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I appreciate that of such companies Microsoft seems the most dedicated to upstreaming what they can directly into git. Most of those heavy performance features are off-by-default, but they are there to `git config` (or `git maintenance` or `git clone`) yourself.

HEAD in most operations is usually a ref to a branch, which makes it somewhat unique as a ref type (it's a ref to a ref, double pointer). When it is a ref to a commit, that's a detached HEAD state.

Plus HEAD to the CLI can also mean the family of refs under refs/heads/* that relate to the HEADS of each branch (which depending on fetch status may not be the same as the branch ref) and traversal into the reflog.


Copilot Code Reviews are Actions workflows. Just privileged ones you can't edit the YAML for. They even litter your Actions tab list and Deployment environments.

Which is why I find it fun to bring up that in Old English "gift" hadn't yet picked up the "t" and was spelled "gif", but in Old English "g" was most commonly "HY". I like the Old English pronunciation of "gif" as "HYEEF", which is a "compromise" position that often makes some of both soft-g and hard-g "gif" pronunciation fans angry.

I sometimes just pick the opposite of whatever everyone agreed to just for fun. I do the same when people cry about vim or emacs since I have used both. ;)

Some men just want to watch the world burn. At least it's mostly harmless fun anyway. It's even funnier when they bring up how my name is pronounced in defense of "jiff" and I tell them, so you're calling me the expert in "Gi" pronunciation then? :)


I have never heard this third option before but I love it!

But you can no longer amortize annually, which makes it even more a question of "is this worth it this month?" each month. Especially for personal accounts.

I'm similarly thinking about sticking with the auto-downgrade back to Copilot Free when the annual sub ends and then just yelling about it any months I hit the 2000 completion cap.

I wouldn't mind a plan between Free and Pro that is just "all I care about is code completion and next edit suggestions".


That's espoused as the big reason for the price increase: most Copilot subscribed developers it seems have moved to "agentic usage" with the CLI and Cloud-based agents.

Which feels a bit like a kick in the pants for me as a developer that was primarily using Copilot for VS Code ghost text and very rarely used the Chat sidebar much less "agentic" tools.

Copilot Pro sort of made sense for my personal account when amortized across a year, but I don't want to "waste" $10/month on credits I won't use most months.


This was never a technical oddity. This was generally a tool of verisimilitude: the real world isn't built on a clean square grid. You might have a diagonal hallway or a road that curves or a passageway between two "rooms" with a strange incline.

On the one hand, you could encode the hallway itself or the road curve or the passageway as their own weird segments in the grid. But then maybe you bog the player down in a lot of liminal spaces that don't really add much to the game. On the other hand, you could ask the player to bring or build their own map and pay attention to descriptive text like "to the north is a passage that seems to bend to the east" or far more subtle variations of such.

Zork and many other IF games were built on the premise that people would map things and getting lost or confused by grid breaks was part of the fun. (Going back to, as neighboring comments point out, the original Adventure which was modeling caves and caves have always had strange three-dimensional twistiness that doesn't fit a square grid. Part of the fun was discovering that disconnect between the game mechanics using square grid compass terminology and the digraph of the game spaces being more confusing than that.)


It makes sense then. I haven't played zork for over 35 years. The last couple infocom games I played (Hitchhikers, LGOP) had more regular geometries, in my memory.

Oh yeah, Zork itself especially is meant to be a weird place and the geometry intentionally silly at times. Some of the geometry was built to be logic puzzles for fellow MIT students. It's impressive it was ever commercialized, much less successful enough that we are still talking about it today.

Though I find it fun on the language family tree that the Infocom team's preferred MDL (and thus ZIL) language was surprisingly closer to (and almost prototyping for) the Scheme split despite being "next door" to some of the most LISP legacy work, too.

It was impressed on me in college how much the MOS 6502 is sort of a fascinating line in the sand for a "clockwork computer". You can visualize all of the 6502 registers and all of its easily addressable RAM in a bitmap you can see on a modern screen and its general clock speeds were so much more relatively close to human scale so you could watch such a visualization compute in (near) real-time.

I remember building my own mini-6502 debugger of my own for an assignment I was having difficulty debugging on the breadboarded hardware in our lab (and also to save me from having to spend all of my waking hours in that lab). I want to say it was in something stupid like PHP at the time, but it was just a quick and dirty hacked together thing I did in like an hour during a lecture for a different class.

I've seen some really cool projects on HN of people building visual/visible 6502 boards. LEDs have gotten so cheap and the 6502 is so easy to replicate in FPGA and other hardware spaces that you can build real neat 6502 computers. Which I think the original homebrew computer club hackers would still respect all these years later. (The 6502 fueled the original home computer revolution and was in so many machines, from the Apple II to the Commodore 64 to the NES and more. It was such a key workhorse chip.) I'm still glad I had a lab course on the 6502 in my college education. (The follow up one with the Motorola 68k was maybe less successful, and mostly taught us why the 68k is the last real breadboardable CPU in so many ways including the way that it frequently burned through breadboards and made most debugging a hardware issue.)


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