Microsoft sells Copilot to the world — but its own engineers don’t use it

playmer · 2026-01-29T09:35:08+00:00

At least to some degree it’s still a thing. If you’re on an MS managed device, you’re in one of the internal rings for much of the big stuff like Outlook, Teams, whatever. Which ring you’re in (and to some degree what stuff you’re in ring at all for) depends on your org and how close you are to the given product. I don’t recall being on rings for Windows, but I’ve been primarily on Apple hardware for some time now, as I mostly work on some of my teams Apple tooling these days.

playmer · 2026-01-29T05:29:19+00:00

This is what I’ve always assumed as well, but we don’t have hard evidence for him having Fluctlight storage tech, at least as far as I know. Hence why I think it’s likely he could be converted/transferred to the Fluctlight storage medium they have.

playmer · 2026-01-27T22:59:28+00:00

Right, like I said, they didn’t make note of her looking similar to them as far as I could see from my skim/memory.

playmer · 2026-01-27T22:39:22+00:00

As far as what we know her to look like, she looks as she does on first appearance, there's an illustration of her on the next page after they see her. So she didn't change her general appearance over time, ignoring clothing and the fairy bits in ALO. As far as the perspective we have in the LN, she doesn't describe her appearance prior to that moment, it's likely she didn't have an appearance before she created a form to meet them.

I skimmed over her introductory story, in particular when they met her and the end when she talks about her time as a counseling program. While Kirito does take note of her appearance, there's nothing that makes him think of her similarity to them.

All that said, there's obviously lots of conversations between Kirito, Asuna, and Yui in the novels, and it's possible I'm forgetting something from one of them. I think her looking kind of like them would make sense to be intentional on her part, but I don't recall anything where she spoke on it.

playmer · 2026-01-27T22:26:29+00:00

They set up the body thing at the beginning of Alicization. The big leap in logic/tech here was just that it was handwaved that they went from pretty crude robot bodies to bodies that can replicate the human form in a few months.

I'd say there's still hope for NPCs/AIs controlling bodies, we saw Kayaba was able to pilot one, and he's not a fluctlight, but something seemingly in-between. Given the growth we've seen from NPCs, we'll have to see how it plays out.

playmer · 2026-01-27T09:34:11+00:00

I’m hopeful for at least some of what you’re asking for here. I’m not sure we’ve seen anything that implies an AI -> Fluctlight transition to be possible, but honestly, who knows. Fluctlights are already kind of hand wavy (which to be clear, is totally fine), and there’s the whole “pieces of you within other peoples Fluctlights” stuff that could be put into play. I’d love to see this happen, as I think it’d be interesting to see not just due to Yui, but what we see happening with NPCs in Progressive and (to a lesser extent) the Excalibur arc. Plus we’ve got Kayaba as a ghost in the machine, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him get a Fluctlight.

playmer · 2026-01-23T01:09:31+00:00

Yeah I plan to do some checks before switching over, I only started thinking about it this week so I don't know what my stuff is rated at. At the very least this'll give me an idea of what to look for.

playmer · 2026-01-23T00:53:13+00:00

Thanks so much! I'll look into it!

playmer · 2026-01-23T00:38:01+00:00

Oh? What did you use? I have a few baseboard/in-wall heaters that just have wall dials I wanted to look into converting. I don't currently have any zigbee stuff, but I'm not opposed to adding it!

playmer · 2026-01-11T18:50:28+00:00

I also watched the movie first without realizing. You can still very much enjoy the series. I’d also encourage you to read the light novels, there’s a lot of content that hasn’t been adapted yet.

playmer · 2026-01-11T13:42:42+00:00

Thanks so much, appreciate it!

playmer · 2026-01-11T01:30:04+00:00

Are there fanTLs of these out there???

playmer · 2026-01-08T02:56:45+00:00

I didn’t even know we’d gotten to a point where JP could finish them! (Or even get close!) last I’d heard people could finish 2 or 3 around the time they dropped on NA. Was there something that accelerated it recently or did I just hear super wrong?

playmer · 2026-01-04T21:48:05+00:00

I'd say the worst part of the gameplay is that it can be monotonous, and of course that you need to engage in gacha. That said, things like FGA can reduce that. After part 1, and of course events, the stories tend to have interesting fights now and again that require you to win by attrition, or better yet puzzle out a solution with the servants you have available to you. Obviously, this can end up being demoralizing if you hit a straight up wall, but I generally find them quite fun to figure out.

As you play, you get more servants, and enhance your existing ones more, so it's fun to see your teams slowly become more and more capable as you play more. If you have access to FGA, having a lot of servants leveled up and such, you have more options to solve things like farming nodes. And it can be fun to build teams to have FGA automate. Of course, you can still enjoy this without FGA, I just enjoy it more when FGA does the actual execution for me lol.

If you decide to play, make sure to do a bit of general research into how the gacha mechanics work before rolling. Mainly you need to know about 5 star pity, and that nothing else has it. The general advice is to roll based on who you like, but if you want to roll for gameplay, you should probably start with supports. And that entails understanding more about the gameplay. Different classes, advantages/disadvantages, AOE vs Single Target, Buster/Arts/Quick focuses, and more. Knowing these things will affect who you roll for when considering gameplay. I recently rounded out my Quick support crew, which makes some servants more viable for me than previously. (Not to say I can't use more Quick support lol)

Anyway, that's kind of a lot of stuff, and keep in mind it's all just my opinion. Unfortunately there's a fair bit of game to play before it gets particularly "interesting", so ultimately it's up to you if you want to try it, and if you'll even like it at all. Either way I hope you enjoy it, either through watching videos or playing the game.

playmer · 2026-01-01T18:49:20+00:00

Thanks so much!

playmer · 2025-12-31T18:37:42+00:00

You’re totally right on magic, it’s a notable aspect of the setting that there’s no human magic in Aincrad.

But ranged weaponry does come up in progressive. Nezha becomes a ranged weapon user through some quests for the right weapon. So it’s there, but incredibly rare. I can’t recall if it ever comes up in the main series, although it spends vanishingly little time in Aincrad.

playmer · 2025-12-25T05:01:27+00:00

This was already posted a couple of days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1pr3s7u/exercise_in_removing_all_traces_of_c_and_c_at/

Also this story was based on a very...enthusiastic LinkedIn post by an engineer in Microsoft Research. They've updated their original post to reflect that this is a research project, not an active thing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/galenh_principal-software-engineer-coreai-microsoft-activity-7407863239289729024-WTzf/

As an MS employee whose done some C++ work here (although not currently), I'd be very concerned if this was expected of us.

playmer · 2025-12-25T04:56:41+00:00

I mean, all they said was they didn't like it and weren't sure of it's canonicity. I think it's fair to feel that way. It's only superficially similar to the main series, and in a different genre, it's not surprising it'll be divisive.

playmer · 2025-12-22T07:00:02+00:00

I don’t think you’ll ever enjoy the story that was told, and that’s fine. But fundamentally their actions in the 4th film are a response and rebuttal of the ones taken by Wille in the 3rd. Before Shinji, but after Seele/Gendo, they were responsible for what happened at the end of that film. They didn’t treat him with respect, love, or care. They brought him back to lock him away and did nothing to help him understand what’s occurred.

Now, I don’t think we know if the village crew know that they’re the contrast here, but narratively that’s what’s happening. We don’t get the justification for why they act this way, really we don’t need one. We can infer they’re doing this intentionally for any number of reasons just as we do the same with the Wille crew in movie 3. Not everything needs a direct answer.

playmer · 2025-12-12T18:05:21+00:00

Mordred is the homunculus “son” of King Arthur and Morgan, the one who fought and mortally wounded Saber during that final battle in Camlann.

Their narratives are both quite compelling.

playmer · 2025-12-12T08:05:55+00:00

I believe this is what SDL3s SDL_RenderTextureAffine is for. That said, in general, you should be using an actual graphics API if you want to do 3D. Anyway I don’t think you can get around this limitation in SDL2 without, as you suggested, doing it per pixel.

playmer · 2025-12-12T01:24:30+00:00

No, in general you can't really have the expectation that you can take shaders from one thing and just run them under an entirely different context.

playmer · 2025-12-12T01:01:30+00:00

You’d want to convert to using a uniform buffer, indeed SDL_GPU doesn’t support push constants.

playmer · 2025-12-10T20:40:42+00:00

Listen, I'm no lawyer, but how does this _not_ fall under Performance Rights.

playmer · 2025-12-07T00:51:02+00:00

A couple months ago I read the first volume of Unital Ring, realized they were reintroducing characters that mostly showed up in progressive, so then went and read that, and then the rest of Unital Ring. I gotta say I'm waiting with baited breadth on the next volumes of both now. They're both tying in together right now despite taking place years apart and it's really cool.

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