Yesterday I asked Chat GPT which was the Japanese Twin City for Venice (Italy).
This was just a quick offhand question because I needed the answer for a post on IG, so not exactly a death or life situation.
Answer: Kagoshima.
It also added that the "twin status" was officially set in 1965, and that Kagoshima was the starting point for the Jesuit Missionary Alessandro Valignano in his attempt to proselitize Japanese people (to Catholicism, and also about European Culture).
I never heard of Kagoshima, so I googled for it. And discovered it is the twin city of Neaples :/
So I then googled for "Venice Japanese Twin City" and got: Hiroshima.
I doublechecked this then I went back to ChatGPT and wrote:
"Kagoshima is the Twin City for Neaples.".
This triggered a websearch and finally it wrote back:
"You are right, Kagoshima is Twin City of Neaples since 1960."
Then it added "Regarding Venice instead, the twin city is Hiroshima, since 2023".
So yeah, a Library of Alexandria that you can count on as long as you have another couple of libraries to doublechek whatever you get from it.
Note also that this was very straightforward question, there is nothing to "analyze" or "interpret" or "reason about".
And yet the answer was completely wrong, the first date was incorrect even for Neaples (actually the ceremony was in May 1960) and the extra bits about Alessandro Valignano are not reported anywhere else: Valignano was indeed a Jesuit and he visited Japan multiple times, but Kagoshima is never mentioned when you google for him or if you check his wikipedia page.
You may understand how I remain quite skeptical for any application which I consider "more important than an IG title".
> Venice, Italy does not appear to have a Japanese twin city or sister city. While several Japanese cities have earned the nickname "Venice of Japan" for their canal systems or waterfront architecture, there is no formal sister city relationship between Venice and any Japanese city that I could find in the available information
I am Italian, and I have some interest in Japanese history/culture.
So when I saw a completely unknown city I googled it up because I was wondering what it actually had in common with Venice (I mean, a Japanese version of Venice would be a cool place to visit next time I go to Japan, no?).
If I wanted to know, I dunno, "What is the Chinese Twin City for Buenos Aires" (to mention two countries I do not really know much about, and do not plan to visit in the future) should I trust the answer? Or should I go looking it up somewhere else? Or maybe ask someone from Argentina?
My point is that even as a "digital equivalent of the Library of Alexandria" LLM seem to be extremely unreliable. Therefore - at least for now - I am wary about using them for work, or for any other area where I really care for the quality of the result.
If I want facts that I would expect the top 10 Google results to have, I turn search on. If I want a broader view of a well known area, I turn it off. Sometimes I do both and compare. I don’t rely on model training memory for facts that the internet wouldn’t have a lot of material for.
40 for quick. 40 plus search for facts. O4-mini high plus search for “mini deep research”, where it’ll hit more pages, structure and summarise.
And I still check the facts and sources to be honest. But it’s not valueless. I’ve searched an area for a year and then had deep research find things I haven’t.
Yup. The difference is particularly apparent with o3, which does bursts of web searches on its own whenever it feels it'll be helpful in solving a problem, and uses the results to inform its own next steps (as opposed to just picking out parts to quote in a reply).
(It works surprisingly well, and feels mid-way between Perplexity's search and OpenAI's Deep Research.)
I asked "What version/model are you running, atm" (I have a for-free account on OpenAI, what I have seen so far will not justify a 20$ monthly fee - IN MY CASE).
Maybe I misunderstand your point but... if these people are not citizens (i.e. they need a VISA) how could they actually vote for whatever party proposing this?
Well, if a party has enough votes to pass such a law, it means that the majority of the society has no problems with that.
Conversely, if this hypothetical party had a secret agenda to pass the law when they get elected, but they kept this a secret until then... first of all they will probably lose of voters in the next election.
Also, they might find out that former immigrants do not automatically reward this behaviour in terms of votes.
I do not find this scenario particularly realistic.
Personally I am trying to see if we can leverage AI to help write design documents instead of code, based on a fairly large library of human (poorly) written design documents and bug reports.
Maybe your point is valid for other situations, but believe me, letting someone getting on a plane after their names has been removed from the Flight Manifest (passengers list) will have very bad consequences for everyone involved.
Starting from the Captain deciding the plane will not depart until the police has taken care of the situation (assuming they find out before taking off, which is quite probable if the seat had been reassigned to someone else).
This is just an oversimplification though. If you had any experience about travel industry (or logistics) you would understand things much better.
Here is an example for you (from logistics): Sending a truck from Berlin to - say - Györ may cost 3 times less than sending the same truck from Györ to Berlin - even on the same exact date.
Is this because shipping companies try to make money out of nothing, for you?
A fair comparison would not be the return, but Berlin-Györ being more expensive than Vilnius-Berlin-Györ. Is that common in logistics, in your experience?
This was a fabricated example, actually: I work in tourism not in logistic (but I have friends in that field).
My point was that to the layman this does not make any sense while if you are managing a shipping company you soon realize that some destination are more profitable because your truck that was maybe taking specialized replacements parts from A to B can easily pick up some other stuff to send back to A, while travelling in the opposite direction your truck has a high chance to travel empty on retutning to base... but you still have to pay the drivers, the fuel, the maintenance and possibly tolls.
Airlines tend to work like this: at the start of the "season" analyst define the margin for each seatbof each departure. Let's say that for Sunday flight from Venice to Hamburg, Economy, your target is 112€.
(For simplicity I will discuss only a direct flight, but the same idea applies to any leg of any Itinerary).
Yield manager for that area/period has now the task to make sure he gets 112 or more on each ticket. And take in account that an unsold seat gets 0, so lowers the averge margin (which is what the yield is calculated upon).
This will soon make you realize that any chance to sell again a newly vacated seat is a boon.
So in the case of the OP the company can either assume that it was a honest mistake and he will somehow miracously get there in time to get on the second flight (3% chance?) or assume that he decided he does not care anymore, he had a serious accident, got fired, won the lottery, whatever (97%) and promptly put the seat back on sale.
The problem with a-b-c costing less than a-b is less obvious, maybe, but it has similar causes: for the airline it is more efficient to sell you the itinerary with a stopover so their pricing reflects that.
There have even been attempts to take passengers to court for getting off at the intermediate stop (they were dismissed) so it's definitely not just because the airlines are throwing a fit if you decide to change your plans.
Probably the a-b leg and the b-c legs sold alone are not very popular so they want more money to maximize the yield, while everyone wants to go a-c and return.
It seems to me that since airlines can't force you on a plane except for taking your luggage hostage, you're free to drop as long of a 'tail' as you wish. I'm wondering whether they'd put you on a black list or something for doing this consistently.
The reason is happens is that take for instance ATL (former home). ATL is a Delta hub and has direct flights to a lot of places that other airlines don’t. Between people preferring direct flights and the lack of competition, they can charge more.
But flying out of MCO with a layover in ATl, they lose the non stop flight advantage and they have to compete with other airlines.
Also ATL sees a lot more price insensitive business travelers than MCO. Businesses aren’t going to force their salespeople and consultants on one of the low cost carriers.
The full explanation would take a wall of text (and still let you unconvinced because you feel entitled to do as you please, probably).
Super-condensed version: civilian flight are a pretty difficult "product" to handle efficiently. Price increases until 1 minute before closing the airplane doors, then falls to zero.
On top of that, the product "provider" also needs its own product in order to move personnel and technicians all over the globe, but of course they cannot just cannibalize their own products beyond the point of profitability.
Plus they have to handle rebookings and passenger protection in cases like delays, sudden airport close-down and so on. (Have you ever been on a waiting list, btw?).
All this is pretty complicated to manage already, so they need to exert as much control as possible on yield and occupancy.
TL;DR: a flight is not a bus ride. So if you just decide to cut it short the airline will try to reuse your vacant space for whatever reason.
Yes, it is not exactly the same thing but the point is: by getting off at B you are making the B->C flight travel with a wasted (empty) seat.
Which they would have preferred to either sell to someone else or use for moving a pilot or technician to C.
(Note also that this trick of getting out mid-itinerary only works if you do not have checked baggage, because that will arrive in C, and neither the airline nor the airport will be happy to reroute it to wherever you thing you want to go next.
Flying is expensive and logistically complex. Just making sure you end up where your ticket say is complicated. If you (as a customer) decide to change your plans you are making everything more complicated (and possibly preventing other customers to pay for the whole itinerary).
The actual question here is why they won't sell you a ticket for A->B for the actual cost of that leg of the A->B->C flight, and then sell the same seat for B->C to someone else.
See above: let's say that on Frankfurt-Hannover and back you get on average 52 passengers a day, and Hannover-London is more or less the same, while people flying Frankfurt-Heathrow are so numerous that direct flights are always full and therefore you need to offer FRA-HEA with a stopover to satisfy the extra request.
If you are sure that 80% of your passengers will go to Hannover only to then fly to London (and back) your prices will reflect that... and Frankfurt-Hannover cannot be lowered too much because you still has to try to reach your quota for the flight per se.
Of course I can understand it from their point of view. But this doesn't make it any more sensible to me as a consumer of their services.
In the aforementioned situation I wasn't trying to exploit the airline, it was a simple mistake that happened and could be easily alleviated. But the rigid processes, precisely the ones where accountability sinks, made it impossible for the humans involved to correct the mistake.
I still stand by the ridiculousness of that. If not the logistics quirks per se, then the fact that this completely unrelated matter dictated the resolution of the situation against common sense and my interest.
What makes this even worse is that presumably the PR department of that very company had to be involved later and they still spent their employees' time and money to compensate me for the mistake that could be corrected for free.
Yes, sorry for your problem but no-shows automatically invalidate everything else. If you decide to cancel part of a trip due to unexpected events, train strikes or whatever that is not directly under control of the airline itself you must contact them and make sure they will not cancel the rest (including the return flight).
Leaving aside the no-show rule, which doesn't make much sense to me, this situation is a good example of an accountability sink.
The intermediary I booked the tickets with made an obvious mistake and showed the wrong airport code. Maybe the airport opening was meant to happen earlier, and the intermediary had already updated their emails or something like that. They refused to do anything meaningful and did not even acknowledge their mistake.
The fact that I was compensated by the airline that had nothing to do with this mistake is even more astonishing to me, although they were obviously protecting their brand reputation.
I was not trying to dispute the accountability part. Btw my company was hit by the delayed opening of BER airport. Colleagues had to rebook thousands of tickets because the BER iata code had to be "retconned" to use TXL again... so I am more than happy to sympathetic with your problem, trust me.
But why would they cancel B-A when there’s a no show for A-B? More so when there’s a few days gap between A-B and B-A? The only issue being they were booked as a single itinerary/PNR. I don’t see what cost has got anything to do with it.
I am in Barcelona, right now (I arrived on Saturday 26th).
The official causes - at least for now - are "extreme temperature variations in Central Spain".
Barcelona is not very Central, but weather here was perfectly normal so I'd like to hear different opinions.
Personally I really miss Google+.
Maybe it was not a perfect fit for what you are describing, but it sure was the best fit for my own interests and use cases.
Yesterday I asked Chat GPT which was the Japanese Twin City for Venice (Italy). This was just a quick offhand question because I needed the answer for a post on IG, so not exactly a death or life situation.
Answer: Kagoshima. It also added that the "twin status" was officially set in 1965, and that Kagoshima was the starting point for the Jesuit Missionary Alessandro Valignano in his attempt to proselitize Japanese people (to Catholicism, and also about European Culture).
I never heard of Kagoshima, so I googled for it. And discovered it is the twin city of Neaples :/
So I then googled for "Venice Japanese Twin City" and got: Hiroshima. I doublechecked this then I went back to ChatGPT and wrote:
"Kagoshima is the Twin City for Neaples.".
This triggered a websearch and finally it wrote back:
"You are right, Kagoshima is Twin City of Neaples since 1960."
Then it added "Regarding Venice instead, the twin city is Hiroshima, since 2023".
So yeah, a Library of Alexandria that you can count on as long as you have another couple of libraries to doublechek whatever you get from it. Note also that this was very straightforward question, there is nothing to "analyze" or "interpret" or "reason about". And yet the answer was completely wrong, the first date was incorrect even for Neaples (actually the ceremony was in May 1960) and the extra bits about Alessandro Valignano are not reported anywhere else: Valignano was indeed a Jesuit and he visited Japan multiple times, but Kagoshima is never mentioned when you google for him or if you check his wikipedia page.
You may understand how I remain quite skeptical for any application which I consider "more important than an IG title".