site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  8hr ago (text post)   75 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 22nd, 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.

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Spent most of the week tweaking the intro story board. There's some things about it I'd still like to change, but at the moment the fixes that come to mind will bring their own issues. In the mean time I'd appreciate any feedback, if any of you guys want to take a look (link expires in 24 hours, DM me if you want a fresh one).

How have you been doing @Southkraut.

Spent the whole weekend doing HEMA, then slept for a day.

But I did manage to fix my tooltips. Then I disliked them for being messy, so I reworked them to have some internal layouting, and now they look nice enough.

intro story board

Alright, let me confess - I am so distracted by the AI art that I can't concentrate on the story. My bad.

I failed to hold myself accountable.

I built out my training/data pipeline and set about building my first pass at a model last week. I hate what I came up with, went back to the drawing board. I read the PINO paper, realized it was too mathy for me to grok at a first pass and promptly lost interest in doing anything last week. However the competition is coming to a close and I never really submitted anything, I might try to train and validate one of their baseline models just for the hell of it.

I talked with the co-worker who suggested it to me, looks like the same thing happened to him. Which is unfortunate. Sometimes it feels like work can really drain the motivation to do similar stuff outside of work. I used to love doing engineering ideas on ML models at home, now it just feels like work. I want to start fucking around with a 3D printed drone idea I have but now I'm afraid I'm just going to repeat this experience again with added money waste as well.

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