Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 129
- 1
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
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've... picked up a Claude Max 20x plan. No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit). It's so fucking good, but at the same time, the more I use Opus 4.6, the more I'm impressed by how close Sonnet 4.6 gets. Sure, Opus is legitimately better, but the difference is nowhere near as stark as say, Gemini Flash vs Pro, or GPT's Thinking or Instant mode. Anthropic cooked, and I can't wait to try Mythos when the version for plebs comes out.
PS: If anyone has a good guide to Claude Code or agentic setups, I need one. I have some serious experimentation to do while I have it.
Last time you solicited requests for AI tasks the motte crashed for like a full day.
I'd say work on TheMotte bug fixes if I was being perfectly altruistic.
What I personally want is my own personal incremental game, cultivation setting, time loop, etc.
What incremental games do you like? I've invested many hours in kitten game, cividle, idle wizard, magic research 2, as well as of course the classics clicker heroes and cookie clicker long ago.
I've tried probably two dozen others (I put a ton of time into cell to singularity last year but don't really recommend it). Military Incremental Complex is the one I played more recently, its fine but nothing to get devoted to. Execute didn't really hook me, same problem with astro prospector, farmer vs potatoes, zombidle, click mage.
Groundhog life is maybe one of my favorites. Or just any games in that vein. Magic Research 1 and 2 are both similar.
https://old.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/115dfw6/collection_of_time_loop_incrementals/
Time loops incrementals just scratch an itch.
I will occasionally go browse game recommendations from /r/incremental_games. I've maybe played hundreds over the years.
I do eventually end up cheating or abandoning them if cheating is impossible. Usually I just cheat to make sure it's not an "idle" game. Cheatengine for speed hack and memory editing, and if that doesn't work, editing the system click and abusing offline bonus time mechanics.
Creature collector games I tend to avoid. And loot focused auto battlers have to be best in genre for me to like them.
I’ll never forget how I learned hexadecimal. When I was very young I was a curious kid and I loved my video games. I ended up getting irked at one where I found it too difficult to advance in the game so I started looking for ways to manipulate the engine and get all the most advanced items and then just destroy my way through everything.
I ended up downloading a hex editor, and I located and then started editing the .d2s save files to max all my character attributes, stats and abilities during runtime execution. The rush of euphoria I felt was awesome. I felt like a genius and a God. Naturally you could only make it work seamlessly in offline play, once you connect to the server you start battling against explicit memory inspection. I didn’t have time for that.
Reverse engineering is extremely fun on closed, proprietary systems to me but Christ is it a pain in the ass as you move on to more complex things. RE is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my entire life. In another life it’d have consumed 100% of my attention and I’d be doing that professionally. I’ve reached pretty high levels of mathematically competency and done advanced courses, but even so I was never one of those guys who could see the matrix. I envy those people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link