It basically is required, because without it they're treating you the same as if you showed up to the airport with no ID at all.
There's a manual verification process that has always existed for people who lost their ID before their flight, it used to be free, now you need to do that and pay $45 for it.
I've also gone through this process, it did take about 30 minutes in my case. That also included waiting for a TSA agent to be available to even start the process. So YMMV, perhaps based on how busy the airport is at the time.
They had me answer a series of questions about past addresses etc, it wasn't just an extra pat down in my case. After answering all the questions correctly they allowed me to continue.
Because it's not just a $45 fee and you're on your way.
You can actually board a domestic flight without any ID at all, for example if you lost it before your trip. But you'll have to go through a manual identity verification process. That includes giving fingerprints and answering personal questions only you should know, like past addresses.
It takes around 30 minutes and if you don't answer correctly, you could be denied boarding. This process already existed before the Real ID requirement, but it used to be free. Now, you're forced to go through the same manual verification steps and pay $45 on top of it.
You're being treated the same as if you have no ID with you at all.
This seems like such a jerk move to reply to someone who worked hard and is excited about something to essentially try to tell them it was worthless. Whether an LLM will ever actually be appropriate as a compiler or not, the reply from Chen Fang is in such poor taste.
It seems like a guard model paired with RAG could help here. A guard model could filter out references to current events or anything outside the Skyrim universe, while RAG could be used to ground the NPCs dialogue in actual in game content. That way if the model tries to spin up a dungeon or location, it first checks against the game's data to confirm it actually exists before surfacing it to the player.
Play a game where typing is required to communicate. Never took any formal typing courses just started playing a lot of EverQuest back in the day. There wasn't voice chat at the time and the gameplay requires a lot of quick communication with your team. Can easily touch type 100+ wpm (according to typeracer.com) now. It's very motivating to be able to type well when you must to communicate and you have something you really really want to communicate via typing (such as communicating with your team via typing in a fast pace game)