walkingsophie

Karma: 14

walkingsophie 9 Apr 2026 12:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Whack-a-Mole is Not a Winnable Game
With my proposal of
Using just contactless payments for flexible travellers in conjunction with advance tickets as the only options available would be a way to solve this.
in the situation you have described, the person with a possibility of change of plans could have used contactless rather than an advance ticket.
If the railway company doesn’t like this, they can assign prices to make this impossible.
The British railway companies do not seem to be doing a good job at assigning prices to make this impossible, despite not liking it.

walkingsophie 14 Mar 2026 12:53 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Whack-a-Mole is Not a Winnable Game
Often there are multiple valid ways to use a ticket, so the product you are being sold is something of the form “choose one of Pushchair Bundle, Powerbank, or Handbag” rather than just being a Pushchair Bundle. Railways need to price the tickets based on all the various available routes, and some routes end up containing parts that travel a longer/more valuable distance then the other routes, making it difficult to give fares that make logical sense with your definition. The rail industry sometimes has ways to fix this for specific journeys, but given the over 6 million origin destination pairs, this is not a winnable game of whack a mole.
Removing break of journeys turns the products the railways are selling from a choice of bundles into a single unified thing, making it much easier for the railway companies to deal with.

walkingsophie 28 Feb 2026 23:57 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Whack-a-Mole is Not a Winnable Game
To me the main problem with respect to routeing seems to stem from break of journeys being allowed, and all the implications of that. My mole in the previous post stems from this, as without allowing break of journeys you would only be able to do the journey A-D with an A-D ticket, as the railways intended. Using just contactless payments for flexible travellers in conjunction with advance tickets as the only options available would be a way to solve this.

However with all the hardware being built around break of journeys being allowed, getting to the state I described above seems rather difficult. There are plans to introduce contactless in a few areas around the UK, but without a full refactor, those plans seem to just add more moles for people to play with.

walkingsophie 27 Feb 2026 0:36 UTC
1 point
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on: Is LLM Translation Without Rosetta Stone possible?
Until recently, it seemed impossible to learn a language without either
...

This does not fully line up with my experience learning languages, so I would like to see a source or evidence backing up this claim.

I know this is an anecdote, but I have learnt a significant amount of Japanese by just listening to podcasts, including on topics too abstract or too disconnected from me to have sensory experiences on, and I personally do not see why you can’t learn a language from nothing but the language itself.

walkingsophie 26 Feb 2026 16:01 UTC
12 points
0
on: Whack-a-Mole is Not a Winnable Game
This reminds me of the British Rail ticketing and fares system, where people try to find cheap tickets and travel at the times they want, and the railway operators try get people to pay for the trains they use and balance the people out between trains.
As a simple example of a mole, there are quite a few train routes A-B-C-D around the UK where a ticket from A-D is cheaper than a ticket from B-C, but still valid to do the journey B-C. (For example a ticket from Mortlake to Ash is valid to do the journey from Clapham Junction to Guilford, but is cheaper than the Clapham Junction to Guilford ticket)
There are also many other moles involving strange time restrictions, strange routeings, split tickets etc.
Recently, National Rail tried to fix the moles involving strange routeings by changing the rules about whether a route is valid to be based on computer generated itineraries rather than the 2000 page long routeing guide as an attempt at a refactor, but this has lead to more moles that I am aware of.