WorldMaker

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.)

Perhaps even more interesting winfile.exe the original Windows 3 File Manager was even updated (including a few open source contributions) with a few modern conveniences. There's not a lot of reason for launching progman.exe in Windows 11, but you might be surprised what you can do with winfile.exe still to this day, when you want a break from File Explorer.

It's archived again now, but: https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

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.

WinForms provided some responsive control patterns like "anchors" and "dock" properties [0] and other sorts of relative positioning. Some third party component libraries included even more advanced layout controls. A lot of applications would add in imperative code to make up for more complex scenarios that anchors/dock didn't handle well enough. WinForms was still built on the back of pixel-perfect positioning assumptions, so there was always people doing it manually with handwritten/hand-tuned math.

It is something I appreciate about WPF and other successors is that responsive layouts became the default and low level building blocks with "pixel perfect" harder to do and less of an "after thought" on top of pixel perfect WYSIWYG that's easy to get responsive wrong, but even with WinForms people were building responsive apps back in the day.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/co...

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.

The Gervais Principle [0] decades ago was arguing that Sociopathy is what companies have optimized themselves for in their upper management. That it is almost the expected "social class" of wealthy people today.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

The Gervais Principle [0] argued that the nature of companies has "optimized" for serial bull shitters (Sociopaths, in its terms) to rise to the top of management.

The argument is that essentially that's become an entire "social class" of people, the people in especially upper management and the people of wealth/privilege.

For whatever reason our society has seemed to have evolved to a point that honesty does not "valuable" or a trait held by "wealthy people".

It's hard not to feel like this is a theme of the movie in question, too.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

> In a way, this documentary was probably _going to_ be about exploring the factual matters and whether or not she knew she was actually guilty or had some level of remorse.

I don't think it was ever going to be about that. Nathan isn't a journalist and his interests as a storyteller generally aren't about The Truth in a journalist sense, but about how we tell stories, especially about ourselves.

The fact the appearance/likeness contract matter doesn't even show up until the second half of the film also doesn't make it feel like the film is about that. That's just a subplot in the larger stories.

But the movie also teases that could just be spin to distract from Holmes' villainy. Just as the first half explores how much the villainy of Theranos by some gets pushed off to Sunny. In about the same ways. Or the first half hints that her Dad as a former Enron executive is the exact same sort of person "who never did anything wrong" but "accidentally" happened to be right there when everything went wrong. (Which is related because her Dad is also one of the big voices for "Sunny was the villain and I knew it all along" narrative in the film.)

But yeah, window into insane wealth and privilege.

The big, big "twist" is SPOILER that last second reveal that Nathan did go swim in the ocean with Holmes and might have been compromised (as Seyfried wonders in the last few moments) and the film really is just another case of trying to make it seem like Holmes isn't the villain because Nathan came away liking Holmes.

(But that's also a game Fielder is playing in this film, how much you can trust him to be an "objective" observer, so not necessarily a twist following along from the beginning, but subtext made text in the last few minutes.)

I did that with SQL Server for a time. It was particularly a strange serialization because I tried to match ULID ordering with SQL Server's UUID sort algorithm.

Assuming the database uses a UUID sort order that reflects UUIDv1 time-based sorting (the last version with timestamps and even then temporal ordering of UUIDs was only one possible sort order; v1 also included machine IDs and some databases optimized for locality by machine for reasons that made sense with v1 but also relate to why we gave up on v1 because machine IDs were problematic privacy issues in wider usage). Many of the databases implementing explicit v7 support are choosing time orders for v7 sorting, and only time orders.

Things like age of an account/record-in-an-account can help find "higher value" targets and/or "less secure"/"more likely to be currently retired/inactive" targets.

I suppose one of the things that influences my opinion is that I mostly don't play RPGs for combat encounters. They are all somewhat equally repetitive filler to me.

Microsoft has a strange habit of doing it. They sold off many of the former FASA's IPs indirectly back to the original RPG source book owner by way of what became WizKids. They made a deal too big to pass up to keep Halo IP when they spun Bungie back out, but allegedly Bungie walked away with a bunch of their pre-Microsoft IP, even if they didn't see how to use it versus building something new with Destiny. (The fact that they've reused the Marathon brand recently seems proof.) Most recently, Double Fine left with all their IP.

(Outside of games, Expedia was a spin out that got an odd mix of old MSN IP.)

> missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth)

Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.

I liked the fresh reset because it was good excuse to get back to the "Exploration" roots of Mass Effect 1.

That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.

Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.

I still think Mass Effect Andromeda was one story DLC away from being my favorite Mass Effect game. The team behind Andromeda was the team that made all the best story DLC for the previous three games. Their wheelhouse was taking the game past the last stages of polish to telling the small stories that really tie the whole thing together. I still wonder what we might have gotten from the cancelled DLC if the technical bugs of the Frostbite engine switch hadn't created such a bad first impression.

(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)

Then the cycle rhymed and they got bought by EA between Titanfall 1 and 2, built Apex Legends as a cash cow, diverted to doing nothing but Apex Legends and unceremoniously fired by EA when Apex Legends stopped being quite the cash cow it was at launch.

I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.

I thought the smaller scale helped make the stakes feel more believable. The very rare case in scifi/fantasy of seeing any sort of stakes deflation.

(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)

Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 were Interplay. BioWare's D&D involvement was NeverWinter Nights 1 & 2.

Mass Effect 3 also greatly expanded the endings in post-launch DLC. Though I also still maintain one of the greatest things about the ending was also the psychological trick it made. A lot of people complained "There was only one 'real' choice for my Shepard" but didn't see enough playthroughs to understand that why all four endings [0] were still rather equally distributed. The ending asked the player to sum up hours and hours of game play with a wild story tapestry of complex interlocking decisions and in general that "there was only one choice that made sense" feeling was that you had characterized "your" Shepard pretty strongly by that point, but different playthroughs pushed each of the four different endings into feeling like "the one and only that makes sense for my Shepard".

I still find that fascinating.

(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)

[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.

I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.