WorldMaker

Part of why the Dreamcast was too clever was Sega letting Microsoft use it as an R&D vehicle for Xbox.

It's fascinating how close Nintendo got to doing the same thing with their Sony partnership while Sony was R&Ding early PlayStation.

A related datapoint, which feels like a "know your tools" thing, but PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View and "Browsed by an Individual".

If you've got multiple monitors, just present to a different monitor, with or without Presenter View (which shows notes and such) and screen share only the monitor with the slides.

If you're on a single monitor (which ultrawides are making more somewhat common again), you can go to Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show and switch the Presentation Type to "Browsed by an Individual" which keeps the slide show windowed, but hides most controls and focuses just on the slides, then screen share only that window. At the moment PowerPoint still doesn't support Presenter View when running slides this way, possibly because it predates modern ultrawides and people didn't have the screen space before to have multiple such windows open side by side.

("Browsed by an Individual" is also stupidly hard to discover if you have never had reason to "Set Up Slide Show", a dialog somewhat more common in 90s PowerPoint because the flow sometimes was that you would need to "Set Up" before you could F5 launch it. I've seen so many company presentations presented with the full fat PPT normal/editing view window simply because no one knows to look for "Browsed by an Individual" to focus the slides.)

You can indeed make good use of those funny names in IPv6. If your /64 or /56 prefix is $prefix you can assign your coffee pot to $prefix::cafe or maybe keep it just fe80::cafe if you only want link local access to your coffee pot.

Roblox just as the single entry point in stores (for the most part) and doesn't clutter search engines when people are looking for the real games (for the most part) and has a certain friction between verisimilitude and aesthetic. For the most part the Roblox version of a game looks like Roblox, you aren't going to confuse it for "the real thing". Needing to use Roblox bucks instead of USD is going to be a red flag for some that they aren't getting a "professional" experience (and for others means they have an easier time playing it because their parents won't give them prepaid credit cards but will give them Roblox gift cards).

It's not just that the bar to entry is that much lower than Roblox's already low bar, but that the ceiling for (mass) deception is now much higher.

In the US "at will" employment in many states means that companies don't ever need employment contracts. Jobs have terms and conditions, often these are explicitly not written as employment contracts and you never actually sign them, you just agree to them by nature of showing up to the job. Even for white collar and higher paid jobs, companies like the CYA nature of not having a contract they can be considered in breach of, but a document they can use as a stick.

US "at will" laws really are that bad. The US has a strange history with labor laws.

What's legal and what's enforceable are two different things. Also the US is extremely muddy in these legal waters because, sure, Federal laws and the Department of Labor are supposed to enforce such actions. But most US states are "At-Will Employment" states which means that companies do not even have to provide a reason for a termination, which means there's no paperwork that really gets sent to the Department of Labor to enforce anything at all.

(Not to mention that companies have spent decades perfecting the "layoffs are coming in a quarter or two, send out performance reviews now and encourage managers to be extra 'honest' and nitpick everything so that we have a written record just in case we need to fire people for performance to make the layoff seem smaller" dance, including Stack Ranking being built to be that smoke 100% of the year, every year. Still technically illegal, but if the quiet parts aren't said out loud who are you going to believe, the months ahead of time paperwork in performance reviews or that executives decided they needed harsh performance reviews months in advance on a golf course somewhere? It's not a conspiracy when it's so easy to pull off.)

The big win of Win32S was getting developers to build Win32 apps ahead of the Windows 95 launch. Especially Win32S was one of the necessary building blocks to convincing some game developers that Windows was finally a good platform for game development rather than just assuming Windows could be exited and returned to DOS. Windows 95's launch would have been a lot less smooth if Win32S hadn't paved a lot of the way.

It's definitely possible to build a self-contained EXE. It's not easy or the default for a number of reasons, including the fact that going back even to DOS the PC application deployment model for applications is folders full of shared library DLLs and a smaller EXE that makes use of them. (The Win32 page model was built on it.) Modern .NET excels in that, including in the classic DOS installer model of "just copy the files, no installer required (but you'll probably build one anyway for extra branding opportunities and a few bonuses)".

Some .NET versions <= 4 installed a lot of their DLLs globally in Windows and if you were exact version tolerant enough (and GAC binding magic lucky enough) you could distribute a single EXE without an installer and expect some number of Windows users it would "just work" with only the EXE (and other users you would get complex dances of Windows Updates and .NET Installers to debug). Modern .NET decided on the classic DOS style "folder of DLLs" model over "global DLL cache and DLL Hell". You can no longer assume that the output EXE can "just work" on some supported Windows machines, but can better assume that the output folder of DLLs and EXE will work as intended generally on every supported Windows machine.

In 2026 with WINE, Win32 is a surprisingly handy cross-platform GUI toolkit with surprisingly relaxed licensing restrictions. WINE even helps maintain the cross-platform support for modern .NET's (.NET 6+) System.Windows.Forms which allows you to write Win32 in a modern language stack with relatively modern conveniences.

It still feels so disingenuous, too, that this keeps coming up for Cobalt, specifically. Cobalt had centuries of being "the useless junk that makes a pretty blue paint from our tin mines". These mines are certainly not mining just for Cobalt any more now that rechargeable batteries are an important thing to some cars. They are still mining tin, lead, diamonds, gold, etc and getting some amount of Cobalt out as a side hustle or "waste product".

They are also done for performative consent. The cookie banners want you to think that you have control. They often offer an illusion of fine grained control. They argue "this can't be a browser feature because they'll get it wrong or not offer you enough toggles to find some magic compromise between our advertisers and your data".

It relates to why DoNotTrack headers failed. Everyone who claimed they would support stopped supporting it as soon as users and browsers voted with their feet that they actually wanted privacy. Performative privacy is better for the corporate bottom line than real privacy, every time.