Sumesh

Infrastructure engineer.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Yes, the tweet is right. Germany really does have more castles than the US has McDonald's, about 25,000 of them versus roughly 13,800. But look at the map again. The biggest red blaze sits over France, and France has almost twice as many castles as Germany does.

France has around 45,000 castles, the most of any country on Earth. In some areas they sit so thick you get more than one per town. One river valley alone holds about 3,000. A rural patch in the southwest is nicknamed the land of a thousand and one castles, and that's barely a stretch. Even the official protected list runs to about 11,000.

The reason this corner of the world is so stuffed with stone forts comes down to one thing. For most of the last thousand years, it ran on landlords. Hundreds of them, each holding his own scrap of ground.

Germany only became a single country in 1871. Before that, it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which, despite the grand name, was really just a loose heap of hundreds of small territories. Each had its own ruler, its own laws, its own taxes, even its own little army. In the 1700s there were about 300 of them. Count the truly tiny ones, the estates that were basically one castle and a few fields owned by a single knight, and you get closer to 1,800. Every duke, bishop and count wanted a stronghold to rule from, so every one of them built one. The Germans even have a word for that era of pocket-sized kingdoms. They call it Kleinstaaterei, which roughly means tiny-state-itis.

France got there by a different route. Its first castles were rough wooden forts, thrown up fast to survive Viking raids. Later they were rebuilt in stone. Then, once the fighting died down, they became show-off palaces, with wealthy families competing to out-build the family down the road.

You can still see how crammed it got. One stretch of the Rhine river in Germany, about 40 miles long, has roughly 40 castles lined up along it. That's about one every mile. Most were built to guard the river and squeeze a toll from every boat that passed. Strip away the fairy tale, and a castle was mostly a wealthy man's way of saying this land is mine, and you'll pay to cross it.

Then Napoleon showed up. Starting around 1803 he swallowed the little territories into bigger ones, the thousand-year-old empire was dissolved in 1806, and within a generation the hundreds of mini-states had shrunk to a few dozen.

So those red dots tell a bigger story. They're a picture of how chopped-up this part of the world used to be. Every dot marks a spot where some duke or knight or bishop once decided he was boss of his patch of Europe, and built a wall to prove it.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

People of pi. pi is moving to the @earendilworks GitHub organization. Starting with the pi website.

https://t.co/fY5Gj2oY3L

Please file any issues related to the website there. The old website repo is no more.

[Sumesh @sumesh]

@qrsupport I have a confirmed flight on March 7 from Kolkata to Dusseldorf, unable to reach you via message or call. How can I get a flight ticket cancellation and refund?

[Sumesh @sumesh]

@adamdenverco your site https://t.co/BVjqNV8hNV is giving 500 error

[Sumesh @sumesh]

@iavins https://t.co/H2Ud9aOapa and https://t.co/PDmFv7ju4X have more details

[Sumesh @sumesh]

Interesting tidbit about how Bluesky scaled the DB layer - they hit limits with Postgres and moved to Scylla and SQLite.

Source: https://t.co/7Q5L2dSPxg

[Sumesh @sumesh]

Tagging resident SQLite devrel @iavins