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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   400 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 15, 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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Inspired by @No_one below, here's a couple ideas that I plan to make into essays:

  • On the instrumentality/lack thereof of femininity and the female form
  • A speculative piece on hanging as a particularly Christian mode of execution

Looks like I won't make it with my update until tomorrow, so for now here's your regularly scheduled ping @Southkraut, how have you been doing?

Family tinkering again. Visited two new Kindergärten closer to home and work. The first was in town near work, seemed alright but had no space. The other was in a village close to home, no bus connection there (though there will supposedly be one later this year), the people there seemed very motivated. Either one would be an improvement for me, but would also take the responsibility for getting the kid to Kindergarten from my wife (i.e., actually her mother, who can drive a car) to me. Which is good because that means no more daily vacillations about whether to go and whether grandma is willing to help and whether mom is fit enough to leave the house, so we can have an actual routine. It's also good because then the kid needn't spend the week with two depressive failed housewives. Sucks for my wife though, since that removes her from her childhood home and garden, and puts her in a place where, without a driver's license, she can't really do anything on her own. Then again, her mother's house will be sold this winter anyways, so the status quo isn't tenable in the long run either way. Also kinda sucks for my work, since I'll have to bisect my day for picking up the kid. OTOH I managed to rope my parents and our new neighbors into various kindergarten logistics schemes, so it may all be more easy and more social than expected. Wife still hopes we'll discover an affordable apartment directly adjacent to either kindergarten, but I doubt it and I am also, to be quite frank, not very motivated to move just so she can continue to refuse getting her driver's license. Not that I expect that to change.

Other than that I've poured most of my creative energy into work, exploring the wonderful world of Spring Batch backend development. It haunts me. It follows me into evenings and weekends. Do I use two steps with the first using a MultiResourceItemReader on one end feeding into a dummy ItemWriter that just stores the header data in a bean or the execution contextor or should I extend the functionality of the standard StaxEventItemReader to also read header information but that would cause too much overhead and also I'd need to add some custom logic to cycle through input files but hey maybe I can just repeat the step for one file at the time oh look there's a step partitioning feature but hmmm that seems to just partition into a fixed number of sub-steps is there some other component I can use to get one step per file or can I dynamically set the number of substeps to match the number of files but even then how do I make sure each substep gets a different input file and then I still need to extend the StaxEventItemWriter add the header information though that's really the easy part and I shouldn't forget about it. And so on and so on. Normally I leave work at work, but right now that separation isn't really working. And oh crap I need to rename six repositiories because the architects of two different teams didn't talk to each other and the concept work for this project still hasn't been done even though I'm four weeks into the implementation and they expect me to work off of verbal instructions and reverse-engineering older projects haha is this a joke we all know we can't fly this past quality control but no oh no they're serious. It's fun, really. I like those people. I tell them "this approach is laughably inefficient and you can't possibly expect this to work and get done on time." and they just go "Oh well yeah you're right we'll give you six times as much time and three additional people to actually do the required prep work right now.", and there I sit blinking and realizing that I have managed to find the mythical land of reasonable people who would rather fix mistakes than obfuscate them.

Kid and work, work and kid.

I did some light reading on Nav Meshes in Unreal, and found contradictory opinions on how they work on dynamic geometry. Did some research on various topics relevant to the setting, but haven't written one line of text or code.

Tell me to shut up and stop turning this into a blog.

Currently building a 2kW, 5kWh, 24V off-grid system for my summer cabin, and for carting around to power tools anywhere (very useful for all the tree clearing & burning I'm doing, which would otherwise take a lot of starting and stopping my small limbing chainsaw. And I don't even have a gas pole saw.)
Amazingly, by resorting to salvaging from garbage dumps and even buying from Temu, it's working out cheaper than running aluminum SER to the building.

It's probably going to come in at 150lb or so. So I should probably figure out how to put some wheels and a handle on it. Maybe off-road bike tires would work best?

What's the terrain and the path look like? If it's paved or nearly-flat hard clay, you can get away with pretty cheap caster wheel like those used for tool carts, which have the advantages of being trivial to install and swiveling. If it's muddy or sufficiently uneven, then you're going to want hefty pneumatic wheels -- either wheelbarrow, or hand cart -- though I'll caution that they're a lot more sensitive to alignment. If it's gravelly or sandy or if this isn't going to get used often, they do make 6+ inch hard rubber tires that aren't fun to work with, but are a lot more resistant to sliding due to underinflation, or to being punctured.

Could need to take it all over, but luggage casters are definitely out. I've got an old two-tyre wheelbarrow base that might work nicely, and would be a lot better for storage than bike wheels.

I've got a hard rubber wheelbarrow, and god it's miserable to use.

Wheelbarrow wheels innit, plus I think a lot of wheelbarrow tires are solid.

Wheeled litters use a Surly 26" fat bike wheel with 4.6" tire, but this is a relatively expensive solution I think.

This is just mostly for me so I can feel awkward later.

List of essays I need to write for various reasons

  • non-gamer accessible description of huge Ark: Survival clusters and the lessons 24/7 no rules, no safezones PvP has to teach about society/people.
  • the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"
  • essay on how militaries that promote officers on the basis of other qualities than anonymously demonstrated command competence in weeks-long highly stressful immersive simulations are NGMI (kinda superfluous now hat 1st Lt. Skynet is coming but maybe good writing practice)

the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"

I think the first Guild Wars achieved that a while back. The in-game advantages from playing a lot plateau'd very quickly, and the game was not, even at a high level PvP, execution heavy enough that one would need to play for tens of hours a week to keep up.

Ultimately though, I think the idea is doomed. Because success in a game is based on usually one of three things, very rarely a fourth. 1) How far along in the grind you are, which reward people who put in a lot of time in the game. 2) How competent you are at the game mechanically, which rewards the naturally talented and those who put a lot of time in the game to keep up with a high skill floor for competition, 3) Luck, which feels usually bad and doesn't motivate people to play because it doesn't reward them.

And extremely rarely, 4) Not game dependant skill, like for instance social deduction games like Among Us reward social skills. This is rare outside of like social or puzzle games.

  1. Not game dependant skill, like for instance social deduction games like Among Us reward social skills. This is rare outside of like social or puzzle games.

Social skill is highly important in MMO PvP games, no? Like group size matters, if you can't find a group and keep it, you're dead.

the idea for an PvP MMO that wouldn't devolve to "the biggest no lifers win"

I always supposed the way to do this was to just limit play time per player per game instance. The no-lifers can play for 80 hours a week, but if they have to split that play time between 20 different avatars in 20 different games to avoid going over a 4-hour-per-week time limit in each, then casuals who can only afford that 4 hours each week still have a level playing field.

You could have different time limits in different instances, too - give the no-lifers a 40-hour-per-week instance if they want to play there, but because everybody has options they'll only end up competing against other players spending 40 hours per week on that same single game, they won't be steamrolling the 4-hour crowd there.

I have a dream to do this by basically building a Dungeon Crawler Carl videogame.

You'd have a single global dungeon which everyone in the world is competing to complete. An enormous collaborative effort which isn't expected to succeed in the first or maybe even tenth season. Early "floors" are split between however many servers are necessary. You get maybe a few hours to complete a floor, if you fail to complete it in that time you get killed as the floor collapses. PvP is enabled, and killing people for their loot might get you farther, but the game is designed so that cooperative play is the only viable option on later floors.

I think it would be cool to put the whole world on the same team like that. And the nature of the game keeps the playing field relatively fair.

Something like that, but I think what could work would be having servers that only open at specific times, for games where you can't segment the world, or having segmented worlds where distant areas can do their turns inside a period.

You can play say, 8 hours a week, whenever, but any travel/attack across a zone border would happen in the next period, with say battles between areas happening at a mutually agreed upon time.

hold up do any militaries achieve that last one? They’re not getting it from exercises. I guess OCS and the specialist schools are filters for personality traits that might signal competence. But it’s not like they’re anonymous, and they definitely don’t keep sending officers back to Ft. Benning every time they’re up for promotion.

No, they don't, even though they could. There's nothing stopping a good military from making a simulation of a war, sticking officers into dorms rooms for a month and having them wage virtual war 16 hours a day and communicating through monitored, anonymized chat so no cliques possibly, you wouldn't even know who is on the other side.

Officer schools filter out the worst performers, but they don't and can't evaluate the ability to lead people or improvise. In addition, this should be all promotions above a certain level.

In US armed forces it's notorious that any and every position above captain requires being political, having patrons and all that bullshit. That's how you get the level of dysfunction they have now - they stopped being able to build ships, they can't get rid of Houthis, etc. In all likelihood, every capable, disagreeable officer got filtered out by this clique system.

I know that I will never make this RPG video game, but a man can dream, can't he? Literally, in this case. I know that people find it unbearably boring to listen to dreams of others, but I think it's somewhat interesting that for literally one and only time instead of mish-mash of randomness and neuroses I saw a fully formed RPG plot in a dream.

It would be a cyberpunk setting, the game itself in the style of the Shadowrun trilogy for the PC. Act 1 begins with the main character, a detective of a vestigial government or a corporate fixer, investigating a death of a middle-level corporate officer. Typical cyberpunk events ensue, mysterious hackers leave messages, heists are performed, the player character survives attempts on his life himself, etc. The climax of the first part is the revelation that the initial murder happened because the corporation was secretly developing an AI against whatever treaties and regulations still exist in the setting. Maybe the man was an attempted whistleblower, maybe it's the opposite and he was a key scientist, but that murder is irrelevant now, since it's all about stopping the project now. Act 2 would be combat-heavy, whatever forces marshalled fighting against the corporation's PMC, the corporation splintering among office politics and people on the player side turning coat, etc. The key plot development: it was not a singular rogue project, three corporations were in an AI arms race. Since the initial murder screwed everything for them, they abandon the secrecy and, in whatever states they currently are, erupt in incredible violence with a zero to hundred tempo of half a second.

Act 3 is the AI war. It's not the corporations fighting against each other using the AIs. Neither is it the AIs exterminating the humanity, that mounts a brave Resistance. The AIs are fighting among themselves, and pay as much attention to humans as humans paid to anthills during Vietnam. A tank brigade might be left alone, while a refugee camp gets leveled because it occupies a good staging ground. In all this chaos the main characters desperately tries to do something, find a shutdown button, or find a safe haven, or just survive for the day. And then he finds himself at the right place at the right time. Two men explain to him that the entire apocalypsis is their carefully orchestrated plan. That the AIs don't seek to destroy each other completely, but this is their way to credibly claim what share of the world each deserves. That they will soon negotiate to merge, and their something-something-technobabble preference matrices will be proportionate according to those martially determined shares. And the plan of those two men is to hijack the process with a microsecond precision, replacing the preference technobabble with the contents of their own minds instead of AI data. The problem is that it used to be three of them, but one died in the ensuing chaos. And they offer the position to the player. Who can agree, or backstab them and replace all three parts with himself, or decide to screw it all and let the AIs be the next step of evolution unimpeded. (As I write this I realize that the dead part of the trio could be the murder victim from the beginning, but that was not how it came to me originally.)

Does this sound like a serviceable plot? And more importantly, did I subconsciously plagiarize it from somewhere?

I think you might have incorporated a lot more Deus Ex 1 into your plot than you think. The ending choice is very similar and there are other similarities such as the 3 act structure, the loyalty twist where the main character discovers that their organization is evil and flips sides, etc. (also it features the wearing of trenchcoats and indoor sunglasses at night)

Deus Ex is a foundational cyberpunk property and if you're too young to have played it in 2000 it still holds up after you use a graphical overhaul mod on it.

also it features the wearing of trenchcoats and indoor sunglasses at night

It's hard to tell because of the graphics tech, but JC's and Paul Denton's eyes are supposed to be unnaturally (luminescently?) blue as a side-effect of their augmentations, not just an ordinary blue. The sunglasses aren't to keep moonlight out, they're to keep JC from looking inhumanly creepy when he interacts with the public. There's an in-game text about a similar problem with the "Men in Black" agents: "... we are still continuing our attempts to isolate the source of the albino traits present ever since the Series L, but so far the simple addition of sunglasses and dark clothing appear to have resolved the matter in a practical fashion..."

The trenchcoats are just because trenchcoats look cool.

I think it sounds rad. Like an alternate-universe set of Metal Gear Solid sequels.

Little bit of Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead, too. Makes sense as it’s like cyberpunk but for necromancers.

Act III might be a bad fit for a game since it relies on taking away player agency, at least until the final decision. Visions of the Mass Effect “Reapers go away” buttons, except in that series, your character has always been making a difference. There’s a real risk of not just nihilism, but unfun nihilism. I remember almost dropping A Fire Upon the Deep, despite its amazing premises, because of how bleak it felt for the protagonists to run and run with no expectation of a turn. This kind of plot can be done, but it’s not trivial!

I can’t think of much mainstream fiction which handles that sort of AI race plot. Maybe Marathon approaches it on a very fantastical, seed-that-instantiates-the-AI level. Reminiscent of Hyperion Cantos, I guess.

For less mainstream stuff, uh.

  • Animorphs: the reckoning. The fact that fic of a children’s series veers into AI value alignment is, like, several layers of spoiler.
  • Pokemon: the Origin of Species, ditto. Actually, it might be spoilers that it dips into organized conspiracy territory, too.
  • The World as it Appears to Be, a bizarre Overwatch fic. I don’t even like Overwatch, but this was unreasonably interesting. Probably the closest to your Act 2/3 plot.
  • Ra, by qntm. Double extra plus spoilers that this one involves AI at all.

I’d say these are all amazing on their own merits, but I have weird taste. For all I know you’ve already read half of them if you hang out on /r/rational. I also never read any of the Twilight or Madoka Magica rationalfics, which have a good chance of conspiratorial AI takeoff plots.

I don't know when I last said what I was doing, so to recap...

I built a boardgame table last year out of rustic walnut. I calculated it would cost me $300 in lumber, somehow I actually spent $450. Still beats the $2000+ asking price of most places selling them. I spent the summer working on it, burnt the fuck out, and took a break for the fall/winter. But the weather is getting nice again, so my un-climate controlled shop is getting nice again too. I sorted out all the off cuts from my table, and am going to make a set of 4 chairs to go with it. Because right now I have a motley collection of crappy folding chairs and desk chairs pulled from my computers.

I based my design off these plans. Except I made it a little smaller because when I compared it's dimensions to virtually every other chair in my entire house, they were comically huge. I'm also not using home depot lumber, because WTF? Nor am I using pocket screws, and am instead going with 100% mortise and tenon joinery.

I mean christ, I wouldn't trust a pine chair held together with pocket screws... would you?

But first I had to build a new chicken coop, because a fox killed 3/4 of our laying hens, and my wife thought that was a great excuse to buy 20 fucking chicks. Granted, she's apparently promised to give 10 of them away to friends when they mature, but still.

After that I got serious about the chairs again. I took all the random offcuts I had sorted out, and milled them to the proper size. I also had 2 spare planks of walnut I ended up not even needing for the table which became the seats, and a few more random parts. Next up was gluing up the seat panels. I may end up creating a template for these to give them a slightly more interesting flared shape, but we'll see. They may end up just square.

Next up I made the template for the back legs. This was a fairly straight forward process of putting a gentle curve on a blank with a flexible piece of scrap I had lying around. Then making the cuts with a jigsaw and lots of sanding.

I'm loaded for bear on this project because I decided to invite a buddy over this Saturday to work on it with me. Going to head to the lumber yard, pick up the 6/4 stock I need for the legs. I'm hoping 2 planks should do it, but we'll see how many knots I need to work around. Might get a 3rd just to be safe. Then hopefully get a few milled, cut, and maybe even get some chairs dry fit together. Which means I need as much done as possible. I still need to get the tenons cut on all the parts and my router dialed in to cut the mortises in the legs. I may even take a piece of 2x6 or whatever I have lying around and make some test legs just to make sure everything looks good. Then after the day is over, and I can take my sweet ass time sanding, shellacking and waxing all the parts.

It's remarkable how wood working is like, maybe 15% cutting and assembling. The rest is design, milling and finishing. I'm starting to understand how a lot of people just buy S4S boards, and then also have some other professional finish it to boot. If I ran a business and/or had the money I might do that too.

I'm currently making a foot stool and having my first go at cutting mortise and tenon joints. I don't have a router so I cut the first set of blind mortises with a multitool + chisel and now I'm doing through-mortises with a jigsaw. It's going much better than I expected, and it's a whole lot nicer to make something where I can pick up and rotate the entire piece with one hand than it was building full size built-in bookcases inside the same actively occupied space they were sized to fit. And yes, putting two coats of finish on 8 uprights and on both sides of 36 large shelves did indeed take forever.

Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding. I'll have to try out a few methods on the off cuts.

Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding.

Honestly I'd say just nut up and get a router. But if that is ruled out for whatever reasons, like you are attached to hand tools, maybe a card scraper? I keep meaning to grab a few myself.

It's 100% on the list. In the meantime this is a small project and I kind of like the challenge/discipline of making do with what I have. Plus despite having added ~25m of shelf space most of that was instantly consumed and I'm still very limited on space and storage, so while a router is justifiable a lot of the larger and more practical tools are off the table. If anything the move right now would be to buy a block plane but again, I like the challenge of having to get creative.

Yeah, I hear that. I remember getting creative, and finding ways to use my tablesaw as a jointer, and putting rabbets on joints for drawers and boxes with it.

Then I discovered the raw joy of having the correct tool for the correct job. The jointer I got last year has been the best edition to my shop by a mile. No more planing sled or makeshift jointing on the tablesaw for me!

IMHO, a router table might be the second most important powertool behind a tablesaw. It can joint, template, profile, mortise, and probably more. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably have skipped my miter saw and gotten a router table sooner.

Also my next project is ripping out a bunch of poorly optimized shelving that came with the place, and instead putting in a miter saw station, lots of drawers, and a wall rack for rough lumber. So that'll be fun.

I'll definitely make a small/portable router table once I have the router. As useful as it would be a table saw is out of the question though.

Americans are lucky that a lot of you seem to have large garages and basements to use, and YouTube being mostly American often gives the impression that table saws are the next step up from owning a power drill. I did eventually find the British corner of YouTube where people squeeze their hobby woodworking into our more typical potting sheds, but if I worked in my potting shed I'd then have nowhere for my gardening stuff.

Alongside the creativity aspect I just have an aesthetic dislike for solving problems by waving a credit card. On the other hand the last time I made a foot stool shaped object I did it using only a Swiss Army knife with a saw stroke of <2", and there was that time I cut a crude mortise for a door lock using little more than a screwdriver and a vegetable knife, so I won't deny there is a certain minimum threshold of viability.

I'm not sure what I'll make next. I've got a lot of projects I'd like to make, a lot of jigs I'll need to make, and a few more tools to buy. Quite keen to learn some sewing actually, was thinking last night that I could start off by making some sort of upholstery cushion for the top of this stool. Should be fairly straight forward, I don't think fitting gets much easier than a small flat rectangle.

Oh damn, not even a tablesaw huh? I really was completely in the wrong mindset for you. There I go being all American again.

I'm seriously thinking about sticking some heating in my shop, maybe even a mini split. It's a lot easier to work on stuff (and bring yourself to work on stuff) when your hands aren't blue.

My wife keeps bringing that up, but my shop is too large and poorly insulated for that to be practical. There is actually an old wood stove out there I could get going if I ever spent an appreciable amount of time out there during the winter. But I think for my purposes something like this or this might be more useful. Something a bit more on demand and directional, so I'm not pissing the wind trying to heat up an enormous drafty space.

I have ordered a pre-carved body for my bass build. I went with mahogany because it was considerably cheaper than walnut. The vendor is claiming a six week lead time, which probably means three months.

In the meantime, I'm going to practice applying 2k epoxy on some scrap wood.

Update: don't work with epoxy in an enclosed, unventilated area unless you enjoy huffing paint.

The good stuff

Up to 92k words on my NaNoWriMo project. Based on the average length of a finished scene/chapter, and the number of scenes/chapters I still have to finish, a first draft is projected to run to 117k words. Kill me.

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