I’m building In the Long Run where runners do virtual runs on famous routes around the world. The app tallies up your Strava mileage and plots your total distance as progress against country- or continent-spanning routes. The intention is to provide long-term inspiration and motivation; life is a marathon, not a sprint. You can have a bad month or season but still make progress on your virtual traversal of the world. The app shows your progress on interactive maps, which lets users do some exploring of their own. But I had long wanted to enrich the maps with interesting sights or historical sites. For routes I was familiar with I could build such lists myself but that doesn’t scale to routes spanning countries I am not familiar with. So I set out to find a data source for points of interest that I could build a pipeline off. Along the way I wrestled with taste and biases, and fought a hallucinating llm.…