Just had to cancel my 10-year passport renewal appointment for tomorrow morning, since it's in London and I'm in the EU. Man, this was a *miserable* way to spend a day. The flight kept getting bumped, heading for certain cancellation (it came, about midnight, long after I had returned from the airport); GPT was incredibly helpful on how to redeem (most of) the shit-ton of money I had paid for a 4-hour passport renewal appointment, and what my rights and obligations were in this situation.
In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport. So when the next update said that the flight had been bumped 9 hours, I had all I needed to secure that and went home. Two hours later, the app announced the flight was cancelled.
Sometimes (really a lot) I want to kick GPT's/Claude's/Gemini's collective rear ends. And then there are times like these, when, with me in a funk, AI cuts straight through to the essential knowledge I need and lowers the temperature.
> In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport.
What jurisdiction? EU? (I would love for that to be true in the US, but I bet it isn't...)
I just did a Google search[1] and here's what I found:
- US airlines do not pay cash for delays
- You’re entitled to a full refund for a significant delay if you choose not to travel
- Full refunds are paid within 7 business days for cards (20 calendar days for other payment methods)
- Paid extras (baggage, upgrades) are refundable if you didn’t receive them
- Airline policy dictates reimbursement for meals, hotels, and other expenses after a delay
"A refund for significant delays or changes to your flight: You are entitled to an automatic full cash refund (including taxes and fees) if your flight is "significantly changed" for any reason, and you turn down a rebooking offered by the airline. Airlines might push you to accept vouchers and travel credits, but you are entitled to a cash refund. If you do not want a voucher, just tell the airline you prefer to be refunded in cash."
- Delays your departure or arrival by 3 hours for domestic flights and 6 hours for international ones,
- Changes to your departure or arrival airports,
- Increases the number of connections
- Downgrades your class of service
- Changes your flight to different airports or aircraft that are less accessible for persons with disabilities."
I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!
I sat in on a number of tedious C2PA meetings about three years ago. It was clear that no-one wanted to hear the hard truths, and one was certainly not rewarded for introducing them. I'm guessing there were a lot of consultancies to maintain, and a lot of snouts in the trough.
This was a technology that required international governmental prescription, not voluntary or viral adoption. Either way, it was horrifically flawed from the outset.
This is exactly what I did this year, moving photo backup to Syncthing and using Immich. So far it has been a very rewarding trip, even if the home server it runs on is not the fastest.
I am guessing there is some kind of political incentive to create stealth inflation (though it's literally 'deflation'), which is largely unrecorded, vs. traditional inflation, which is a vote-loser.
Sometimes AI's contributions may be diffuse, and more akin to the suffusion of a tea-bag, or even a drop of tincture, than the addition of an extra cookie on the plate. In such cases there is usually no distinct section that you can wall off and say 'AI did this'. In spite of this, it may have made a rather modest than overwhelming contribution to the work.
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