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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   620 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 25, 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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Reposting for visibility: Quokkit now supports clicking posts or comments to select them, as well as jumping to the current comment's immediate parent comment or the top-level comment in a given comment's ancestors. Link to manually update the userscript: Quokkit v1.0.2

Next on the docket is making the "More Comments" (expand comment subtrees) and "View More Comments" (fetch more comments under the fold) buttons navigable and actionable with the keyboard. I'd almost include it in this release, but I'm having some timing difficulties with updating state when AJAX stuff happens. I'd call it 95% done, but it needs a little more TLC. The work in progress is in the dev branch.

Comments/concerns/suggestions appreciated.

Have any motteizeans kept chickens? I have a lot of unused square footage in my backyard and can potentially split costs, but almost certainly not labor.

We have chickens. 4 is the max we are allowed legally. It would be cheaper to buy the eggs. But labor is pretty easy. I give them fresh water daily and need to top up their food about twice a week. I check for eggs when I give them fresh water. I clean the coop once a week and do a more thorough cleaning every other month. They're in a chicken tractor that has worked to protect them from predators and I move it during the weekly cleaning. So less than half an hour a day on average I would guess.

It's a bastard depending on where you are. Lots of predators, some (like weasels) very clever about getting in. If you don't have enough forage for them, the feed costs negate most of your savings on eggs. You'll often have either way too many or none at all. Hens will go broody and sneak off to lay in the woods (or under a neighbor's deck) until the eggs go rotten or something eats her. If you can't rig up an automatic gate you'll need someone there every night and morning to shut them in and let them out. If they forget this probably means a coon tearing one of them apart, or a weasel killing everything for fun.

If you're set up well, are handy, can rig up some lights for winter, and have a good source of free forage on hand, they're great.

My backyard is fenced- will that make a difference in going rogue? I know chickens can fly but generally prefer not to.

The only daytime predators are hawks, feral cats, and coyotes. I’ve never seen the latter but the city government and Nextdoor assure me they’re present. I have seen hawks and feral cats in my yard, both of which would necessitate keeping chickens confined to a coop or run. I’m an HVAC tech with construction experience, so ‘being handy’ and ‘set up well’ isn’t a high bar to clear for me. I can get a house sitter if I go out of town who won’t think ‘bring water and food and let the chickens in/out’ is a big deal. Again, it’s possible for me to find someone to split costs, but not labor.

I've seen a "heritage breed" chicken fly 20' straight up into a cedar tree for the night (neighbor's walked a quarter mile to visit, God knows why), but yeah the modern ones can hardly flap their way onto a 3' perch.

Feed is probably your biggest issue on a suburban lawn. Especially doing it in a way that doesn't bring the rats around, and doesn't cost more than the eggs would have.

If you have hawks, then you need to build a very large movable enclosure for them to forage in during the day or buy chicken feed.

Not entirely necessary unless the wife or kids get unreasonably attached to them. Just some shiny strands overhead and a tolerance for losses is all you need. I only ever had one taken by a hawk, out of a few dozen lost to coons, cars, and Mysteriously Stone Dead Syndrome.

Damn thing must have been desperate to make the run, because it nailed her on the back of the neck and realized it couldn't carry her up out of the clearing. Dropped her after a few ft.

They're a very good animal for introducing kids to the mysteries of life and death, and answering where we go when we die (the compost pile)

Your hawks must be chill, then. I know of a prepper from Kiev who stopped having chickens because he had no recourse against hawks and wouldn't pay for feed, trying to be a 100% self-sufficient prepper and all that.

It's all about cover. Chickens are a brush bird, not open range creatures. They like bushes, rotting logs, low tree branches to perch on, and a protective canopy overhead.

I live alongside a ridge with a road on it, where hawks hover all afternoon on the thermals. They only dive on field rats and such out in the open. They're very nervous about going anywhere near brush, because being caught on the ground is a death sentence for them.
It's pretty common to see eagles circling above a dead deer in a bush, never having the balls to go for it until the vultures show up and take their lunch.

If someone has a bunch of open pasture... Get sheep, not chickens. They're the real ultimate prepper animal.

I assume I’m missing something obvious, but can’t you just keep the chickens in a coop/cage to stop the hawk getting in?

You have two options: keep them in a coup and feed them or let them eat whatever they find in your backyard but leave them unprotected.

It's "free eggs" only if you don't have to buy chicken feed.

I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to put a cage or net over the entirety of your backyard, would it? Aesthetics would suffer, of course.

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You don’t do the chicken cannibalism thing?

Redpill me on the shiny strands overhead- I’d definitely be more worried about feral cats, but reasonable precautions.

I've bitten the bullet on creating a substack. There's nothing to see there just yet, but if anyone has advice or suggestions, I'd love to hear them! Does anyone happen to know if substack's organic discovery is any good? I'm not going to spend money on advertising, or spam, so I don't know what to expect.

Working plan: Await next post of mine that would be a certified club banger, and then use that to announce its existence, here and on /r/Slatestarcodex.

I think I have a sizable backlog of essays I could easily copy and paste, just to flesh it out further.

The problem with asking questions about how Substack works is that anyone with experience there is too busy raking in the bucks to post here. From the consumer side, I don't think it has much of a direct discovery mechanism (like Youtube recommendations or whatever), or at least I'm not using it. The way I find out about content is by recommendations from other creators, so your best bet is triggering someone bigger into replying to you, or getting on some sort of interview circuit.

Hmm.. That sounds sensible to me, and roughly what I expected/feared. Still, I'll probably give it a shot, given that I write anyway for this audience, then I don't think I'm doing too much extra work, and it has its upsides. Thanks!

Well, on the flip side, I periodically get notifications that people started following me, and all I ever do is comment (and I do so very rarely). I always thought they're bots, but maybe I'm too pessimistic. I definitely encourage giving it a try (just don't abandon us once you make it big)!

Aww.. I don't mean to, I'm fond of this place (or I wouldn't volunteer my time to janny it, let alone have >3k comments). I've already had the value of my free time multiplied massively courtesy of the large nominal and relative pay raise going from a third world country to a (debatable) first world one entails, and I'm still here haha.

Even if I was purely mercenary, I think that half of the AAQCs I write are in response to things someone else said over here. It's a fertile breeding ground for ideas and strong arguments for said ideas, not many places like it out there.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

No real progress this week. I got a miniscule amount of planning and research done, but it's barely worth mentioning. Please ask again next week.

So I was looking into strapping a crawler on my Nitter / Miniflux solution, and decided to take a stab an rewriting the damn thing from scratch.

Don't get me wrong I do like how it works, but the more I thought of crawling and archiving websites with it, the worse of an idea it seemed.

  • First, as nice as Miniflux is, it's structure doesn't seem to be particularly friendly to strapping stuff onto it. I already had issues with the relatively small stuff I added like downloading media and running OCR on them.
  • It's all a bit too bespoke, I don't like the idea of having to run 2 independent applications to browse Twitter (+Substack and maybe Youtube).
  • I like the the chronological feed I get, but when someone puts out a banger and everyone starts retweeting it, I have to see the same damn thing 20 times (sometimes in a row). Not easily fixable in an RSS reader, but I can deal with it if I start from scratch.
  • Being able to tell that many people are referring to the same content (via retweets or link) might let me come up with some sort of Hottest Stuff Feed.
  • Sometimes the true bangers are buried in the replies, and come from people I don't follow. I'd like the ability to save their content as well, without necessarily following them.

So I've been going through Nitter and figured out how it does authenication and API requests. I'm able to fetch the latest tweets from a user, and now I'm writing an import job and trying to come up with a structure that will take care of all of the above into account. Nothing much to show off yet, but making good progress.

P.S.: This might be old news, but I recall us discussing the official announcement that Nitter is dead, but don't recall anything about it coming back to life. From the ativitiy on github and the site being up and functioning, it seems like it may have come back to life.

I have been making very weird music. There's a ridiculous amount of genre blending in it and I'm not sure if it appeals to anybody other than me, but it's fine if not - I'm just having fun with it for the first time in a long time.

Here are two long tracks for your listening pleasure (hopefully).

https://voca.ro/17EHXBzKIaYj

https://voca.ro/1nyZB7yhcJAJ

I'm not good at providing feedback for music. I know there's all sorts of theory that goes into it, and I'm just a simpleton that can only answer me likey, and me no likey. It starts of pretty strong, and I almost want to make some cyberpunk detective story video game, just to be able to put it into the soundtrack. At around 7:40 it becomes not quite my cup of tea.

I'll give the other one a listen later.

Since this time last week I've written just under 4,000 words of my NaNoWriMo project, 71,000 in total. Dying to finish the first draft (now projected to run to 95-100,000 words) as soon as possible so I can have my evenings back, then come back to the second draft with fresh eyes. I know there's loads of stuff I'll be able to cut out, but I don't want to start cutting until the first draft is finished.

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