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thesagan | 1 year ago

That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun.

There’s a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which suggests that there were quite a few towers but not that many and not that tall as shown here. In any case it still had an impressive skyline for its day.

If I remember to do so, I’ll come back here and post a link.

discuss

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YeGoblynQueenne|1 year ago

>> I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun.

Isn't that really weird? I realise that most people experience the internet only through their phone browser and social media apps, where it's hard to do many of the common and simple things one can do on a computer, like pasting a link. How is it that those extremely fiddly interfaces have come to be the norm?

tpmoney|1 year ago

Because they're with us everywhere and conveniently at hand most of the time. A traditional computer, even in laptop form, is comparatively bulky, unwieldy and inconvenient. Laptops don't fit into your pocket, they don't pull out for one handed use while you're waiting in line and they don't slip easily back in once the line starts moving again. To type in text, you need both hands free, and a relatively stable surface to place your laptop on.

Phones trade ease of use for ease of access. They allow people to be online and participating in an online discussion when and where a traditional computer would be prohibitive or inconvenient. And as a trade off those people aren't always able to do (or conveniently do) something they would do on those traditional computers. Most people most of the time seem to find that an acceptable tradeoff. And to be fair to those most people, I write far more than I copy and paste links so it's not unreasonable to find that tradeoff to be acceptable.

Sharlin|1 year ago

Most people never need to manually copypaste links on a mobile device because they can share links, via the browser’s share button, straight to all the apps relevant to them. Use cases like sharing URLs on a legacy non-mobile-oriented web platform such as HN are an extreme outlier. In any case, copying a URL via the browser’s "Share->Copy" or equivalent isn’t IMO too onerous a task even compared to C-l C-c.