Tootfinder

The #git history command deserves more attention
https://lalitm.com/post/git-history/

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

As a teaser, I’ll thread the 20 tech lessons from the talk here — without the context, but at least you’ll get the vibe.
–––
LESSON 1: Know what problem you are solving.
LESSON 2: Security requires threat modeling.

Sonja Drimmer’s post asks us to conduct our own informal survey of whether job listings actually require “AI skills,” whatever that might mean.
As it happens, a colleague shared this fascinating graph from a fairly bland report. It gets at roughly the same question. Note the position of “AI skills” in the list.
This is for 2026.
https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf
2/2

I've finished reading Simon Winder's "#Germania" a while ago, but I've been slacking with the review. This is a book about the history of #Germany, in the wide meaning of word. However, it's not your boring detailed history book. The author takes us on a deeply personal journey across German landscape, across tiny towns and great forests, Schlosses, churches and monuments, and uses that as a context to bring the country's surprisingly interesting history to light. And honestly, it works — it is deeply enjoyable, to the point of making me wonder if one day I should actually move to Germany, get a Bahncard 100 and start exploring myself.
I didn't quote the book here, but if I were to choose one quote that really resonated with me, it would be:
"""
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. […] And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
[…]
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
"""
(Simon Winder, Germania)
And if you follow me, you have evidence that the part about crisscrossing towns is so true: the best things I've posted here I found by complete accident, especially the murals.
#books #bookstodon

(I am pleased to report, for those who don't know the story, that the MN Orch musician's union absolutely steamrolled that terrible board. Management locked them out for 15 months, during which time they staged multiple self-produced concerts without any help from the management they supposedly needed to function. The conductor who'd rocketed them to international fame resigned, and began conducting the locked-out orchestra's sold-out concerts. Eventually the board caved, tails between their legs. Many of them left, the tool of an orch president resigned, what remained of the board instated the musicians' preferred candidate as the new president, and the board got absolutely none of their precious Powerpoint plan except for a glammy new lobby. It was a rout. The orchestra is now doing better than ever — and the supposed imminent budget implosion that the old board had been raising hell about suddenly vanished along with them.)