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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  11d ago (text post)   Edited 3d ago   645 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 22, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Do some napkin math for power consumption, weight (esp of wiring), and waste heat (est ~60% of LED power will eventually go into whatever surface they're mounted to as heat). It's easy to think of these things as rounding errors, individually, but they do add up, and it's easy for your eyes to get bigger than your stomach when it comes to them. LiPos let you get away with a lot of goofy things from a power consumption perspective, but they're not free.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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