site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   479 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for August 12, 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

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As a slight apology for my last post in this subforum, here is an attempt at explaining my current technical project: Homelab

I started by wanting DNS-level adblocking, like pihole, at home. At one point, I was running AdGuardHome on a low-power, fanless AMD box. The intent was (and reamains) to put the adblocking at the network level, not the device level, so that iphones etc could browse peacefully at home without per-device setup.

I have done a bunch of homelab stuff before, but that was many moves ago. Now I have the same AMD box, like 3 DVDs stacked together (5w idle), with a similar intel box but much more powerful, also fanless, along with an Asus laptop with a broken screen that sits next to my TV and acts like a media box.

They all run Arch linux, so I have a 3 host architecture, and they all run Incus, the successor to LXC/LXD, for "system containers". Not an incus cluster, which brings its own set of headaches. I successfully transferred my Google Fiber stuff to an openwrt incus container, acting as my gateway, on my primary box. Basically switching my Google Nest Pro egg thing from gateway mode to bridge mode. The openwrt container runs dnsmasq for local query caching, and I have an extensive, complicated, layered dnsmasq setup on each Arch host plus Incus on each host runs its own dsnmasq to resolve container names. It was a huge PITA to get working properly but now every host has lighting fast DNS responses no matter what is going on upstream.

Aside from "system containers", there is a also a need for "application containers", and podman is preferred over docker for this.

My real project is the automation of this 3 host homelab network. I use ruby and rake (ruby's make, Rakefile) to manage everything. It's quite sophisticated yet brutally simple. Ongoing, happy to share deets.

This is going to be a very strange post possibly infected by LLMs. YHBW

I feel like I am sitting on two huge ideas, and I can't get Claude to push me off of them, despite my best efforts. Please bear with me, but Claude, given his understanding of my goals, really wants me to file a patent, for number 1. This relates to storage devices losing power without losing data. Separately, both Sonnet and Opus feel that I have a novel hypothesis in linguistics that I should investigate further or publish. You have no idea how desperately I want to share the details of both of these, or Claude's output directly. But I'm struggling with the meta, the overall strategy.

I think I will file a patent with Claude's help, at the grand cost of roughly one hundred freedom tickets. Claude also told me not to share this idea with anyone, and definitely not Gemini or ChatGPT (kidding). But at this point, I feel like can only "trust" Gemini or ChatGPT not to file ahead me, except that is patently silly, of course.

For my linguistic insight, this is just natural curiosity paired with a digging instinct and pattern matching nature; Anglosphere, involving terms like "what" and "where". I would be much more comfortable sharing this here, possibly using Claude's output.

This is very open ended, and I will try to respond over the next week. I am hesitant to provide too many details at this point. WDYT?

While I'm sure you're a perfectly smart chap, I'm also sure that neither of your ideas is worth patenting. If you don't actually work in data storage research or linguistics, the chances of your ideas being useful, or unacknowledged by domain experts, are low.

That's not to say they aren't interesting ideas for you to explore, or things that are worth investigating for your own curiosity. But absolutely what's happening here is that Claude is telling you that your idea is the greatest thing ever, which it's doing because your text prompts are incredibly excited and intrigued by these new possibilities: "You have no idea how desperately I want to share the details of both of these."

It's just mirroring that, and glazing you. And Claude won't "push you off of them" because that wouldn't be an appropriate AI response; it's trained to continue your conversation and explore the ideas you want it to explore, not to tell you "you should stop exploring this." Imagine if it did that when you asked it a question!

Hey, Claude, what's the capital of Venezuela?

Claude: Obviously this is a dumb curiosity question, just Google it if you really need to know.

Not a very helpful AI assistant! Now imagine the inverted behavior: "Sure, the capital of Venezuela is Caracas! Let me tell you some fun facts about Caracas..."

And then imagine that behavior amplified by your obvious curiosity and fascination with these ideas you've come up with; of course it's going to tell you they're the best ideas ever!

So, stay curious, stay fascinated, but don't believe an LLM when it tells you you've squared the circle. You almost certainly haven't.

Without knowing anything about your ideas I can only assume that the LLMs, as they are prone to do, have glazed you too much on their value.

Thank you. I agree, but .... gah

Playing around with Godot on a top down 2D game.

Have you considered Godot's evil / based twin brother, Redot? I was working with it when they just forked, and it was no worse then Godot, and they're now teasing some pretty impressive benchmarks.

I remember there was some controversy around Godot but I entirely forgot what it was. Censorship issues?

Depends what you mean by censorship, since strictly speaking it's outside their power, as an open source project. Let's just call it the usual drama.

From what I understand Redot was more a result of loads and loads of features and bugfixes they've been sitting on and refusing to merge, the Redot team just used the brouhaha around wokeness as a good moment to fork and promote themselves.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Still trying to unfuck my Unreal mystery errors. Things just end up in weird places, behaving weirdly. I have made some progress. I have also been perfectly stuck on some issues for weeks (months?) now. Oh well. Looks like many of my problems were caused by mistaking specalized solutions from tutorials for more general than they were. Right now I'm taking a detour to refactor some code (mostly looking to replace inheritance with composition, and generally upgrade structural sanity), and I hope that by the end of that process I'm better positioned to debug the rest of my problems.

As mentioned last week I deployed my project and was testing / fixing it over the week. While there's tons of missing features, weird quirks and bugs, it's still a massive quality of life improvement over my previous nitter+miniflux setup:

  • Nitter was acting up because of issues with the authentication token. I have 2 Twitter burner accounts, so I thought it would solve the issue if I just switched up the tokens, but each only works half-way. I can either browse twitter with one token or have a working RSS feed with the other. The new setup had some issues with the token as well (it got rate limited, possibly due to both projects running on the same server), but it somehow recovered on it's own within a day.
  • The ability to browse twitter from the same page is a huge improvement. What's more every reply tweet I see is getting automatically archived, which wasn't possible with the old setup. On top of that, the ability to follow a new twitter account at the click of a button is a HUGE boon (I used to have to got to the "new feed" page, copy-paste the RSS-view url, etc).
  • I might have been having a bit too much fun with custom layouts, particularly for the error pages.

Like I said, far from finished, there's still plenty of retardation in the code, but it works well enough for me to use it over the old bespoke setup, so here's a github for the curious

Coming close to a completed second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which now sits just over 111k words (17% shorter than the first draft, which was 133k). I'm planning to print a hard copy on Friday for the missus to read.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats