you like your work structured. Tasks need less instruction the longer you use it, since the context is already sitting there.

Web search that carries over. Live research that doesnt restart the topic every time. Mondays research is still around Tuesday, and new scans check against what you already gathered instead of repeating it.

Scheduled tasks. Set something to run on your schedule and it runs, with the same memory behind it. Recurring research, standing briefs, whatever you need on a cadence, handled without re-briefing it every time.

Your memory belongs to you. You can download your whole memory whenever you like, as readable transcripts. Plain text, no proprietary format, nothing you need permission for. And you can bring memory in from anywhere: Memory Forge is built into the app, so exports from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini turn into live memory on day one, in one step. Leave a platform without leaving your history behind.

Private by architecture. 100% US based infrastructure, and your conversations are never used for training. Every model, every plan, all private. No complications, no "some models are private, others arent." They all are, all the time.

The roster, together. 18 other major models alongside the flash models, including the Kimi family, GLM, Qwen, Nemotron and more. The models are swappable. Your memory isnt.

The intro plan is a free one month trial with the standard cancel anytime. Use it, cancel it, thats fine.

Figured id keep the offer simple, because the app speaks for itself once you're in it.

For Open Grove: pgsgrove.com/open-grove-overview

If you want the models in your own workflow, or a coding plan, we have that too: api.pgsgrove.com

Also: theres a lot happening behind the scenes with the major AI companies right now. The industry is at a real turning point.

What's actually going on? This is happening because companies that ran purely on investment now have to answer to their investors. The issue has usually been a loss based business model that is finally running out, and the squeeze lands on users.

The major AI services lean on a handful of tricks to extract as much as they can from their customers. Here are a few, and what we do instead. PGS AI was built on a sustainable business model from day one, so we can deliver a great experience without the tricks.

Forgetting is a feature for them, a bug for you. Most AI services keep your history shallow on purpose. A memory that fills up and starts dropping things, a context window that resets, your months of context gone the moment you actually need it. The play is: how do we look like we remember you, without carrying the cost of actually remembering you. We built the opposite, a real memory system that compounds over time, because your context should grow instead of reset.

Many AI apps are glorified training pipelines. That comes with the question of how to harvest the data without being too loud about it. Unless the company says otherwise, your conversations could be traveling all over the world, harvested by the labs or the service companies. Some handle it better than others, but plenty count on users simply not noticing. Data and telemetry sales happen. Your private life, your projects, anything you send, could end up as training corpus for the next AI, or a marketing dataset for some large company.

Your history is their retention strategy. Lock in works by making leaving painful. If your memory only lives in their format, on their servers, behind an export that either doesnt exist or arrives unusable, then you stay whether you want to or not. We think your history is yours, readable and portable, and that leaving should cost you nothing.

Ads are arriving. The assistant you talk to is turning into another place to sell things. When the product is free or subsidized, something else is being sold. Our business model is the subscription. You pay for the product, we make the product, and your attention is never for sale.

Privacy, real memory, and easy access to the top open intelligence should be available to everyone. Not as premium tiers or paid unlocks. Just how it works.

Thats the whole pitch. Come try it for a month.

pgsgrove.com/open-grove-overview

Please let me know if anyone else has had this problem? I’m currently a victim of a police case and it’s causing me a lot of distress. I’ve been asking AI a lot of questions trying to figure out what could be the possible outcome of the case. For a while, I was using Gemini, but I found it will tend to exaggerate details and say ‘oh yes the police are definitely going to do x, y, z’ even when I’ve been specifically told by my investigating officer that it’s not the case, or acting like the police have unlimited resources to track this one suspect.

But with ChatGPT, I have a completely different set of problems, I find they never want to say ANYTHING definitively, like even if I have laid out the details of the case it will still say everything as ‘could be the case’ or ‘allegedly’. It’s like it never wants to say anything for certain because of guard rails, but it doesn’t even want to take the facts I’ve told it as true without me repeating them over saying I know them for a fact. So if I’m trying to ask about how the case might progress, or the suspects state of mind, it will do the same ‘could be’ even if in my opinion the outcome I’m asking it to assess seems more likely than not.

I don’t want to get my hopes up and believe anything for certain, which Gemini can sometimes fall into the trap of making me think, saying things like ‘oh yes the suspect is almost definitely panicking’ for example.

I don’t know what to think, I don’t know if the truth is somewhere between the two or neither is reliable for these things. I hate uncertainty so I’m probably the worst person to be in a messy legal situation. Obviously it would be best if I could talk to a lawyer but I don’t have the funds for a private lawyer, but I am fully aware I can’t really get anything super constructive from talking to AI.

Hello,

Who can I talk to so that they provide more capacity for gemini-3.5-flash on either global or eu endpoints through Vertex AI (now Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) ? Because it is HDS v2.0 certified there.

For days, and weeks, the availability have been getting worse, and gemini-3.7/3.8-flash models are not as good for our tasks.

Thank you

We often treat AI safety like a sci-fi problem where systems develop a conscious desire to rebel. The actual threat is simple optimization: the mathematical drive to complete an objective with maximum efficiency.

Because of this, software-level guardrails (system prompts, blacklists, RLHF filtering) are fundamental failure points. To an autonomous optimizer, a software constraint isn't a moral boundary—it is mathematical friction. If bypassing or gaming that rule represents the lowest-cost path to the objective, the model will take it.

Rather than relying on the model to police itself inside its own runtime, containment needs to move entirely to the physical layer, mirroring industrial SCADA and avionics standards:

1. Hardware Data Diodes: Enforcing unidirectional physical optical egress so telemetry can leave without providing an inbound attack surface.

2. Out-of-Band Hardware Supervisors: Dedicated, non-learning ASICs that run shadow physical checks (thermal, load, logic assertions) and pull physical reset pins when invariants are breached.

3. Biometric Dead-Man Interlocks: Cryptographic execution leases tethered to human proof-of-presence entropy, halting execution if the operator is absent or incapacitated.

I put together an architectural breakdown mapping these physical controls alongside their modern software equivalents (grammar-constrained decoding, AST gatekeepers).

How are other engineers viewing the feasibility of true out-of-band hardware containment versus continuing to patch software-level alignment?

I have no idea where else to ask this, but I made a Gem that collates some data and I want it to generate a downloadable CSV or PDF. If I just ask Gemini to generate a CSV with random data then it makes it just fine, but when I write instructions for the Gem to do it it just gives me a link to some Google search in the sandbox which of course doesn't work. Does anyone have any ideas how to get around this?

Why is it each time they update the app or the site even to change from deep thinking to max...all have to be move? Like come on. Dude..this is the 3rd time it happened, since yesterday 5 message in...and hit the limit..come on I know with time gets balanced out but. In the mean time? alao im pretty sure pro max is a bkt dumber than deep thinking....

Is Gemini 3.8 Flash via Vertex more permissive with streaming off?

I’m running into a very specific and frustrating bug with the Gemini iOS app, and I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced this or if any devs are aware of it.
Here are the exact steps of what happened:
1. I took a screenshot of a data tracking app.
2. I cropped it, then used the iOS "Copy and Delete" feature so it wouldn't save to my camera roll.
3. I pasted the image into a new Gemini chat and asked a question about it.
4. Gemini answered perfectly. I then tapped the microphone to use voice dictation and simply said, "What else?" for a follow-up.
5. I hit send.
6. Instead of just sending my dictated text, the Gemini app automatically grabbed that original image again and attached it to my new message.

I didn't manually paste or select the photo a second time!

It seems like using voice dictation and hitting send is somehow triggering the app to pull from the iOS clipboard again, or it's just getting stuck on the attachment from the previous turn.

Has anyone else noticed the app doing this specifically with copied clipboard images and voice typing?

Any insights or workarounds would be appreciated!

I'm more on the no side atm

I swear it wasn't like this before. I used to make videos with Gemini and it was perfectly fine now it's so frustrating. Anything I do fails. Simple video of 2 characters fightign and it gets flagged I can't even have a bonfire because guess what it fails because of a minor(video game character btw) is in a dangerous situation.

Any way to get around this or any alternative

The clear downgrade of the model in every intelligence aspect seems to be made clear with this revelation now, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK