Week 3 Lab: When Did It Diverge?

Take a real copy (a "Copy of," a forward, a duplicated file) and find the specific point where it stopped being just a copy

8 March 2027

Before the session#

Find a file on your own machine with a name that admits it’s a copy: “Copy of,” “(1),” a forwarded attachment saved under the sender’s filename, anything duplicated rather than newly created. Locate the file it was copied from, or your best reconstruction of what that file must have looked like at the moment of copying.

Open both. Compare them properly, not by eye alone: line by line in a text file, cell by cell in a spreadsheet, slide by slide in a deck.

In the session#

Some pairs turn out identical: a copy nobody ever touched, still just clutter. Bring one of those too if you have one: the negative case matters as much as the positive one. For pairs that diverged, the group works backward from the differences to the single change most likely to be the first one, and argues about whether that change was the moment the copy became something else, or just the first of several before that moment arrived.

Afterwards#

Whichever pair you brought, keep the specific change you identified. Next week is about what happens after that point: once a copy has diverged and someone has to decide what to do with two related, unreconciled versions.