The UK doesn't have exit checks.

Of the ~50 countries I've been to in the past 10 years, The UK is the only one I remember which I did not need to show any ID when leaving. I thought it was strange because this is just one way countries catch overstays.

But what’s the point of catching an overstay if they’re leaving already? It’s more important to catch them when they try to re-enter (at which point you could have collected data from airlines to estimate whether they previously overstayed).

Exit checks are pretty pointless if there’s no violation that would lead to enforcement other than deportation (since the traveler is already self-deporting).

Deportation is just the end result. Fines, blacklisting, even imprisonment is possible in many countries.

So you keep them from leaving and imprison them in your country (essentially paying for their upkeep and rendering them useless for your economy). And you do that to solve the problem of illegal immigration.

It’s so stupid it sounds like a policy some right wingers in my country might actually want to make reality.

It tends to be the opposite. The UK is so strict about overstays that it doesn’t need to fine anybody to enforce the rules.

The countries that fine people are usually (not always) more open to allowing them back in again.

I’m not aware of countries that imprison overstayers, although I’m sure there must be some. Detainment awaiting deportation yes, but usually if you show up at a border and try to leave after overstaying most countries will not interfere with your exit (with or without a fine).

It tends to be the opposite. The UK is so strict about overstays that it doesn’t need to fine anybody to enforce the rules.

The countries that fine people are usually (not always) more open to allowing them back in again.

I’m not aware of countries that imprison overstayers, although I’m sure there must be some. Detainment awaiting deportation yes, but usually if you show up at a border and try to leave after overstaying most countries will not interfere with your exit (with or without a fine).

You sure they don't?

As in, 'you have 2 days to GTFO, or we'll land you in prison for a few years to think of your actions'.

Happened many, many times since the start of this horrific war and many times before.

Source: I'm one of the lucky ones who managed to GTFO from Russia and find a job abroad.

Also, Russia is [contemplating](https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/04/25/russia-reportedl....) stopping issuing passports abroad - to try and catch the 'undesirables' again. Which would leave many people de-facto stateless. This is what Belarus did quite a while ago, by the way.

I believe the idea of not issuing passports is the opposite -> to get people to come back to Russia where they can face consequences?

"Either you stay the F out and become de-facto stateless, or you're going to prison". Simple as that.

I'm actually pretty surprised that Russia didn't do it yet, as Belarus did a while ago.

Well, they can immediately charge a fee (personal experience) and also it may be applicable for other matters in-flight.. let's say you're applying for a visa but have overstayed the current one. If they don't check until re-entry, they wouldn't catch this

If someone has overstayed you might want to note that down in case they come for another stay, right?

if you don't get any record of them leaving, from a manned border crossing or an airline reporting to you, then they've overstayed

You can also assume the first record of them entering another country is the date they left your country, since a person cannot be two places at once.

They get the records from the airlines. They don’t need to pay someone to stamp passports at the border to know who is overstaying.

Sure (and I'm not sure if that's actually how it works), but the border control also physically stops someone from leaving after they've overstayed. If someone has overstayed, they just go to the airport and hop on a plane with no consequences.

Some countries do fine overstayers, but UK is quite happy for people to leave with no penalty, it just doesn’t want them to come back again afterwards.

If someone overstays without a good reason then they are probably not entering the UK again for a long time.

The consequences are almost worse without the exit controls because overstayers will waste money on a flight only to get turned around at the border - assuming they don’t need a visa or ETA.

Maybe it's a requirement for for air travel only? Why do all those countries bother? Surely they don't all have exit visa requirements?

When taking the Chunnel recently there are two passport checks on the way to the train, leaving UK and then 20 ft later entering France.

I just made this after realising that chatgpt 4 now has 32k input context so it's useful to inject multiple files into my prompts easily

"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."

We made it, you can play with it :)

What is the point of quoting the introductory sentence of a page full of rules?

If that was the only thing about a Show HN, every corporate blog post would be a Show HN. They all have products you can try out after signing up.

There is certainly some gray area around what constitutes a Show HN. But the link you submitted clearly is a blog post.

This is an interface that has GPT-4 producing content while also producing images using DALL-E 3, we have integrated them.

Feedback is great, thank you.

I linked to the shared report so that it's obvious what is actually being produced, rather than just a description of it.

This is just an example summary of a single web page, you could imagine it producing much more compelling content, for example combining multiple pieces of information, along with a twist, just as many humans do when publishing on the web. FlowChai could search hundreds of documents to produce a report (using RAG), so in that sense it can go beyond what a person could do in a reasonable time frame.

While this makes some of what my startup https://flowch.ai does a commodity (file uploads and embeddings based queries are an example, but we'll see how well they do it - chunking and querying with RAG isn't easy to do well), the lower prices of models make my overall platform way better value, so I'd say overall it's a big positive.

Speaking more generally, there's always room for multiple players, especially in specific niches.

Their system also does not seem to support techniques like hybrid search, automated cleaning/modifying of chunks prior to embedding, or the ability to access citations used, all of which are pretty important for enterprise search.

Could just mean it's coming, though.

I have found success with chunking with 100 tokens, preceeded by the last 10 tokens of the previous chunk, and the first 10 tokens of the next chunk, 120 tokens total. I generate an embedding for each, then compare that to embedding(s) derived from the input query.

How to generate embeddings from the input query well is where one's focus should be IMO. An example: "don't mention x" being turned into filtering out / de-emphasizing chunks that align with the embedding for x.

I've been using these techniques along with pgvector and OpenAI's embeddings for https://flowch.ai and it works really well. A user uploads a document or uses the Chrome Extension on a webpage and FlowChai chunks up the content, generates embeddings, builds up a RAG context and then produces a report based on the user's prompt.

I hope that helps show a real world example. You're welcome to play with FlowChai for free to see how it works in practice at the application level.

Things like this needing to exist are one of the reasons we are working on https://flowch.ai/?ref=hn - the ChatGPT interface is really sub-optimal for work and keeping track of interactions over time. We have been building a much better way to organize LLM interactions, even basics like splitting things into projects and search make it a much better experience.

I'll be curious to see if many people end up subscribed to both this and ChatGPT Pro, are they different enough to both be worth it?

Yes. I use both.

ChatGPT-4 is slightly "smarter" but has very limited context. You have to tweak the system prompt to get it to be concise and relaxed.

Claude-2 can read an entire codebase, a memo describing a new functionality, and documentation for two new modules that are useful, then tell you exactly where in the codebase to make what edits.

Then you can take the mistakes it makes and use ChatGPT to correct them.

Context is king.

I still find ChatGPT (4) far superior to Claude.

Some feedback (it's clear you're just pitching FlowChai, but that's ok its HN):

I quick scrolled through your webpage and had no idea what it was. Extremely text heavy, and generic images that didn't communicate anything. I wanted to know what the product LOOKED like, especially as you're describing the difference between it and the chat interface of OpenAI.

I think you updated your comment (or I missed it) with the link to a "report" - it looked just like the output of one of the text bubbles except it had some (source) links (which I think Bing does as well)? It didn't seem all that different to me.

Very fair, we have demo videos, guides etc planned for the next week or so. As it's a tool that can do many things it's hard to describe. Still a lot to do :)

In terms of what makes the report different from Bing: this could be any source of data: scraped from the web, search, API upload, file upload etc, so there's a lot more power there. Also, it's not just one off reports, there's automation there which would allow for example a weekly report on the latest papers on GPT4 (or whatever you're interested in).

Doesn't seem to be in a usable state yet. I created an account and realised there's not actually any features to play with yet. I gave a URL for scheduled reports but I cannot configure anything about them.

You didn't offer me any way to delete my account and remove the email address I saved in your system. I hope you don't start sending me emails, after not giving me an ability to delete the account