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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2mo ago (text post)   439 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 28, 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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I recently wrote several pages of documentation at work - in Confluence. Having gotten entirely used to the auto-save features of modern text editing software, I thought nothing of just shutting down my machine at end of day. Come next day, it was of course all gone.

It shouldn't be gone, it should be saved as a draft. Have you looked in your 'recently worked on' and/or clicked Edit on the page you were modifying?

I clicked edit for sure, but found nothing. Didn't check anything else though - never even knew of "recently worked on"!

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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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