Replace “gods” with “billionaires” and I think I see what Sir Terry was getting at here…

“Gods are not very introspective. It has never been a survival trait. The ability to cajole, threaten, and terrify has always worked well enough. When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency toward quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow’s-point-of-view is seldom necessary.

Which had led, across the multiverse, to men and women of tremendous brilliance and empathy devoting their entire lives to the service of deities who couldn’t beat them at a quiet game of dominoes. For example, Sister Sestina of Quirm defied the wrath of a local king and walked unharmed across a bed of coals and propounded a philosophy of sensible ethics on behalf of a goddess whose only real interest was in hairstyles, and Brother Zephilite of Klatch left his vast estates and his family and spent his life ministering to the sick and poor on behalf of the invisible god F’rum, generally considered unable, should he have a backside, to find it with both hands, should he have hands. Gods never need to be very bright when there are humans around to be it for them.”

- Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

#TerryPratchett #discworld

The nyckelharpa is a folk instrument from Sweden 🇸🇪 with a long standing tradition there. "Nyckelharpa" is a Swedish word, "nyckel" meaning "key" and "harpa" being a general term for a stringed instrument. Its key features (hah, see what I did there?) are the sympathetic strings and a keybox full of wooden keys. Some translate it into English to "keyed fiddle" 🗝️ 🎻 "viola de teclas" in Spanish or "viola d'amore a chiavi" in Italian - although it is not a fiddle or viola ;)

How it works: I produce the sound with a bow on the strings, like on any other bowed instrument, but instead of touching the strings with the fingers of my left hand and pushing them down on a fretboard or fingerboard to play a melody, I press a key. The key moves a little wooden tangent to the string and tada, the note changes 🎉 The magical sound of the nyckelharpa is created from its sympathetic strings (usually 12) which are enhancing every note I play on the four melody strings.

If you want to hear some nyckelharpa music, you're welcome on my duos bandcamp https://aklejafolk.bandcamp.com or search for "Akleja" wherever you like to stream music. More names you can look for there are Josefina Paulson, Hazelius Hedin, Emilia Amper, Väsen, Daniel Pettersson / Sotali, Erik Rydvall - there are so many FANTASTIC players out there! 😭

The instrument pictured here was made by Mats Wester.

#nyckelharpa #musiciansofmastodon #folkmusic #instrument #acousticmusic #music #luthiery #stringinstrument #sweden #violin #viola

Today in InfoSec Job Security News:

I was looking into an obvious ../.. vulnerability introduced into a major web framework today, and it was committed by username Claude on GitHub. Vibe coded, basically.

So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month.

https://github.com/search?q=author%3Aclaude&type=commits&s=author-date&o=desc

As I looked through the code I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.

Are we all millenials here or is that a misperception?

Could people boozt this? I am so curious.

Are you a: