site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   216 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 1st, 2026

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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Are you telling me that GURPS is so realistic, it triggers antiterrorism safeguards? I think SJ games needs to advertise with that.

You know the story about GURPS Cyberpunk and the Secret Service, right?

Sadly, I lost my copy of Vehicles (2nd edition) on a Canadian bus trip in the early 2000s, so I'm stuck getting Claude to write me something similar by trial and error. Things Claude has argued are true:

  • With the projectile and powder charge held constant, shortening a cannon barrel increases chamber pressure.
  • Shell walls need to be extra thick to survive, unsupported, max chamber pressure being applied to them, or they'll deform laterally.
  • The best way to simulate shell fragmentation is to build from scratch a geometric model of the shell casing, rederived from the shell and filler mass values.
    Fixing any of these is fraught, as the code is still triggering classifier safety lockdowns when I try to load it into context. Fixing that and further debugging the shell/gun stat calculators is my current goal.

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