Trails

Books | Film | Trails | Vesuvio

27 Ianuarius 2023 - Adetswil

Tweet

This morning I woke up far to early (jetlag? still?), so I've been updating my trails pages. Of course the most travelled lately remains the Tobel of the Kemptnerbach. Catching up travels in England and Spain and Norway and the US and Poland I've added many new notes and routes. Why do I do it? I suppose it's nice to look back on and remember my adventures. Surely no one else looks at it. Probably the same reason I have spreadsheets of books, shotglasses, addresses for Christmas cards, winetasting notes, etc. I have always enjoyed collecting and organizing knowledge. The time it takes to fulfill this need is often more than I have though, so I have to let things go. I could be more efficient. I could automate aggregation from various sources but links go stale and broken and APIs change. If I want things to last I really have to preserve them myself. How many embedded Shutterfly albums in blogs no longer work? How many YouTube videos have I had taken down? How long until Strava puts everything behind a paywall? A newspaper clicking can sit in a file forever, but a hyperlink to the article is likely to be broken in a few years. Still, I keep on writing and organizing and hoping to organize my small corpus of information about trails in a useful way. Part of me hopes that not many people ever look at it, so there's no reason to monetize and destroy it. ChatGPT is giving us a window into a paradigm beyond Google Search - it's what we all hoped Ask Jeeves was going to be. For many people it passes their Turing test. Will ChatGPT take us beyond the ad-supported internet and render the business models of many big tech companies obsolete? I suppose that's the creative desctruction of the marketplace. I'll keep writing though.