In the last few years AI image generation has gone from something very rudimentary and nigh-on unusable for commercial purposes to the go-to option for small businesses' signs and menus from SF to Rome—this sucks. Somehow, as the models have gotten better, they've left something behind. I find myself thinking more and more wistfully of DALL·E 2, an image generation model from 2022 that conceptually shouldn't hold a candle to the current state of the art. So why do I miss it?

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There's a place in Skyrim right outside the capital city, Solitude, where if you cast Magelight at the top of a mountain, you get tons of XP in Alteration — enough to level you from 15 to 25 in just one cast. But why?

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I was writing up my main post reverse-engineering Skyrim pickpocketing and found myself going a little too deep into how Non-Player Characters gain skills. Once again the wiki had the wrong formula, which was making it hard to answer my question: who has the lowest and highest pickpocketing skill?

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I was recently the willful accomplice victim of a successful plot to pull me back into Skyrim. I put hundreds of hours into the game back in high school but had mostly escaped — until my friend texted me when I was sick. While playing through it seemed like the pickpocketing chance was bugged. Follow me down the spiraling rabbit hole to reverse engineer what backs it, what causes the bug, and just how much gold I can get away with stealing.

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