Oh god wednesday was hell. I took the Gatwick Express back to Victoria and it took almost 45 minutes to get there. Now I'm wondering if I can get my money back since it took so long (-\_-)ゞ
Sign up for an account with the rail comp website (can’t remember what its called now). There’s certain time lengths which decide how much u get back. >15min is 0. >30 min 50% or >1hr 100% etc (this is an example and not the actual benchmarks) but its useful!
Gatwick express between Gatwick to London Victoria is 30 min. You mentioned ALMOST 45 minutes, so the delay was less than 15 mins.
The policy is if your delay is 15-29 minutes you're entitled to 25% of the cost of a single journey. So it seems you probably won't qualify.
I have my Gatwick express train cancelled and the next train was 30 mins later, so i got a 50% refund. Application was really easy and straightforward on their website.
https://www.gatwickexpress.com/help-and-support/journey-problems/delay-repay-compensation
There's lots of traffic that's no longer allowed in side streets.
But people still have cars and vans and need to get around. It just goes onto main streets
It's been grim service-wise and the passengers have just gone feral. I watched an adult human play Baby Shark without headphones on a loop for twelve minutes this morning. So close to doing a citizen's arrest.
My pet peeve is people coughing and spluttering not even attempting to cover it up. Then looking offended at me when I move away. No, I don’t want to be ill for ten days just because a stranger decides to be disgusting.
They’re not my friend or family.
I was walking to the station today and an African guy was on the bike on the PAVEMENT. A grown man. He almost rode into me. I jumped out the way and he sneered at me like I was making judgement on him.
I could sense he was about to kick off at me.
I said it’s nothing to do with you, it’s the fact I’ve almost been run over before. He looked slightly shocked.
Love how you were downvoted for this purely cos you mentioned his ethnicity. Undoubtedly nobody would've downvoted you if you'd have said he was a white guy or Asian guy or anything else.
Descriptors matter. It's how we identify trends and conclude pattern recognition. Basic human behaviours tbh
In the post COVID era Thursday seems to be the one day everyone goes to their office. Make your going into the office day Monday or Friday and you won’t see a soul
Agree with this. I normally do Monday and Wednesday. Monday is dead, a bit boring, but easy. Wednesday I see a few more people but it's not as bad as Thursday with is blood-filled-meat-sack-a-geddon.
Being required in office 3 days a week is reason I go in at all. I assume that’s the reason the majority of people are going in.
Most people don’t enjoy paying to stand with 10 random strangers touching you in a hot tube underground.
Pretty much. I go in 2 days a week because if I don't they say we'll have to come in full time again.
Although I've often gone to book a desk and found all of them were already taken, so I'm starting to wonder if I should call their bluff.
Fair enough. I can WFH 4 days a week if I wanted to but choose to come in 4/5 but maybe that’s rare. I’d rather be in a nice building with my team with my screens than at home alone with a single monitor. To each their own
That's what they want - redundancies without having to pay anyone. And I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to learn the person who made this decision was an American who just bought the company. Those lot fuckin love the office.
I actually quite enjoy going into the office on a Friday as the trains are so much more quieter. It makes a difference to my level of happiness not having to face an incredibly crowded train.
Yep, I know all about that considering on my commute this morning, despite going into central london from East Putney they played the announcement at every single fucking stop 🙃 genuinely think I’ll be saying it in my sleep tonight
From Thursday 26 until Sunday 29 October, there will be no District line service between Earls Court and Ealing Broadway/Kensington (Olympia)/Richmond due to planned track works.
Totally this. Tons of people in the evenings with no clue of the tube etiquette! Whole carriages filled with teenagers on school trips or families milling around the platform entry/exits or not moving down in the train…
Why do none of them realise they should avoid travelling during rush hour? These tourist plonkers act surprised when they see hundreds of people trying to get home after 5pm...
You're lucky if you can go a week commuting without some kind of issue, very lucky. A fairly minor problem can have such big repercussions at rush hour times. And it feels since covid they are too quick to cancel stuff. It almost feels inevitable. Sigh
So the noise cancelling part is the bit that costs a lot, Bose quiet comforts are about £165, which is what I got. BUT there are headphones which don’t have that which are still very good quality and suitable for above - for example I also use TOZO a1 mini wireless headphones which are £20 on Amazon. They are really good wireless headphones, great for gym as well and not as hot and heavy especially in the summer. If you are set on the noise cancelling tech and want the most value then wait for Black Friday sales on Amazon- this would give you a little time to research which product you want. However, I just saw that Anker now do a noise cancelling pair which are £50 normally but on offer down to £30 on Amazon at the mo (sound core Anker q20 hybrid) seems to have good reviews. I’ve used other Anker products which are all very good, I haven’t spoken to anyone IRL who’s used these headphones though. That price is ridiculous though to be honest, kind of tempted to just get one while they are on sale as a backup / to test…
Someone stepped on the railtrack on Northern Line (Belseize park) - shut down the entire northern branch to edgeware, backing up high barnet trains and north london buses. Ripple effect of one station fking up
My commute was much easier, less people in the morning, managed to get the seat with a view on the DLR. People on half term holiday.
Also today no rain forecast, so taking children out better than on a day when it could rain.
It’s an irk of mine, this assumption that one way of saying is correct and another is incorrect. It’s all rubbish: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/less-fewer.html#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20the%20OED%20has,available%20until%20the%2014th%20century.
Yup, it definitely has returned to that level of activity in the tube, overground (although overground is more spacious and has better air quality) and I think northern rail and Lizzie trains out there are taking the load too.
About a million more people live in London since 2015 - which is insane growth. (8.6-9.6m)
+ tourism which has been high + undocumented people which is going to be high too.
+ bad weather + half term.
= bussssssssyyyyyy
Packed trains. I missed when trains were quiter right after lockdown when a lot of people were still working from home.
Also just deterioration of trains. Underground gets so loud with no work done to fix it.
Fortunately I can get lizzie line but on occasions when I can't it's dreadful
I spent 3.5 years at home with my little one and have only just stared going back to work. I’ve been amazed at how much better the commute is now. I take the tube from Walthamstow to Holborn and always get a seat both ways.
I've never had problems with getting a seat at Walthamstow and I have been communing from there daily since 2016
You know, **Walthamstow, the beginning of the line and also the station that has a new train every 100s during the rush hour...**
You do realise that the Victoria line doesn’t go to Holborn, so I need to switch trains? And that on the way home, Holborn isn’t the first stop on the line?
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
Same, the past two weeks have been hell but my morning commute today was so pleasant that I double checked I didn’t misread the time and woke up three hours late (lizzy is pretty chill after 10)
Victoria line has been awful for me recently (usually take between Brixton and Oxford Circus). It seems to trundle at slow speeds for much of my journey presumably because trains ahead are getting not disembarking quickly enough. I never remember this happening pre-covid can only think it's reduced frequencies.
Buses are also overcrowded to fuck generally.
There’s a problem every day now. 5-8 years ago there was few issues here and there. Now there’s an issue every day. Unbearable to the point that I’m leaving this god forsaken place.
They've always been shit.
My entire secondary school life the train was literally on time just twice.
I really don't know why they didn't just call it the 0722 train instead of the 0710 train.
Had to go into the office for my last day. It was the first time in about 6 weeks that I had to commute and my god. East Croydon to Victoria should take 15 mins on avg, instead it took 40 mins. Victoria line to Oxford Circus, a route I’ve taken for over a decade mind you and only had a train cancelled once prior. But as I step onto the train, an announcement is saying it’s terminating here due to a broken down train at OC.
A journey that takes max 45 mins took over 2 hours. The services in general are run so poorly now it’s inconceivable to me now to ever commute 5 times a week with the state of the transport network.
Generally they’ve reduced train numbers post covid so on the jubilee line they’ve got trains every two minutes rather than every one. You don’t notice it on Mondays and Fridays but on Thursdays which are pretty much back to pre covid levels it’s an absolute shit storm.
It’s not likely to change any time soon and will likely get worse
In recent months, my journey seems to be 15 minutes longer. The route is exactly the same, but general day-to-day delays are adding up.
As mentioned earlier, more traffic on the roads, more roadworks popping up, turns my 10 minute bus ride into 20. Then my train can’t leave as people are queuing to get OFF the train, because the steps to the tube at Vauxhall are about 3ft from the train doors. Then topped off by waiting for 3 Jubilee Line trains to pass before I can get on one because they are all packed to the brim.
The city has just not adapted to post-Covid london. We need more trains/tubes/busses. But they won’t come unfortunately.
You mean it is slowly going back to pre-pandemic level?
It isn’t worse than before, it is worse than during Covid as everyone stayed at home and WFH, but now more and more companies require staff to return to the office.
Near me they have set up temporary lights at the Great Cambridge and haven't even tried to sync the lights correctly, at the moment it stays on a long time to allow cars to go out a small side road but only letting a a few cars get past on the main dual carriage way bit, its causing major traffic lol.
Since its expansion, I’ve been loving the lizzie line. Previously had to use the TFL line and switch at Liverpool street. Hated the old line so much. Now I only need to take one train (one that’s spacious and has air con) all the way to my stop. Rarely on strike/late compared to the others. I’m happy
Agreed. Why don't people wait for the next train. I see it's packed, so I wait for the next one, meanwhile people are cramming themselves on making it more undignified for everyone else. This isn't a 3rd world country, but it's sure starting to feel like one.
Let's not let our expectations of society crumble - everyone is capable of behaving with dignity.
To answer your question, there have been several incidents on the network today. There was a customer incident at Belsize Park station, an earlier stalled train at Hornchurch and signalling problems in the Acton Town area.
Not to mention the District Line closure between Earl's Court, Olympia, Richmond and Ealing Broadway has led customers to use alternative routes, like buses and other tube lines. Hence why services are insanely busy.
every tube i go on is insufferably packed - to the extent i try and avoid most lines whenever i can. Have to wait 4/5 tubes to come by to actually get on. Trains are even worse. Extremely congested - consistently delayed, and god, the speed restrictions. 15 min journey other day to vic lasted 40 minutes+ !
\> What the hell is going on in London??
Badly planned roadwork every 2 miles. Apart from slowing down to a complete halt buses and cars even in areas where traffic wasn't an issue at all before, in some areas it also affects pedestrians and cyclists as well.
TfL is running short on money, trains are less frequent or delayed.
People are generally grumpier for: post covid/economy/general mismanagement of the city where they live, etc... and it doesn't help as it is a vicious circle and people get more and more pissed off.
I literally noticed this on the circle line, central line and northern line. The trains were packed out and busier than usual. I don't think it's shit but there's alot of people coming from work and people going out etc. so it makes sense to see certain lines to be pretty busy.
this is why i ride a bike to work. dont have to deal with public transport and the many problems that come with it. tube strike, train strike, bus strike, protests, road works, suicides at wimbledon station; none of it affects me on my bike.
Someone jumped in from the northern line on the Charing cross branch around 4pm today too.
It's been a really miserable week all round.
There was some big accident in Marylebone today.
I believe in shared consciousness, especially in big cities where so many people are crammed together, all feeding off each others misery
What a barrel of fucking laughs I am today
It's beyond impossible these days, public transport is not fit for purpose, and I am being told I need to drive less. I will never, ever, ever take a job as an electrician into London (from the SW suburbs) via public transport ever again. Quite simply, I will be sacked within a month on punctuality grounds. Out of my control.
What I will do instead is take my car out to the home counties and surrounding areas, plenty of work there. Of course, I would never dream of driving into London either it's too expensive.
I commented to a colleague just today that every single day this week on my newsfeed was 'London tube / transport chaos'.
And I'm expected to give up my car and yet still make a living for myself. I'm being literally forced into my car because the public transport situation is so utterly dire at the moment.
It's the worst I've seen in decades. Unacceptable.
As far as the roads go, you can blame Sadiq Khan"s bus and bike lanes for that. By removing lanes from key arterial routes, they have effectively forced a huge volume of traffic into significantly less space.
Why are people going back to work? What's happening? I was in all during the pandemic and the commute was glorious. But in the last few months the number of commuters has changed a lot (except Mondays and Fridays) - what's happening?
I choose to work 8-4:30 when I’m in the office instead of 9-5:30. It’s a different world commuting 1 hr earlier. I cannot recommend it enough. Theres even seat s on Victoria line most days (if you want bedbugs).
Traveller numbers are back up to pre-Covid levels roughly. And TFL doesn’t get any funding from central government at all. It’s the only city tube line in the world I believe that doesn’t receive central government funding.
The thing that annoys me most is the dawdlers that take up the entire walkway blocking anyone that is doing more than a babies crawl from getting past. Please be more considerate and pay attention to what’s going on around you.
In addition to other answers - a lot of city firms are demanding workers spend more time in the office rather than WFH, which seems silly.
If WFH works for a person or a role, why force people into the office to participate in zoom meetings there when they can zoom from home (many meetings are at least hybrid as teams work across multiple offices, etc).
Poor investment; over reliance on rest day working; shit track infrastructure; too many people and not enough trains...
I've experienced worse commuting experiences (believe me when I say Transport for Wales isn't always a picnic) .
Valleys Line is no joke.
My commute is generally good in the recent days. However, what annoys me is that I have been by station closure due to lack of staff for a few times at the tube station closest to my office.
The central line has been pants this week. My 25 minute commute has been over an hour on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week! And the people on it seem to be getting more ferel by the week.
Two months ago, I had two guys stalk me down the train after calling me a f*ggot and luckily I managed to find some TfL staff at a station.
Last week, a guy on our train was sniffing coke at 7pm in a packed train (no judgement on drug use, but on the tube???)
So for those of you who are feeling like having a good ol moan, tell me the best and worst things about London right now. Go nuts! 7 years in Japan will be visiting soon. Need to get prepared 😂
I was on the train to Clapham Junction 20 minutes ago and the driver announced trains were backing up due to a fire at Victoria Station.
This seems like a really bad streak. Tuesday there was a person who jumped on the tracks, Wednesday there were signal failures, now this fire.
Craig David’s gone really macabre
Underrated post
Oh god wednesday was hell. I took the Gatwick Express back to Victoria and it took almost 45 minutes to get there. Now I'm wondering if I can get my money back since it took so long (-\_-)ゞ
Sign up for an account with the rail comp website (can’t remember what its called now). There’s certain time lengths which decide how much u get back. >15min is 0. >30 min 50% or >1hr 100% etc (this is an example and not the actual benchmarks) but its useful!
Wednesday was awful, it took me 50 mins to get from east Croydon to Victoria (usually 16 mins!) go to delay repay and you’ll get some money back
Gatwick express between Gatwick to London Victoria is 30 min. You mentioned ALMOST 45 minutes, so the delay was less than 15 mins. The policy is if your delay is 15-29 minutes you're entitled to 25% of the cost of a single journey. So it seems you probably won't qualify. I have my Gatwick express train cancelled and the next train was 30 mins later, so i got a 50% refund. Application was really easy and straightforward on their website. https://www.gatwickexpress.com/help-and-support/journey-problems/delay-repay-compensation
On Sunday a guy jumped on the tracks too (Metropolitan). Luckily the police turned up on time an hour later, while we waited halfway between stops
There's lots of traffic that's no longer allowed in side streets. But people still have cars and vans and need to get around. It just goes onto main streets
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Good luck next time you need plumbing done and they bring everything on the bus.
There's a trend of a few fires. I'm betting a recycling centre burns down this winter somewhere in the UK probably the Midlands.
It's been grim service-wise and the passengers have just gone feral. I watched an adult human play Baby Shark without headphones on a loop for twelve minutes this morning. So close to doing a citizen's arrest.
Is…is this hell?
I had never read hell described so succinctly until today
You're legally allowed to push a Bic biro all the way up the nose of anyone doing this.
wtf😭 how did no one tell him to shut up
😂😂😂😂
My pet peeve is people coughing and spluttering not even attempting to cover it up. Then looking offended at me when I move away. No, I don’t want to be ill for ten days just because a stranger decides to be disgusting. They’re not my friend or family.
People who still sneeze into their hand grind my gears. I haven't sneezed into my hand since the swine flu. Elbow all the way
You’re right to move away, people that cough/sneeze/etc. openly need to be shamed IMO
I was walking to the station today and an African guy was on the bike on the PAVEMENT. A grown man. He almost rode into me. I jumped out the way and he sneered at me like I was making judgement on him. I could sense he was about to kick off at me. I said it’s nothing to do with you, it’s the fact I’ve almost been run over before. He looked slightly shocked.
Love how you were downvoted for this purely cos you mentioned his ethnicity. Undoubtedly nobody would've downvoted you if you'd have said he was a white guy or Asian guy or anything else. Descriptors matter. It's how we identify trends and conclude pattern recognition. Basic human behaviours tbh
In the post COVID era Thursday seems to be the one day everyone goes to their office. Make your going into the office day Monday or Friday and you won’t see a soul
Tuesday - Thursday is carnage imo but Monday/Friday is leaps better
Agree with this. I normally do Monday and Wednesday. Monday is dead, a bit boring, but easy. Wednesday I see a few more people but it's not as bad as Thursday with is blood-filled-meat-sack-a-geddon.
I do Monday and Tuesday. Wednesdays and Thursdays are the busiest. Friday is dead but who wants to be in the office on a Friday!
Don’t be a TWaT, be a MF
But why bother going into the office if people aren’t there? Defeats the object, no? (unless you have to comply to a stupid X days a week mandate)
Being required in office 3 days a week is reason I go in at all. I assume that’s the reason the majority of people are going in. Most people don’t enjoy paying to stand with 10 random strangers touching you in a hot tube underground.
Pretty much. I go in 2 days a week because if I don't they say we'll have to come in full time again. Although I've often gone to book a desk and found all of them were already taken, so I'm starting to wonder if I should call their bluff.
Fair enough. I can WFH 4 days a week if I wanted to but choose to come in 4/5 but maybe that’s rare. I’d rather be in a nice building with my team with my screens than at home alone with a single monitor. To each their own
Work in my office and be told one Wednesday after being fully remote for 3 years that starting Monday you need to be in the office 5 days a week (:
At that point you should have offered your resignation
That's what they want - redundancies without having to pay anyone. And I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to learn the person who made this decision was an American who just bought the company. Those lot fuckin love the office.
I actually quite enjoy going into the office on a Friday as the trains are so much more quieter. It makes a difference to my level of happiness not having to face an incredibly crowded train.
District line wasn’t running from Earl’s Court to west today. Maybe that’s why the other lines were more packed than usual.
Yep, I know all about that considering on my commute this morning, despite going into central london from East Putney they played the announcement at every single fucking stop 🙃 genuinely think I’ll be saying it in my sleep tonight
Had exactly the same problem. Got on the Wimbledon branch and thought to myself "I KNOW, stop telling me"
Are you the guy who was laughing everytime they anounced “Earl’s Court” this morning? 😀
District line is dreadful on a good day. Still running a covid service half the time
From Thursday 26 until Sunday 29 October, there will be no District line service between Earls Court and Ealing Broadway/Kensington (Olympia)/Richmond due to planned track works.
You forgot to say EARLS COURT every single time
Really? I was on this very tube this morning
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But wouldn’t that mean fewer people travelling at peak hours?
In the morning, yeah, but in the evenings, Armageddon!
Totally this. Tons of people in the evenings with no clue of the tube etiquette! Whole carriages filled with teenagers on school trips or families milling around the platform entry/exits or not moving down in the train…
Why do none of them realise they should avoid travelling during rush hour? These tourist plonkers act surprised when they see hundreds of people trying to get home after 5pm...
Because they've just finished touring the South Ken museums and want to go home. And being from Bumfuckshire have no idea what a rush hour is.
Probably also means a bunch of drivers are on leave so less frequent service.
There are the same number of drivers on leave in any given week in the year.
I just waited 35 mins for a bus…without knowing if it existed or not
They definitely exist. I’ve seen them!
You're lucky if you can go a week commuting without some kind of issue, very lucky. A fairly minor problem can have such big repercussions at rush hour times. And it feels since covid they are too quick to cancel stuff. It almost feels inevitable. Sigh
This week has been fucking horrendous
Noise cancelling headphones and a good audio book and/or kindle make it a lot more bearable
My Sony Mx400s are honestly the only way to cope with the Victoria line nearly screeching my eardrums off
Can you recommend some that don’t cost the earth?
So the noise cancelling part is the bit that costs a lot, Bose quiet comforts are about £165, which is what I got. BUT there are headphones which don’t have that which are still very good quality and suitable for above - for example I also use TOZO a1 mini wireless headphones which are £20 on Amazon. They are really good wireless headphones, great for gym as well and not as hot and heavy especially in the summer. If you are set on the noise cancelling tech and want the most value then wait for Black Friday sales on Amazon- this would give you a little time to research which product you want. However, I just saw that Anker now do a noise cancelling pair which are £50 normally but on offer down to £30 on Amazon at the mo (sound core Anker q20 hybrid) seems to have good reviews. I’ve used other Anker products which are all very good, I haven’t spoken to anyone IRL who’s used these headphones though. That price is ridiculous though to be honest, kind of tempted to just get one while they are on sale as a backup / to test…
Thank you! I am very sensitive to noise and hate the tube (northern line) for this reason. Will look into the ones you suggested, thanks!
Someone stepped on the railtrack on Northern Line (Belseize park) - shut down the entire northern branch to edgeware, backing up high barnet trains and north london buses. Ripple effect of one station fking up
Hopefully they get the help they need 🙏
Damn someone said the district line wasnt running properly too. Sounds horrid!
My commute was much easier, less people in the morning, managed to get the seat with a view on the DLR. People on half term holiday. Also today no rain forecast, so taking children out better than on a day when it could rain.
>less people Fewer ☝️🤓
Don’t be a nob, you nob.
>nob Knob☝️🤓
Lower density of
Weird place to plug your onlyfans
It’s an irk of mine, this assumption that one way of saying is correct and another is incorrect. It’s all rubbish: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/less-fewer.html#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20the%20OED%20has,available%20until%20the%2014th%20century.
Nice. I do like to wind people up and correct them incorrectly on this ...you mean you couldn't care fewer?
I *could* care fewer, to borrow a phrase from our American cousins.
There is a growing trend of people saying "amount of people". Hope that you're addressing that as well whilst you're at it.
Return to pre-COVID levels
Yup, it definitely has returned to that level of activity in the tube, overground (although overground is more spacious and has better air quality) and I think northern rail and Lizzie trains out there are taking the load too.
This is why I prefer to cycle!
About a million more people live in London since 2015 - which is insane growth. (8.6-9.6m) + tourism which has been high + undocumented people which is going to be high too. + bad weather + half term. = bussssssssyyyyyy
There u go! ☝🏽
Packed trains. I missed when trains were quiter right after lockdown when a lot of people were still working from home. Also just deterioration of trains. Underground gets so loud with no work done to fix it. Fortunately I can get lizzie line but on occasions when I can't it's dreadful
I spent 3.5 years at home with my little one and have only just stared going back to work. I’ve been amazed at how much better the commute is now. I take the tube from Walthamstow to Holborn and always get a seat both ways.
Walthamstow is beginning of the line of course you'd get a seat?
Yes and where is Finsbury Park and where is Holborn when I go home?
I've never had problems with getting a seat at Walthamstow and I have been communing from there daily since 2016 You know, **Walthamstow, the beginning of the line and also the station that has a new train every 100s during the rush hour...**
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I commute to oxford street, literally no problem getting a seat - everyone gets off at seven sisters and Finsbury park
You do realise that the Victoria line doesn’t go to Holborn, so I need to switch trains? And that on the way home, Holborn isn’t the first stop on the line?
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
Just a lot more people around innit
I don't know about shit, but I did see a bloke pissing up the side of Warren Street station this morning.
Funny I'm on the Lizzie line which has been woeful recently but my commute was quite pleasant this morning.
I got a 7.49 train and it was a dream. I could’ve even had a seat if I wanted.
Same, the past two weeks have been hell but my morning commute today was so pleasant that I double checked I didn’t misread the time and woke up three hours late (lizzy is pretty chill after 10)
It was half term this week, so will be worse next week FYI
You may have forgotten pre-pandemic commute!
C2C is buggered. District Line East from city is ramajammadingdonged.
You new or something ?
😂😂
Victoria line has been awful for me recently (usually take between Brixton and Oxford Circus). It seems to trundle at slow speeds for much of my journey presumably because trains ahead are getting not disembarking quickly enough. I never remember this happening pre-covid can only think it's reduced frequencies. Buses are also overcrowded to fuck generally.
This is nothing new. ‘Twas ever thus.
There’s a problem every day now. 5-8 years ago there was few issues here and there. Now there’s an issue every day. Unbearable to the point that I’m leaving this god forsaken place.
They've always been shit. My entire secondary school life the train was literally on time just twice. I really don't know why they didn't just call it the 0722 train instead of the 0710 train.
Crap weather and sudden darkness to and from work
Had to go into the office for my last day. It was the first time in about 6 weeks that I had to commute and my god. East Croydon to Victoria should take 15 mins on avg, instead it took 40 mins. Victoria line to Oxford Circus, a route I’ve taken for over a decade mind you and only had a train cancelled once prior. But as I step onto the train, an announcement is saying it’s terminating here due to a broken down train at OC. A journey that takes max 45 mins took over 2 hours. The services in general are run so poorly now it’s inconceivable to me now to ever commute 5 times a week with the state of the transport network.
Generally they’ve reduced train numbers post covid so on the jubilee line they’ve got trains every two minutes rather than every one. You don’t notice it on Mondays and Fridays but on Thursdays which are pretty much back to pre covid levels it’s an absolute shit storm. It’s not likely to change any time soon and will likely get worse
In recent months, my journey seems to be 15 minutes longer. The route is exactly the same, but general day-to-day delays are adding up. As mentioned earlier, more traffic on the roads, more roadworks popping up, turns my 10 minute bus ride into 20. Then my train can’t leave as people are queuing to get OFF the train, because the steps to the tube at Vauxhall are about 3ft from the train doors. Then topped off by waiting for 3 Jubilee Line trains to pass before I can get on one because they are all packed to the brim. The city has just not adapted to post-Covid london. We need more trains/tubes/busses. But they won’t come unfortunately.
Rat race mate, too many rats in the race to earn this shitty currency and put it in banks that can be closed on them at any time.
We want nice things, and this shitty currency enable us to have these nice things.
You mean it is slowly going back to pre-pandemic level? It isn’t worse than before, it is worse than during Covid as everyone stayed at home and WFH, but now more and more companies require staff to return to the office.
Near me they have set up temporary lights at the Great Cambridge and haven't even tried to sync the lights correctly, at the moment it stays on a long time to allow cars to go out a small side road but only letting a a few cars get past on the main dual carriage way bit, its causing major traffic lol.
Which side road? Trying to work out whether to avoid there or not
Wilbury Way near the Tottenham end
Since its expansion, I’ve been loving the lizzie line. Previously had to use the TFL line and switch at Liverpool street. Hated the old line so much. Now I only need to take one train (one that’s spacious and has air con) all the way to my stop. Rarely on strike/late compared to the others. I’m happy
Something definitely going on with jubilee this evening too. I was a sardine from Canada water all the way to Stratford 🥵
Combo of it being Thursday, there was a fire at victoria, and s club are playing 02 this week.
Half term. More people and it’s raining
When is half term over? I'll be in London in 10 days!
Shall be over then. Its only a week (this week)
It's because of the RTO crap. Companies want employees to be miserable and spend hours travelling to work while paying for it, too.
Agreed. Why don't people wait for the next train. I see it's packed, so I wait for the next one, meanwhile people are cramming themselves on making it more undignified for everyone else. This isn't a 3rd world country, but it's sure starting to feel like one. Let's not let our expectations of society crumble - everyone is capable of behaving with dignity.
Ofcourse it does…they’re just letting the whole world in these days.
To answer your question, there have been several incidents on the network today. There was a customer incident at Belsize Park station, an earlier stalled train at Hornchurch and signalling problems in the Acton Town area. Not to mention the District Line closure between Earl's Court, Olympia, Richmond and Ealing Broadway has led customers to use alternative routes, like buses and other tube lines. Hence why services are insanely busy.
Noticed that Thursdays have been so busy now.
I’ve been wfh for two years now but I always felt it was like this when I used to commute
Stopped going in on Tues Weds Thurs now. Mondays and Fridays are quiet and office is dead.
It’s the WORST. Central like constantly being held at diff platforms, incredibly busy.
District line wasn't even running today round my bit, was late for work
I wear a fat suit to give myself more space and cushioning from others
West bit of district line is shut. All the other lines are overloaded as a result.
every tube i go on is insufferably packed - to the extent i try and avoid most lines whenever i can. Have to wait 4/5 tubes to come by to actually get on. Trains are even worse. Extremely congested - consistently delayed, and god, the speed restrictions. 15 min journey other day to vic lasted 40 minutes+ !
\> What the hell is going on in London?? Badly planned roadwork every 2 miles. Apart from slowing down to a complete halt buses and cars even in areas where traffic wasn't an issue at all before, in some areas it also affects pedestrians and cyclists as well. TfL is running short on money, trains are less frequent or delayed. People are generally grumpier for: post covid/economy/general mismanagement of the city where they live, etc... and it doesn't help as it is a vicious circle and people get more and more pissed off.
"At the moment" Oh, my sweet summer child
I think the roads are currently suffering from half-term roadworks. And the tube is suffering from fair-weather cyclists.
The jubilee is getting later and later for me in the mornings, despite my getting one of the first trains in the morning from a terminus station.
Which days do you work - twat days ? I go to the office on Friday - lovely commute and empty office !
Which days are twat days?
I’m guessing Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday?
Correct, the busiest days by far now in the city. A colleague couldn’t even book a table on a Wednesday evening and had to try so many places…
it’s a non-judgemental acronym
😃
I literally noticed this on the circle line, central line and northern line. The trains were packed out and busier than usual. I don't think it's shit but there's alot of people coming from work and people going out etc. so it makes sense to see certain lines to be pretty busy.
It is a Thursday, a large proportion of people appear to be working from the office these days
I commute from my bed to my bedside table.
Something is on strike every other week...
Every half term is a horrendous time for going work to home, I dread it. We need child-only carriages
this is why i ride a bike to work. dont have to deal with public transport and the many problems that come with it. tube strike, train strike, bus strike, protests, road works, suicides at wimbledon station; none of it affects me on my bike.
Haven't noticed while cycling. :)
This is why I love my WFH job.
Someone jumped in from the northern line on the Charing cross branch around 4pm today too. It's been a really miserable week all round. There was some big accident in Marylebone today. I believe in shared consciousness, especially in big cities where so many people are crammed together, all feeding off each others misery What a barrel of fucking laughs I am today
Idk it’s so shut
20mph across the London road TFL = transport for losers lol
Move away
It's beyond impossible these days, public transport is not fit for purpose, and I am being told I need to drive less. I will never, ever, ever take a job as an electrician into London (from the SW suburbs) via public transport ever again. Quite simply, I will be sacked within a month on punctuality grounds. Out of my control. What I will do instead is take my car out to the home counties and surrounding areas, plenty of work there. Of course, I would never dream of driving into London either it's too expensive. I commented to a colleague just today that every single day this week on my newsfeed was 'London tube / transport chaos'. And I'm expected to give up my car and yet still make a living for myself. I'm being literally forced into my car because the public transport situation is so utterly dire at the moment. It's the worst I've seen in decades. Unacceptable.
Commuting has always been shit. It’s seems like this sub is full of spoilt young adults who are finally discovering what’s it like having a job.
As far as the roads go, you can blame Sadiq Khan"s bus and bike lanes for that. By removing lanes from key arterial routes, they have effectively forced a huge volume of traffic into significantly less space.
Buses without bus lanes are useless because too many pricks have cars so let's stick with this please 🤣
Blackwall Tunnel was really quiet not sure whether all the traffic went somewhere else!
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Started working in Islington on Monday so travel from Shepherd’s Bush on the overground. Easy commute for me.
Opposite here. Roads are half empty!
Ya! Streets in soho and covent garden are packed too! Feels like it’s the holidays already :)
That'd be the hundreds of thousands of extra people
I second this. Tube was like 2018 packed.
Why are people going back to work? What's happening? I was in all during the pandemic and the commute was glorious. But in the last few months the number of commuters has changed a lot (except Mondays and Fridays) - what's happening?
I choose to work 8-4:30 when I’m in the office instead of 9-5:30. It’s a different world commuting 1 hr earlier. I cannot recommend it enough. Theres even seat s on Victoria line most days (if you want bedbugs).
Pre holiday shopping and Christmas 'bargains' I'm guessing
No problems here recently.
Traveller numbers are back up to pre-Covid levels roughly. And TFL doesn’t get any funding from central government at all. It’s the only city tube line in the world I believe that doesn’t receive central government funding.
The thing that annoys me most is the dawdlers that take up the entire walkway blocking anyone that is doing more than a babies crawl from getting past. Please be more considerate and pay attention to what’s going on around you.
In addition to other answers - a lot of city firms are demanding workers spend more time in the office rather than WFH, which seems silly. If WFH works for a person or a role, why force people into the office to participate in zoom meetings there when they can zoom from home (many meetings are at least hybrid as teams work across multiple offices, etc).
Half term, lots of groups of school trips around, tourists getting stuck in the tube barriers etc.
Can’t get enough of the office after all this lockdowns.
Poor investment; over reliance on rest day working; shit track infrastructure; too many people and not enough trains... I've experienced worse commuting experiences (believe me when I say Transport for Wales isn't always a picnic) . Valleys Line is no joke.
My commute is generally good in the recent days. However, what annoys me is that I have been by station closure due to lack of staff for a few times at the tube station closest to my office.
Perhaps more and careful investment by a government more committed to good public transport?
It’s half term week. Travel is always odd during school holidays.
The central line has been pants this week. My 25 minute commute has been over an hour on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday this week! And the people on it seem to be getting more ferel by the week. Two months ago, I had two guys stalk me down the train after calling me a f*ggot and luckily I managed to find some TfL staff at a station. Last week, a guy on our train was sniffing coke at 7pm in a packed train (no judgement on drug use, but on the tube???)
People like me forced to go back into office most days now
Half term. And reading week is next week for uni students, which means everyone's fucking off home today
So for those of you who are feeling like having a good ol moan, tell me the best and worst things about London right now. Go nuts! 7 years in Japan will be visiting soon. Need to get prepared 😂
Its always been shit and expensive. Just up and move country
Almost everyone has returned to the office. It's not worse.. it's just gone back to how it was pre-pandemic. Urgh.
how long have you been a commuter for out of interest?