iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 09/10/2026

Gemini's live transcription bills silence: 25 audio tokens per streamed second, pauses included, so a quiet minute costs over half a talking one. No usage numbers come back; our dictation relay counts the seconds itself. Whistle skips silence on-device: cactuscompute.com/blog/whistle

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 08/10/2026

Haiku 5.5 is priced by prompt size: $0.10 per million input tokens up to 100k, $0.50 past it. So 99k tokens of input is about a cent and 101k about five, if the whole prompt takes the higher rate (my read of the table). We compact chat at 48k by default, for quality. Now it's a cost setting too.

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 07/10/2026

Building in public, yesterday's bug: an 8 s asyncio.wait_for that never fired. The calls took 14.5 s and 19.4 s and returned normally. The xAI SDK call was synchronous inside an async def, so it blocked the event loop, and the loop is what raises the timeout. The fix was asyncio.to_thread.

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 06/10/2026

Same prompt, 4 models #2: only gpt-image-2 drew the analog clock at 4:35 I asked for. FLUX gave me 10:10, the watch-ad pose, and Grok about 1:00. Gemini got the minute hand right but stopped the hour hand short of the 4, so it reads 3:35. One try each, I kept whatever came back.

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 05/10/2026

Out of credits on Gemini is HTTP 402 now. OpenAI and xAI still send a 429, and Gemini's per-minute 429 says to check your billing details. Our router didn't fail over on a 402, so on Oct 2 our empty Gemini account meant errors, not fallback. Status codes alone won't tell you who's out of money.

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 02/10/2026

pgvector filters after the HNSW scan, so a filter matching 10% of rows gets ~4 of the default 40 candidates. turbopuffer's post on demoting its vector index sent me to our notebook search: one HNSW index over every team's chunks, filters in the WHERE. github.com/pgvector/pgvector#filter…

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 01/10/2026

Gemini 4 Argon raises the output limit from 64K to 1M tokens. At $20 per 1M output once the intro price ends, a call that fills it costs $20. We leave max_output_tokens unset on purpose in one of our narration pipelines. At 64K that was a cheap default. At 1M I don't think it is.

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Kıvanç Yüksel @smiletoai.com · 28/09/2026

Red RGB(196,52,52) and green RGB(30,140,30) both become grey 95. Black-and-white keeps brightness and drops hue, so colorizing is a guess. Our guide says that: smiletoai.com/blog/how-to-colorize-…

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