ave

I was getting close to that much in interest earlier this year :p

@Themoonisacheese oh wow that is pretty good

@xtropicalsoothing could probably get an entire counterfeit deck for a tenner on ali :P

(sorry stackexchange I love you but I wish you were better <3)

That's a very new example, but I recall incidents preeetty much at least once a year for many years now

That's where I'm at too, I do contribute occasionally to travel.se but that's it

For me writing code isn't the slow part, designing things is, and that's not safe to offload to AI, imo.

@Nzall I do feel this way when I use it. More distracting than helpful. And I have really tried.

@xtropicalsoothing that's the funny part: this network is declining, partly due to AI ofc, but mainly because repeated bad management decisions over the years drove out a lot of people who were serial contributors. I think overflowai is an example of "bad management decision that drives out serial contributors".

It's not the only example either. I was trying to find how to build a dataset for something I'm working on, and most of the google results were AI generated blog posts that were ranging from "misleading title" to "wrong". That's another example of AI shadowing good information by experts.

@xtropicalsoothing Those are pretty obvious ones and I agree; but I also think that things like the stackexchange AI go too far, mainly because it goes against the design of the network. I think it's fair to treat AI is "unreliable info source" (and there's good uses for that if you keep it in mind), but there's also value in good, factual information from ~experts, which is what this network tries to be.

@xtropicalsoothing fwiw, I'm not for prohibiting AI, but generally being more mindful of what walls we throw it at. We don't need AI integration in every app, when it is useless in 99% of them. It's a waste of time and human energy to implement it only for it to go unused.

is AI the only thing that keeps you from boredom?

@xtropicalsoothing ok but if you're going to live by the strategy of "we'll all die anyways" and "sun will go out in a few billion years" or whatever, what's the point of going on? People tend to like to live with the intention to keep their material conditions and emotional health in order.

@SPArcheon-onstrike wow, that top left SO actually hurts to look at

@Nzall there are definitely good uses, but as a counterpoint on the same case: coworker recently used chatgpt to get laptop recommendations and comparisons of them. I checked the options manually and all the prices were significantly wrong (±30%).

@xtropicalsoothing cars are useful for transportation (and cause some accidents), condoms are useful for birth control (and may be bad for birth rates, if you care for that), emails are useful for communication (but do enable some spam and fraud). yes, ai chatbots are useful for certain uses too. but I think it's important to also look at, say, a nuclear bomb. one can't say that most uses of it are good. chatbots aren't as bad as nukes ofc, but it's worth thinking about if they're good in most cases.

It's good to learn things and be able to do them. Short term speed gains (your current project is done faster) vs long term speed gains (can't write a complex regex yourself later, one that AI struggles to get working for hours).

re: regex. had to write a pretty complex one for work just two days ago, AI wouldn't do good with it. can recommend learning the basics! regex101.com is a great resource, you can pick your flavor (language), put in the regex and example text, then it shows you what matches. it also has a useful box in the corner with the syntax you can use in that regex flavor :)

@xtropicalsoothing also I disagree with a bit worse: it's significantly worse. You say it's been getting worse since web2.0, no, the SNR was very good back in earlier days of web2.0.

but, it's in the interest of many entities to spread false information. It can be used to weaken a political opponent, for example. Or to make a foreign nation seem weak, or to weaken the regime there through causing scandals.

And it is in the interest of people that do these implausible seeming things if you condition people to think that it's likely fake

Can't just blindly reject things that seem false, because implausible things do happen (ranging from POTUS using profanity when talking with press, to horrible atrocities).

@xtropicalsoothing But how do you believe anything? Where do you draw the line? One can generate realistic videos with voices now. Sure, the public ones are capped to 6 seconds, but that's likely going to change, and nation state actors etc may have access to better options.

@SaintWacko arguably puzzles.se suffers from the same issue, or any site that's often has one correct answer.

time sure flies

(yup, illegal: dha.gov.za/index.php/civic-services/travel-documents)

About could and should: I know a south african citizen who is supposed to enter ZA with his ZA passport, but enters with his AU or UK passport, as he claims that there can be restrictions for foreign-residing ZA citizens. What he's doing is potentially illegal ("shouldn't"), but not explicitly blocked (can/could).

@JonathanReez Most countries that are the audience here do. Germany knows smth like 50 countries that don't under any circumstances. Many countries require surgeries etc, but do eventually allow it.

we answer for everyone in that situation

@JonathanReez you know better than I that we don't answer for OP

@JonathanReez (Completely irrelevant but slightly disagree with the "Nations are experts on their own visa rules" thing, anecdotally I had instances of countries not knowing their own rules well. I've recently had the head of Munich foreigners office issue me a formal apology on behalf of the department for a sizable fuckup they had (giving illegal advice), though that's more of an expat thing than a traveler thing.)

@JonathanReez I'd appreciate sources on this if you have any. To my knowledge, testosterone injections (<the main hormone therapy for trans men) will get trans men to cis men levels of testosterone (if not more).

There's absolutely a decision that travelers must make of "am I okay with the small risk of making my travels harder for the next 3 years"

I know that UK asks about global visa bans and refused entries for example

@JonathanReez (heyo I just made my way here.) I disagree. A visa ban is a "big deal". Even if this gets nullified (not released) in 3 years, that'd mean for these travelers, that they'd need to declare this ban on every visa form (or similar) that asks about any visa bans (or rejected entries, etc) globally, which may or may not lead to further travel restrictions. And if it gets only released and not fully nullified, they may need to keep declaring it even after it gets lifted.

and yeah I guess that set me off on a bit of a route of enjoying collecting as many ones with my name as legally possible. I have 4 rn, will be up to 5 once I get the foreigners' TD.

@Willeke I could write endlessly on this topic. eMRTDs were my lockdown special interest :p

I totally forgot I wrote this answer 3 years ago.

"hm this question looks like a good one, but it already has an answer" "oh it's kinda in-depth" "oh."

@Willeke ha.

@Willeke as I said above (sorry for late reply), I would be interested in the scope of it: is this a known scam? is this done at a scale where people may lose items even if they choose a locker at random? I do rely on the train station lockers for my bag sometimes, and it'd suck to lose it.

@ave er. not answers, comments.

It'd also be useful to know if this is a more widesprrad thing. One could theoretically clone a bunch of the keys, not just one. They did look hard to clone thru normal methods (never seen blanks that'd suit them) but did look potentially 3d printable, wouldn't even need much precision due to the size of the bittings.

@RoryAlsop oh I'm pretty sure it was a scam, but I was curious about the MO

Perhaps even "what's stored in my passport chip, and who can access it?" etc, seems even more informational for travelers that way (different sets of data have different access methods so it'd make sense to have those two adj questions together imo)

inspired by this interaction, which I'm not very happy about as it's pmuch a q and an a in answers travel.stackexchange.com/questions/192201/…

Hmm, does anyone think there'd be interest in a question and answer set like "what's stored in my passport chip"?