Mastodawn

The Seven Voyages Of Steve

I saw a young person ask ChatGPT how long their flight was today when they were literally holding the boarding pass with that information on it in the same hand that had the phone in it. ChatGPT spat out about 4 paragraphs on the subject when the answer was “40 minutes”. What a time to be alive

Edit: this blew up so I’m muting it now to save my notifications. No, I didn’t make it up for clicks, I’d have preferred fewer. Just a little anecdote from a tiring day that I’m trying to relax from now

Britstralian 5d ago

@sinbad I hear stories about teenagers who can't tell the time on an analogue clock or watch. If ignorance is bliss, the next generation will surely enter nirvana...

@sinbad That does not sound plausible. Why in 2026 would a young person be holding a physical boarding pass?

The Seven Voyages Of Steve 5d ago

@mikemccaffrey amazingly they do still give them out

@sinbad Does not seem like a common occurrence, so I'm not shocked that a young person would not to think to look for disembarkation information on the document that is explicitly for boarding the plane.

The Seven Voyages Of Steve 5d ago

@mikemccaffrey It’s just the default here if you check bags in, which they had done. It’s also your baggage receipt. Entirely possible they never thought to look at it

MarjorieR 5d ago

@sinbad @mikemccaffrey in practice not so simple if where you are and your destination are not in the same time zone, as both departure and landing times will be reported in local time.
But anyone who thinks they need to ask an LLM about this must already be pretty brain dead.

@marjolica @sinbad For the 40 minute flight in question, that seems like it wouldn't be a factor.

However, I always find that difficult to figure out flight times in the moment, so I make sure to put the info in my calendar, so it acts like a progress bar as time elapses.

ndevenish 5d ago

@mikemccaffrey @sinbad most of the flights I’ve taken in the past couple of years have given boarding passes. Even if their apps support in principle they print you one to use instead anyway.

“Does not seem common” I assume only applies to the subset of ((US, Internal))

@ndevenish @sinbad Well, I suppose that I don't know how common digital boarding passes are in other countries. I'm just happy that I can usually get on a plane without having to interact with anyone but TSA.

The Seven Voyages Of Steve 5d ago

@mikemccaffrey @ndevenish I’m sure one factor is that even regional services in the US are pretty large. Whereas I just flew home in a plane with propellers and you have to walk across the tarmac to get in them

The Seven Voyages Of Steve 5d ago

@ndevenish @mikemccaffrey I guess an equivalent would be on this side of the Atlantic we might assert that issuing a physical cheque/check was not at all common, when in the US it’s still a more common thing (I assume, I haven’t been back in 10 years but it was then, whilst here we’d mostly got rid of them years before). Different regional norms are still a thing

The Doctor 5d ago

@mikemccaffrey @sinbad It's very common.

canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️‍🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁5d ago

@mikemccaffrey @sinbad Because it is a valid documentation and receipt of your bags at hand… Electronic devices fail, paper not.

@canleaf @sinbad Alas, technology does not advance because it is a good idea.

canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️‍🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁4d ago

@mikemccaffrey @sinbad I do not want to sit in transit with expiring visa because the Backend of the airline was vibe coded and paper copies are rejected.

canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️‍🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁4d ago

@mikemccaffrey @sinbad It is good that etix were adopted instead of waiting weeks for the flight coupon. But I prefer to hold a paper copy in a binder when i am out there in the outback or Canada’s west with no internet. I was asked the boarding pass coming into a country when I tried leaving the US at some point in the past. I keep mobile phones off at immigration proceedings.

Rob Vaughan 5d ago

@sinbad last year at work, a recent engineering graduate of a top UK university was looking at an xy scatter graph of some experimental data in Excel, and he expressed annoyance at the imposed workplace limitations, and said "if we were allowed ChatGPT in here you could quickly get a best fit equation for that data". And this is a smart guy, to be fair.

@sinbad @jwz The Great Poopcopalypse when a day-long network failure prevents people from getting the LLM to tell them when to take a shit will be an incredible tragedy…

@sinbad i feel like most criteria for grading LLMs would consider that answer correct as long as “40 minutes” is in there somewhere. or worse, if it gave a range of answers that includes 40.

The Seven Voyages Of Steve 5d ago

@alys it was in there TBF. Just padded out with a lot of other waffley nonsense

@The Seven Voyages Of Steve That's a whole lot of information to get from just looking over a stranger's shoulder, who was holding a physical boarding pass for some reason.

Really Lazy Bear

@sinbad
I'm honestly shocked young people can even read at all, lol

Totally get your core point, and don't disagree at all.

Also, due to time zones, flight time is unknowable 😉

https://xkcd.com/2867/

DateTime

xkcd

Hot Dog Water 5d ago

Should his seat get sucked out into space, check later to see if there are any records of ShatPTSD being asked "how long is down from here?"

Julescelt 4d ago

@sinbad For me this confirms that critical thinking should be brought back to schools...

There's a wildlife cam video that shows how fast the Morrill Fire in Nebraska is burning and people were having trouble reading the time stamp correctly. Ffs.