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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  13d ago (text post)   395 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 18, 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 fundraised $500K for the nonprofit I'm running; it arrived a few days ago in our bank account. This means I get to run my small intelligence agency for another year.

One year?

For some reason I got the impression you were running it by yourself and all online.

The drafts I sometimes post on Thursday are by myself, but I have a larger team that does other things (e.g., parsing Twitter, reddit, making sense of stuff when wars start, etc.) We also wanted to have an emergency response team.

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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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