News and notes from around the interweb:

• Use AI to identify and tell you more about the plane you’re on… just from a photo of the interior.

  The ability of multimodal AI to “understand” images is underrated.

  I just took these. Given the first photo Claude guesses where I am. Given the second it identifies the type of plane. These aren’t obvious. pic.twitter.com/cn0S5CV15v

  — Ethan Mollick (@emollick) October 23, 2024

  I take photos of things with my young daughter all the time, and ChatGPT identifies whatever it is for us… bugs, models of dinosaurs, etc. and then it can tell us everything we want to know. Soon children will have teddy bears or other AI companions that will automate this just for the asking.

• Emirates contributed 19% of Dubai’s GDP

• Attention, Passengers: Someone Is Skipping the Line at Your Gate (NYT) also ‘Gate lice’ begone? Airline seeks to enforce order in boarding process (NPR)

• I’ve walked into a room at a Ritz-Carlton with a condom in the unmade bed so checking in and finding a needle in the bed doesn’t surprise me.

  

• Airports commonly offer incentives to airlines for flights, but this is unusual: a $200,000 subsidy to open a restaurant The Punta Gorda airport’s private jet campus has already started buildout on a restaurant with pizza oven.

• Citi gave me free money on my AAdvantage business card account. I’m not the only one. I haven’t looked for the backstory, anyone happen to know?

  

  Somehow has to do with the companion cert you can earn via spending, perhaps a mistake Citi made is saying what the taxes could cost – but I haven’t met the spend requirement so I don’t know why they’d give me this…

• Obviously not everyone feels as I do, that they overpromise and underdeliver.

  Which one of you lunatics is this?
  byu/Shitrec inmarriott

• What can you steal from the Park Hyatt New York?