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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   324 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 4, 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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While my projects are on hold, my mind keeps wandering.

I've been thinking for a while that search engines started sucking enough that probably some for of an alternative might be feasible. The idea isn't crawl the entire web, because that's kind of pointless, but to do a very narrow search, and even curate the index. I had the thought that something fairly basic as starting a shallow crawl on the Motte, would quickly yield a decent catalogue of interesting stuff on the internet. I took a quick look at some FOSS search engines, and so far I tried:

While some of these projects are cool in their own right, I'm looking for something:

  • Simple, that I can spin up and debug easily (so far each of these projects has been a pain in the ass to look into).
  • Not resource intensive (most these projects are large indexes needing lots of ram and disk space)
  • Giving me a good readable map of the indexed sites, and an ability to prune them (or failing that, back to point 1, are easy enough to grok that I can code it myself)

Anyone have any recomendations?

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.


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