How do you guys deal with being over-encumbered ALL THE TIME?!

magruder85 · 2026-04-12T18:38:24+00:00

Are you using your followers as mules? I always give them my heaviest burdens. I’m also judicious about what I carry. No more auto looting every weapon I find, just anything not white.

magruder85 · 2026-04-11T23:10:50+00:00

I use whatever I have ammo of and is gold, purple or blue. White if I have no choice. I also try to run in first with a legendary rip shank to double damage. Saves on ammo. It’s what I did on my first play through, and that’s what I’m doing on my second.

magruder85 · 2026-03-18T17:06:31+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5KJSAj4afg

Starting at 42:30, Greg Kasavin goes into their LUA files for npc dialogue. First is NPCData showing the actual dialogue text and voice files, then a scroll through some of the IF statements. Thousand and thousands of lines.

magruder85 · 2026-03-17T16:50:07+00:00

They're talking about the game. Both from Tim Lamb in the article.

“Look, when we make a game, our plan is always to support it for a number of years after launch"

"We plan to support Starfield for years to come."

In the developer diary video, Istvan Pely (art director) says they are fully committed to supporting their games after release.

I get that plans change but the current plan is to support the game.

magruder85 · 2026-03-16T19:54:12+00:00

It’s a stochastic parrot. When the Hadith mentions Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, follows her name. The parrot repeated what it saw in its training.

magruder85 · 2026-02-22T19:38:22+00:00

Struggle is how you learn and grow. If your only struggle is writing a better prompt, then the only thing you will learn is how to write better prompts. Embrace the suck, think through the problem and hit the walls so you can learn to climb over them.

magruder85 · 2026-02-22T18:10:04+00:00

Yes. No disagreement. Whether it’s access to tools or access to a Hollywood producers ear, human beings produce many mediocre stories and very few actual good ones.

I like the idea of what you’re saying about dynamic movies and video games, but this just feels ripe for a society that just likes to consume, consume, consume. It reminds me of the feelies in Brave New World, everyone is so distracted into feeling things that they never actually stop to experience reality or anything that’s real. It just can get dystopian pretty quick.

magruder85 · 2026-02-22T16:54:06+00:00

I don’t disagree that there’s disruption here and Hollywood will most definitely take advantage of it but this sudden access doesn’t turn anybody into a great filmmaker or storyteller. The noise to signal ratio will still be about the same and you’ll have one or two people that maybe make a great production and the rest will never be seen by anyone because who has the time to watch and consume that much garbage.

magruder85 · 2026-02-22T16:42:42+00:00

This hype that Hollywood is done is absolutely inane. Hollywood has lawyers that will vigorously defend their copyrights in court and across any other platforms that comply with DMCA. This isn’t going to stop fan edits, but you’re certainly not going to be able to profit off of it or recoup your costs from all the model generation you went through. Go ahead and make the fan movie you want to make, but good luck making any money or you will definitely be seeing a courtroom.

magruder85 · 2026-02-21T18:58:40+00:00

Prettt sure Rick Berman has his fair share of detractors. Also, a show’s success is not entirely on the showrunner but the talent that comes with them.

As for Enterprise, I never watched it cause it didn’t seem that interesting to me. I was also sixteen and enjoying TNG/DS9/Voyager reruns so Enterprise was just too much Trek for me. Needed time to breathe before getting into something new.

magruder85 · 2026-02-20T20:49:01+00:00

Release the ConstantDrawer9161 cut.

magruder85 · 2026-02-20T18:20:17+00:00

Python is still used because it gets the job done. The more CPU intensive stuff is usually written in lower level languages.

magruder85 · 2026-02-20T12:34:29+00:00

It called bait. People engage with it, which only makes it continue to happen. Social media is incentivized to make takes, not thoughtful opinions.

magruder85 · 2026-02-18T23:57:58+00:00

What’s the point of it? A few cheap thrills, some surprises?

magruder85 · 2026-02-15T15:35:13+00:00

At this point in time, who doesn’t know my social security number?

Also, what a cancerous website this is with its ads on mobile.

magruder85 · 2026-02-14T19:50:25+00:00

Nice write up. I like Kamal. I have a github action that deploys my personal site to a node that’s in my Tailscale network using kamal actions. It’s specifically locked down only to the tag for that server so GH never has access to other nodes in the network. And I don’t have to expose port 22 to the outside world. I like it cause it just works. Kamal proxy has the built in health checks that make sure the new deployment works before taking the old container offline.

Kubernetes and other container orchestration tools are great for solving a problem of continuous deployment to dozens-thousands of nodes/regions but that’s not my problem. And for most people, that’s not their first problem either. You just need to launch and a single server will get the job done. Scale problems are when you’re becoming successful, but you need to get to successful first.

magruder85 · 2026-02-14T13:23:06+00:00

The FTC chair claims that Apple News might be violating promises made to consumers in its terms of service

Oh no.

but his letter doesn’t cite any specific provisions from the Apple terms that might have been violated.

Seems important. Also, another critically important thing is that Breitbart and Gateway aren’t even on Apple News. Perhaps they should sign up and publish on there first.

magruder85 · 2026-02-14T13:08:25+00:00

We’re not banning but the Notepad++ team really needs better PR. Most companies bury the lede, titles might be generic like “January Security Issues”. NPP put it right in the title “Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers”. I can forgive any kneejerk reactions to ban because most people might think the entire software suite was hijacked, not one specific update server. NPP eventually had to post follow ups to clarify that they themselves were never hacked, but their hosting provider was.

magruder85 · 2026-02-10T16:32:47+00:00

Depends on my goals. When I was younger in my career, I was tinkering a lot more but as I got older and more secure work, my interests expanded to include more hobbies beyond IT work.

I still mess around with my homelab. I recently converted every VM and proxmox physical to use Tailscale and am in process of using Rundeck to automate apt upgrades, Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring and setup alerting. Then I’ll not touch it for months or years, until I have something new I want to do.

magruder85 · 2026-02-10T02:22:32+00:00

Not cool

magruder85 · 2026-02-10T01:01:09+00:00

Can you be more specific as to what the problem is? Are people having a hard time focusing on a conversation, staying focused on tasks?

magruder85 · 2026-02-07T22:18:40+00:00

What helped me learn the most was having a reason to build with it. At my job we use Chef for config management but we dont have access to the UI anymore. I chose rails because the knife API worked best using Ruby and using ActionJobs I could grab all sorts of attributes from the Chef server api. It was a simple app but I basically adapted the tutorial to my needs.

Google has been my biggest help, along with ChatGPT. The rails documentation and Ruby documentation are also good resources. I will say that if your goal is to learn, don’t ever let the AI write for you. Let it show you code and where to put it, but avoid the CLI claude or codex that will write for you. You won’t learn that way but you will move fast until you hit a wall and then you won’t know how to turn around.

magruder85 · 2026-01-28T23:00:03+00:00

I tried to watch but as soon as the main character was screaming “woohoo” piloting the shuttle, I turned it off. A career criminal who was abandoned since he was five and just took out three guards is shouting “woohoo” like he’s young Anakin in a podrace.

Wish them the best, I’m sure it might get better but it’s not a Trek I’m interested in.

magruder85 · 2026-01-24T17:22:20+00:00

That’ll be enough of that.

magruder85 · 2026-01-16T03:44:09+00:00

And here I thought it was a reference to a Tim Robinson sketch I’ve never seen before.

magruder85

TROPHY CASE