Last day in Switzerland, and indeed Europe. Did little aside from seeing a bit of Zürich. I enjoyed my visit, but it’s good to be heading back home.
Nerding out at the Swiss Transport Museum, in Luzern. Super interesting! Can definitely recommend.
Mark one more off the bucket list: travelling through the Gotthard Base Tunnel.
Hired a car and spent my last full day in Italy exploring a bit of the wider Veneto region. Visited the town my grandparents grew up in and also went on a small bush-walk up at Cansiglio Forest. The landscape was absolutely breathtaking. The photos I took do it no justice (and I took a lot of them).
I know Venice is known for its canals, and they’re certainly something to behold, but this single rail tram-line blew me away.
Edit: it occurred to me that these “trams” are running on regular tiers, and use this rail for the return current. That means they can get away with using just one overhead wire instead of two. I guess they can also use the rail for guiding the vehicle around curves as well? Seems like a bit of a disadvantage over other trolly-bus systems with trolly polls that can move around traffic.
Venice in the morning.
Vincent’s post about Tinylytics recognising www sub-domains is a welcome one. I’ve had a domain setup for a week in Tinylytics that was recording zero hits. I thought it was because I placed the script tag in the header. But, no: I naturally forgot the “www” when registering the URL. 🤦
Dealing with the coin laundry driers suck. You buy more time by putting more money in, but the laundry points don’t make it clear that you’ve already paid for time and all you need to do is press start on the machine. I paid for drier time I didn’t want twice on this trip.
I was wondering what to do for my second day in Bologna until something told me that Florence was less than an hour away. So I decided to take a day trip.
Spent a bit of time in the small but lovely university botanical gardens in Bologna this morning. Walking around a new city, I’ve found myself being attracted to parks and gardens. A bit more serene than the hussle and bussle one finds at buildings or squares.
Breakfast in Parma. Naturally parmesan cheese is on the menu.
Helped someone set up their eSim this morning. His phone only allowed an eSim setup by scanning a QR code, so I had to take a photo of the Airalo QR code, just so he could take a photo of my photo. The process worked, but the experience was utter crap (fix your software, Samsung).
Front of the Palazzo del Governatore, in Parma, on a warm and lazy Sunday afternoon. The street was closed off for an event but most of the other streets were just as quiet.
On the shore of lake Como. Plenty of boat activity on the water today. For myself, I was happy to stay on dry land.
Oof! It looks like one of my friends I’m traveling with, the one who did all the planning and was the most enthusiastic about seeing the places we’re visiting, has come down with something and is out for the day. Poor guy. I feel so bad for him. Really unfortunate timing.
View from the top of Torre Castello San Vigilto, in Bergamo.
On the subject of Google Maps, I think it’s time the app had something akin to tabs, so we can have multiple instances of Google Maps at one time. If I have a journey in progress, and I need to search for something at our destination, the only way I know how to do it is to stop the active journey, do the search, and start the journey again from scratch (which involves entering all the details again).
I’ve started getting around this by opening Google Maps in a browser tab, but it’s just not as good as the mobile app. Having separate map tabs would go a long way here: have the active journey in one tab, do searches in another, and simply switch between them without loosing anything. You could even use it to plan jouneys in advanced, then when you’re ready to start them, just go to the tab and tap “Start”.
A resonably elegant solution to avoid backing out of active navigations or typing things in three or four times.
TIL you can save planned journeys in Google Maps for later. You make the plan, select a suggestion from the list, and instead of starting it, you “Pin” it. Then you can recall that journey from the “Go” tab. Not the most intuitive UI there is, but I’m glad that this feature exists.
A day of site-seeing around Milan. Going through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on our way to Duomo di Milano, the cathedral.
Another sunning building, the Duomo di Milano. A lot more “traditional” than the Sagrada Família but still very impressive.
On The Reddit Strike
Ben Thompson has been writing about the Reddit strike in his daily updates. I like this excerpt from the one he wrote yesterday:
Reddit is miffed that Google and OpenAI are taking its data, but Huffman and team didn’t create that data: Reddit’s users did, under the watchful eyes of Reddit’s unpaid mod workforce. In other words, my strong suspicion is that what undergirds everything that is happening this week is widespread angst and irritation that everything that was supposed to be special about the web, particularly the bit where it gives everyone a voice, has turned out to be nothing more than grist to be fought over by millionaires and billionaires.
That, though, takes me back to Bier’s tweet; the crazy thing about the Internet is that said grist is in fact worth fighting over.
It’s easy for me to say this, as I’m not a user of Reddit, but I have full sympathy for the striking moderators.
You spend much of your free time volunteering to keep a community on a site, producing value for it’s users and owner, with the expectation that the site would recognise your efforts and reciprocate by serving your needs with, say, an API. I can understand how enraging that would feel when they turn around and “alter the deal” while expecting the mods to continue as if nothing has changed.
So good on the moderators showing that they too have leverage.
And as to OpenAI using the API to train its model: well yeah I can understand the CEO of Reddit feeling shitty about that, but I would’ve hope he would have the ingenuity to solve that while maintaining the needs of those that actually provide value to the site. Either he doesn’t which, given that he’s one of the founders, I find hard to believe; or he just doesn’t want to.