Unless and until I see a clear privacy police analyzed by a lawyer, stating categorically that this doesn't happen, I think it's wise to assume that you are correct here.
While it's possible they meant something nefarious, I think the goal was probably just to prevent confusion around shared computers. Such confusion might seem unlikely, but when your market is as big as Microsoft's even unlikely things happen all the time.
Microsoft's "CoPilot PCs" scheme places a lot of emphasis on the hardware being powerful enough for locally-processed "AI" features and isn't about offloading everything (I suspect because they're starting to acknowledge that not everyone has a highly-reliable multi-megabit Internet connection).
The addition of tabs to Notepad has made me stop using it entirely. My entire workflow around it was having separate windows for each document that I could move and close freely. Having an all-in-one-place Notepad filled with the ghosts of API tokens past is precisely the opposite of what I needed.
I think it takes maybe 3 clicks to set up "old style notepad". I don't understand the harsh criticism? I don't use it myself since I have a sublime license, and st3 opens up instantly, but I don't think the new changes to notepad are the end of the world.
I don’t understand why anything I said is a “harsh criticism” or “the end of the world.” I don’t actually care about Notepad! It might have taken 3 clicks to set it up, but it took zero clicks to say “this is a change I didn’t want and I don’t care enough to learn how to fix it, I’ll just use something else.”
Yeah, not everything needs an LLM tacked on. Notepad is a lesson in tool minimalism; it serves a lot of use cases precisely because it has a small feature set.
on windows 11 it's still lightweight and snappy though, with tabs, autosave, dark theme and design that fits in and doesn't stick out like a sore thumb
I disagree. I mean, it could be worse, but notepad has become feature-laden enough that it almost eliminates the usefulness of the program. I may as well use a full text editor.
I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs in different places and it wastes more time for me having tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the monitors instead.
In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest time.
It still works like that but combined with autosave you really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not already open in another instance or different tab lots of times.
Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open Notepad days or weeks later.
Even though for like 40 years when you opened a new instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a blank text window.
And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file to open without having some other text on some other tab that came from somewhere else you might not remember that well.
So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you type now by default.
No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that, nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.
I guess that's why they're going to call the next level Rewrite.
I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but what can you expect anyway?
tabs and autosave are pretty essential features. they make notepad a single window app (no need to fiddle with a bunch of windows) and easy to open and close while keeping all tabs/files open (no need to save every file on exit, no need to reopen every file).
it improves the usefulness of previous notepad, which was clunky to use for lack of those features and prone to data loss (no autosave, duh), which would actually make the old notepad almost useless. it improves it so much, it's probably the easiest way to quicky note something, and be sure that it won't go anywhere.
it's just the right amount of actually useful features that makes it so much more usable. and lack of those features would just immediately prompt one to look elsewhere for something that has those (like notepads, which is pretty good as well). some other editors might not be as quick and not even as good at autosaving and actually keeping stuff. (like sublime, which would lose sessions and data in them with absurd regularity, which hasn't happened once in a year of use of notepad (sure, not saving manually is bad, but having functionality just not work and fail with regularity is worse)
Autosaving introduces it's own dataloss problem, though, because now you might accidentally overwrite a file you didn't actually want to change.
Inside my IDE that's not a problem because my software projects are under version control and I can easily revert unwanted changes, but for general files somewhere on my hard disk… hm.
it's not really hard to separate between 'vague notes that can just hang' and 'files that should be just saved to avoid ambiguity'. for me, autosave works better for 'text that isn't in a file and is yet to be put together and saved into a file'. it's fine for quick notetaking that isn't pressing enough to plug into an IDE or to even launch it for just that.
Not for me. Tabs and autosave are features I absolutely don't want in Notepad. The entire value of Notepad to me is that it's simple and basic. The tabs are irritating, but at least I can pretend the tab bar doesn't exist (although I wish I could hide it), and autosave as well as restoring the last document can be disabled.
But even having to start configuring Notepad to restore some of what makes it valuable to me reduces its utility. There is great value in having a bare-bones text editor. In those cases where more features are desired, using a more featureful editor is possible. That's what I do.
All that said, there are plenty of simple editors out there that I can use instead, so it's not really an earth-shaking deal. It's just a little sad to me. Notepad had managed to maintain its value proposition and avoid feature creep for a very long time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually.
Notepad was and always had been a simple and light application for viewing raw text files. Text editing is secondary and justifiably quite limited. If you wanted a real text editor you used Wordpad.
Microsoft has absolutely no concept of the value that anyone gets out of anything they make. The one and only question they seem capable of asking is "how can we monetize this?"
Why do people want tabs anyway? It's kind of clunky compared to just having smaller individual file explorer windows. Like you can't _really_ drag and drop files between tabs without the added time overhead of waiting for the tab to change.
I assume most users are just full screen, list view-ing it though instead of the large icon view.
I don't think this is a good reason but tabs give you the ability to keep a bunch of files open and accessible without cluttering your main taskbar since there is only 1 Notes window.
You don't need tabs to do that. You can enable grouping on the taskbar.
I personally don't find tabs useful at all, but I don't really hate them. Well, I wouldn't hate them if more applications would avoid showing the tab bar if there was only one tab showing. I get annoyed by the waste of space that provides to those of us who will never use the tabs.
I wonder when the environmentalists will realize what is going on right now, and start to protest AI usage in general. I was already wondering the same when the open source community started to CI every damn PR and commit, but I guess I was too optimistic with that one.
Windows Update is another big one, the way it makes every Windows computer spin the fans like crazy on a regular basis. Probably room for improvement there.
maybe they could just make the software not be completely shit instead ?
why does Windows take 2 minutes to decide what updates to install, then 45 minutes to install them when Debian on the same machine can do both in under 30 seconds?
I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto people used to say when it was very new.
It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are.
I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc.
Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".
To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller more power efficient models with the same performance are possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops and increasing value is found that 'AI' will cross the threshold of being worth the energy.
Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.
To be clear, I'm not against AI or LLM as a technology in general. What I'm against is the unethical way how these LLMs trained and how people are dismissive of the damage they're doing and saying "we're doing something amazing, we need no permission".
Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji).
However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them.
Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.
I disagree. Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was a solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database was a better solution the problem.
I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
AI is a gigantic landscape with tons of different applications to different problems, and there are many solutions which work for a given problem.
However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences about something being asked. More importantly, what that parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its accuracy about its slop.
And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness.
You've moved the goalposts from AI to LLM's. Fair enough, we've been doing AI since the 50's, and this is the second AI boom in a decade.
Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they are immensely useful. You might not personally find value out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with parameters", except I can not ever remember the parameters (they're different for different things). I can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified folder, and the entire task is done before I've even thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to, rather than munging data around.
If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers, then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of screwing around to find something viable.
> And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness.
> That doesn't solve any problems.
I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't solve real problems.
I think it's premature to be integrating LLMs into operating systems. That said I think they're very valuable, and the training is fundamental research. I feel like complaining about the resources used to train new models is a bit like complaining about the resources used to build experimental fusion reactors or particle accelerators. The fact that we're seeing direct applications is a bonus, but it's still more like fundamental research than anything.
People are spending all that money training because they are trying to fix the problems you're complaining about, and this includes fixing the power consumption problem. If we can create 3B parameter models that have capabilities on par with today's 405B parameter models, that's worth spending a lot of energy training. But nobody knows what is possible, so they have to try. I feel like you're basically arguing nobody should try because you don't believe they will ever improve, but that seems contradicted by the general trajectory of how things have been working the past decade. More resources spent on training means more efficient and useful models.
> Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was a solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database was a better solution the problem.
Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of decentralized peer to peer payments, which is the key differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
> I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here.
If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
Would you like to hear more or have you already dismissed these as "not good use cases"? It would be nice to differentiate between use cases that don't apply to you personally, and use cases that don't apply to anyone.
> Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of decentralized peer to peer payments, which is the key differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
And the point that the useful cases cede to make a useful product. The thing that is a _feature_ of a cryptocurrency is why people don't use it. I've had this debate dozens of times on here.
> If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
> The thing that is a _feature_ of a cryptocurrency is why people don't use it.
People do, in fact, use them. Is it a popular payment method in western countries? No, but do some people use it? Yes, they do.
For privileged people, decentralization is usually a serious flaw. For others, it's an extremely important characteristic that lets them transact at all. The world isn't black and white, and people have use cases that are different from yours.
You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
Not nearly as well, or there wouldn't be anyone using cryptocurrencies for that purpose.
You could make identical boring, bad-faith arguments about AI products. I think 99.99% of all "AI" products available today are completely useless - to me - but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
> You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
If you can't make your point without making sniping attacks about my character, then this isn't a conversation I want to continue having.
Privileged person is anyone living in a western country who hasn't had to deal with censorship. I consider myself to be a privileged person in that regard. That's not an attack on anyone's character.
> You're being self-centered
That's anyone who fails to consider use cases other than their own. I wasn't speaking to your character, It was a description of your reply, not your character, because it contained sweeping statements that only apply to certain groups of people.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
That's not an attack on anyone?
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
I've explained that privilege isn't an attack on anyone's character. As for the rest, sorry, but which words am I supposed to use when someone denies that a problem is real (which fair enough, I'll elaborate), later admits that there are other services that solve the same problem, but they still want to claim that there are no problems that the obscure product is solving, despite that product having real-world users who are using it for that exact problem?
I never heard of any reasonable uses for Crypto or Blockchain in general. A lot of people tried to sell us various things at the time but it was very obvious that it had no real value.
AI is already implemented into businesses in various ways. Even if it’s not done so official you still have loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT and Claude because they work.
In terms of generative AI, for general use cases, Open AI reported having 11 million paid subscribers last quarter. People clearing paying for Adobe Firefly and Midjourney access. That's already a ton more people finding it useful in day to day life than Crypto ever had.
It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend that no one is getting any value out of this.
At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use, according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for AI.
Manga Library Z, a manga archiving site that distributed old and out-of-print manga for free has been forced to close down due to all major credit card companies refusing to provide payment services. If some hypothetical widespread decentralized payment system can prevent scenarios like this one from happening, then it would be worth the "enormous waste of resources". These days, you're essentially relegated to a non-person if card companies stop allowing you to use their services.
Notes is a very different app to Notepad though. Nobody uses the Notes app to edit plain text files, which is the sole use case of Notepad. Notes is for writing, well, notes. Notes also has a lot of other editing modes and features like drawing with the apple pencil, scanning documents, cross device syncing, etc. As far as I’m aware Notepad can only edit plain text files.
It's unfortunate that Apple Notes doesn't handle plain text. I'd use it like this if possible.
Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete, autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers…
I used Notes to edit a text file once and learned a very important lesson; It changes all your double-quotes to fancy Unicode double-quotes. They may look prettier, but they completely break the code you are working on.
It's basically autocomplete, spellcheck and refactoring, just based on a new technical approach. Those are not new or unusual features for a text editor.
On the other - the whole appeal of notepad was that it was a barebones text editor with none of that fluff (aka - it's a text editor, not a word processor or IDE).
MS has a large number of alternatives for the folks who wanted them.
When I opened Notepad - it's explicitly because I don't want the machine trying to tell me what I entered is wrong, or fix it. I just want a big dumb textbox for my file.
---
Basically - If you wanted those features you're looking for MS Word or Wordpad.
But MS discontinued Wordpad, and now they seem intent on trying to turn Notepad into Wordpad 2.0.
My prediction is this will not work well, since it directly competes with Office, and is not what the legacy users of notepad want.
But hey... a text editor is an easy place to shove text based AI, and cool shiny new thing of the year means some exec can claim to be shoving novel solutions into prod and bump up AI usage.
I just think people want a nice zen experience in notepad without the buzz of tech and AI swarming them. Kind of like choosing pen and paper instead of opening up Word. If I want a text editor for "all of the above capabilities" it won't be notepad.
Strange. Microsoft seems to struggle with the fact that they named it "Notepad" and some subset of users took this to heart and used it as a note pad, but due to backwards compatibility concerns it must never save rich text formatted files, else it could cause confusing data loss scenarios for users just trying to edit config files. Hence, the odd combination of LLM features added to a text editor that will never support rich text or rendered markdown.
It a result of a rather sad trend, which I think started with Google. Rather than going out and doing market research you just throw things against the wall, measure and see if people are using it at any significant rate.
The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google have no problems just killing of things that doesn't perform to their standard (which is bad in it's own way). With Microsoft backwards compatibility is everything, so once something is in Windows, it says around for a very, very, long time.
AI assistance in writing isn't a bad idea, but maybe not in Notepad. I know that this isn't they way modern Microsoft wants to do things, but exposing an API that would allow 3rd. party vendors to AI support in Windows seems like a more sensible approach. Except they'd probably have to make it accessible from Javascript to make anyone use it.
Perhaps trying random things uncovers more big opportunities than market research does. Market research tells you to breed faster horses; random things converge to combustion engines.
According to Wikipedia [0], the development of the car concept went from 1649 to 1881. That's not exactly throwing random things and seeing what sticks. It may have not been systematic, but with the wealth of information and resources we have today, we can and should do better.
I hate that Win11 Notepad has so many tabs open even after you close the app.
Many times, I just paste my copied text in Notepad to strip the formatting + special characters and close it after re-copying the data. Pretty efficient.
Now that I open Notepad.. all my previous tabs are open asking me to close them one after the other (extra click on not so save the file) :@ so annoying
I'm not sure how they built this thing, but it makes sense to me on the face of it: Notepad should be the thinnest wrapper possible around a simple textbox, and the generated thing they're showing should be built into the widget itself so it's exposed to all apps in the OS (much like macOS exposes emacs/readline-style shortcuts everywhere that uses a default textbox).
Why do writing tools have to be a feature of every app instead of an operating-system wide tool like Apple Intelligence? Makes no sense whatsoever to just "sprinkle AI everywhere" except for specialized use cases.
You seem to be of the understanding that Microsoft has some sort of unified strategy that tries to optimize for user experience. Might have been true in the beginning of the company's life, but today? They've been using the "spraying and praying" strategy for the last 2 decades at least and this is just another way of applying said strategy.
I bet there's there's a poorly thought out directive from the company bigwigs to integrate AI into all Microsoft products, and middle management is gobbling that up to get ahead in the rat race.
Visual Studio and VSCode have also become infested with little Copilot icons.
I've yet to have a good experience with copilot in Visual Studio
It still surprises me to have shows stopping bugs with it, In THE first party IDE, in Windows, using pure .NET and other microsoft tooling
I couldn't describe a more perfectly vacuum'ed spherical cow, and still, copilot dies randomly even after they have acknowledged the problem and made some fixes
Visual Studio unfortunately still heavily uses legacy .NET Framework, only some parts of instrumentation specifically for C# were moved out of process and run on top of modern runtime. It's a pretty good IDE, much better than the kind of experience you get elsewhere, but I've moved to VSC + Rider since and only use VS occasionally on my "gaming pc" because it has a convenient community-made extension for getting quick .NET's compiler output.
As far as I’m aware, Windows doesn’t have anything quite like services on macOS and probably can’t because Windows apps, even those that are first-party, are built with a menagerie of different UI toolkits which means there are no universal hooks for something like services to use.
The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).
> Makes no sense whatsoever to just "sprinkle AI everywhere" except for specialized use cases.
Microsoft really don't know what they're doing. They're trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks without thinking of any externalities such as people getting pissed off and leaving to other platforms.
Is the Windows Copilot not that? There has been annoying focus-killing long-form automatic autocomplete replacing the text popping in every kind of text area on the computer I use at work. Is this being done on each application?
Despite how far its rotted, macOS is built on object-oriented APIs. Making Apple Intelligence work for text means adding it to NSText and whatever crappy UIKit objects came over with Catalyst/SwiftUI, not every single app individually bespoke.
It's less effective at the OS wide level because the context is incredibly important. Notepad is used very differently from word processing and other applications. Even in the context of notepad- you're using that app very differently when working in python vs a readme.
AI is best integrated at the application level because the application developers are best suited to tune the algorithm and determine which pieces of context are most relevant.
I think this is where it will go inevitably, with only specialized AI tools being features baked into products you like.
A lot of our opinions on AI (like the one you just conveyed) stems from now nascent the design thinking around AI truly is. Like early internet, I suspect 10 years from now the UX of these tools will be much more mature. There'll likely always be a need for what ChatGPT has now, but these do feel like OS features.
>It’s worth noting that you’ll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it’s “powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization.”
What?!
What about AI PC, NPUs in e.g Lunar Lake and in general AI@Edge?
It's been pretty fascinating to watch what Microsofties have to put up with, having switched to Linux in 2007. Vista's half-assed release, Windows 8's tablet UI disaster, Windows 10's online account requirements, now all the AI crap they're shoving into Windows 11. Meanwhile I'm just over here using basically the same Arch Linux tools & XFCE environment for almost 20 years. Yes, I know, Linux isn't perfect, but it's maybe worth a look if you're fed up with using an OS that wants to exploit you instead of serve you. It's especially easy now that most things are web-based.
Arch has consistently proven itself to be the perfect machine for me. I go for months without a reboot even with daily package updates. 2000 line C window managers like DWM leave me more productive than windows ever has
I stopped using Windows and switched to Linux exclusively decades ago. But I don't get to choose what OS I use at work, so what Windows does still deeply affects me.
"Just switch" is great for home machines, but for most, that's not an option at work.
Work is for work stuff. It's someone else computer, someone else wants and needs. I don't mind if they want to feed all their data to Big Tech (On my previous work computer the only truly personal piece of data I had was my profile picture and ssh keys for my GitHub account). I don't even do web searches on work computers. If Windows is slow, I'd just bring it up to my manager and the IT dept.
On my personal computers, that's a different story.
I totally agree, but I was really addressing just having to put up with the OS rather than privacy issues specifically. My employer can take whatever privacy risks they want.
I do get your point. But all of them are fine OSes, if you just want to run some software (which is the majority of the jobs). What macOS and Windows don’t allow is true customization, aka aligning it to your personal taste. That’s not great for a personal computer, but fine for a work one. If the company don’t want to address inefficiency, that’s on them.
So, they went from not updating in forever, to finally updating it in some meaningful ways a couple years ago, to adding crap that no one wants pretty much right away. Too much, MS. Shoulda quit while you were ahead with tabs.
Prediction: All corporate-backed general-purpose LLMs/AIs will eventually include ads. They won't even always be obvious ads like we have on the web, sometimes they will just be product placement. Ask the AI for an example of a linked list, and it will give you one, but the sample items in the list will be Coca-Cola, Lexus, the name of the closest marijuana dispensary, etc.
If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the content and the ad.
There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain somehow.
You’ll be warned when you accept the terms and conditions. And after the first lawsuits, there will be some fine print on the bottom of the page for you to ignore.
They must be completely toothless laws considering the amount of product placement that is easily visible. The only thing that will change is automating product placement in what used to look like organic conversation, including on HN.
Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
In the US, the laws just say that if you do product placement, you have to disclose you're doing it. If you do that, then there's no restrictions on product placement.
I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.
It's not quite that simple, it's if you have a relationship with the seller of the product that the average viewer(tm) would not expect. So, e.g. product placement on daytime TV or quiz shows doesn't require disclosure, because the regulators/courts have decided that's what the average viewer would expect anyway. But anything on social media does require it, it seems. I think produce placement in LLM chatbots would probably qualify as unexpected, though.
AI can feel more like a novelty than a truly helpful tool, especially when it comes to getting real work done. When I need a real boost, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola. It’s amazing how it instantly lifts my mood and keeps me going!
They have already onboarded a scrum team on the code base. They've got to burn those points on something to argue for their payroll and the PO and the lead dev thinks AI is cool.
All it needed was a way to work with other newline formats cleanly. Adding much more than that (even tabs) makes it into a different thing that leaves a gap in the niche it used to fill.
When I was a windows user 20 years ago I was using scite, the Scintilla demo editor. It had the lightness and simpleness of notepad with syntax highlighting.
That, and finally getting rid of keeping a lock on the file handle of the opened files. Sooo many times I needed explain someone that their directory could not get deleted or their apps failed to uninstall simply because they were still reading its readme.txt
It's not the lock on the file, it's the lock on the directory. The common file dialog in Windows changes the current directory of the process to the file that was selected, and a Win32 process holds a lock on its current directory. So when you open readme.txt in a particular folder, Notepad.exe's current directory is changed to and holds a lock on that folder.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
Wow, so notepad++ and vscode quickly change the cwd after opening a file via a win dialog?
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
Oh, great, they added a "Users Resistance is invalid" button - so everyone can go along with it, until they remove it in 2 updates and then, well you had a choice and the choice was to swallow whatever you get served.
The default Windows taskbar doesn't haven't given you tabs for a very long time, has been mostly unusable if you use it as tabs recently, and only has 1 level of tabs, while keeping tabs inside the application gives you another.
To answer seriously, because workflow is a tree. And the outer levels need task-specificity. Browser tabs need different display options and available actions from text editor tabs, etc.
A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).
After Visual Studio 2008, they rewrote the UI in WPF and started writing large components of the program in C#. This dramatically regressed performance, especially on a cold start (it runs decently if you've had the program open for a while). I'd probably still be using Visual Studio 2008, except it limits you to C89 and C++03.
C# is working hard to be Rust-like in certain areas of performance. Part of Visual Studio's problem is that they can't yet take advantage of it in some key areas because they are still dependent on the Legacy Framework and Legacy WPF and have to migrate to modern .NET.
Cold boot perf is a good yard stick but it’s not that important in your workflow. Except when it crashes. They really should work on that. Quality as a feature.
The first apps I need to replace on any new windows machine (after installing FF) are Paint, Notepad, Photo/Image viewer and MediaPlayer. The funny thing is their replacements are all ancient as well, and still awesome because they've been thoughtfully upgraded over the years without destroying their conceptual integrity, or they've just been "done" for decades.
My main OS is macOS but I use Windows for gaming. The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows is actually kinda depressing. Everything newer is garbage for various reasons, and everything old is ugly as hell.
Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
Mentioning all these programs and seeing the trouble people have I will never really understand why there are any men at all that still use Windows and Mac.
I mean Haiku is the best OS in my opinion. But nobody really uses it because it lacks the software support. Sometimes you got to put up with the BS to get what you want done.
Apple Notes on MacOS have been crashing for me constantly since shortly after Apple Intelligence beta started rolling out. Even though I'm not even on the beta.
> The reliance on crusty old ass applications like those on Windows is actually kinda depressing.
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
VLC is pretty damn crusty, especially to anyone not familiar with that particular....design ethos.
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
Is VLC really "complex software" if you just want to use it as a media player? Double click your media file, it plays. Play, pause, volume controls are where you'd guess they are. There's plenty of complexity underneath, but the happy path is simple.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
> The guy who requested the feature then went ahead and implemented the feature in a weekend. Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
They eventually did credit "the guy," Casey Muratori, who's a very accomplished game engine developer. He has a series called Handmade Hero where he writes an engine and game from scratch and streams it live.
I've used VLC forever and I had no idea there is anything more to it than playing media. It always seems to have the most recent codecs, so it doesn't seem crusty to me.
Even when just opening a single video file it tries to do way too much at once.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
Yeah mpv is great on win; I switched from VLC because VLC had trouble with playback combined with large subtitle offsets. mpv just works and the couple things I need for UI were easily configured as hotkeys
I've used VLC for a long time as well, and while I wouldn't call it crusty, I would call it odd. Powerful, super capable, but doesn't seem to follow standard conventions. Honestly, it's odd but I would rather they don't do some overhaul to standardize or modernize it. Software, hardware, etc. don't have to be homogenous or turn into bland corporate-ware.
It feels like GIMP was designed with user-hostility in mind. There’s no Paint.net for Linux, so I have to use GIMP from time to time for my gui server job needs. And gosh, I hate the damn thing. Every simple step in it is as hard as you can’t bear.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
I always thought this, but used it for a while for work and found it was actually quicker work-flow-wise than Photoshop (though Photoshop was better for photo editing) or Krita (and krita is way better for painting).
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
I agree. I too am a VLC hater. It's not just crusty, but often buggy and worse[1] than alternatives (I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema myself, despite it being dead for almost a decade). VLC is also ugly in a non-platform specific way. It's like a web app developed before web apps were a thing and doesn't feel at home in either Windows, MacOS, or Linux.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
The only problem I've ever run into with VLC was on their Android app they hid the audio sync setting for basically no reason. Other than that, I've never had a problem with it. Maybe i just haven't been exposed to the magic of perfect media players but VLC is vastly more feature rich than the defaults, "just works", and i don't think it looks bad at all!
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
Have you used VLC on MacOS tho? Full screen video looks very slick and is tough to differentiate from native quicktime other than having support for more codecs and features.
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I have always thought the decision to keep Notepad and Paint as they are is a nod towards the developer community. Thanks to this, there's a large market for affordable and better alternatives.
I don't know about depressing, but eg grep is slow and lacks some quality of life features working with modern toolchains (aka git, but also codebase size). ag and rg both read .gitignore if there is one (disable with rg -uuu); for today's multi-language repos, ag can look inside a specific language's files eg ag --go or ag --js.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
To be clear, i’m not saying they’re new, but rather that they are beautiful because they have been continuously modernized to match the look and functionality of the OS.
If you care about beautiful interfaces macos and linux will always be way ahead, for sure.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.
I never understood the need for Notepad++. If I want to edit text quickly, notepad works fine, maybe I'll use vim or something if needed. If I want to view code, again vim works fine, and maybe VSCode if I know I'll be actively working on it. I don't see the usecase for Notepad++ personally speaking.
Notepad++ is an alternative to Vim, so if you are using Vim you are covering most use cases of Notepad++ already.
In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.
[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters
> I don't see the usecase for Notepad++ personally speaking
Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.
Try notepad2. It's an decent improvement from notepad while not going full notepad++. I install it on new Windows boxes and have it replace notepad.exe (there is an option to do this in setup.)
- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory
- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each
- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs
- colors
- allows tail -f (the eye icon)
- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)
- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments
- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)
- lets you see and change encoding very easily
There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.
Be careful with Irfanview and XNView as these are free strictly for personal use (non commercial). An open-source alternative I've been using is: https://nomacs.org/
We've run into an issue with the new versions of notepad saving your edits to a temp file in the background so that you can continue where you left off without losing changes if you close notepad before saving.
The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening the file to verify that they remembered to save the information will be fooled into thinking its there.
It's not too much. It's a storm in a teacup, until major user migration happens. And I think that their business strategy is working way better than that.
463 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadMicrosoft's "CoPilot PCs" scheme places a lot of emphasis on the hardware being powerful enough for locally-processed "AI" features and isn't about offloading everything (I suspect because they're starting to acknowledge that not everyone has a highly-reliable multi-megabit Internet connection).
I've seen several essays/posts describing "AI Fatigue" recently.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
At least based on search volume, we're still on an upward swing.
https://sourceforge.net/p/notepad2/code/HEAD/tree/ for source code.
[0] https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/toilet-camera-uses-a...
[1] https://today.duke.edu/2021/05/smart-toilet-uses-artificial-... (from before the LLM hype cycle, even!)
Edit: Oh. It does too.
> As a positive note, the default text editor Notepad is nice and lightweight, a good piece of software.
Unfortunately, they screwed it up with Windows 11. And apparently they are doubling down on this.
[1] https://sebastiano.tronto.net/blog/2023-01-28-windows-deskto...
I understand why people would like it, but there are bugs in different places and it wastes more time for me having tabs when some very good workflows involve having numerous distinct instances of Notepad on different parts of the monitors instead.
In a way where it was absolutely perfect for the longest time.
It still works like that but combined with autosave you really have to check a lot to make sure the file is not already open in another instance or different tab lots of times.
Or your previous message(s) pops up every time you open Notepad days or weeks later.
Even though for like 40 years when you opened a new instance of Notepad, you could reliably expect a blank text window.
And when you double-click on a TXT file, you want that file to open without having some other text on some other tab that came from somewhere else you might not remember that well.
So it's like it has Recall already built in, the AI has not even been injected yet, and it autosaves everything you type now by default.
No resemblance to a keyboard logger or anything like that, nothing to see here, nope, au contraire.
I guess that's why they're going to call the next level Rewrite.
I can't wait, in just like the last year, for the first time ever it's already way less usable than in W9x, but what can you expect anyway?
it improves the usefulness of previous notepad, which was clunky to use for lack of those features and prone to data loss (no autosave, duh), which would actually make the old notepad almost useless. it improves it so much, it's probably the easiest way to quicky note something, and be sure that it won't go anywhere.
it's just the right amount of actually useful features that makes it so much more usable. and lack of those features would just immediately prompt one to look elsewhere for something that has those (like notepads, which is pretty good as well). some other editors might not be as quick and not even as good at autosaving and actually keeping stuff. (like sublime, which would lose sessions and data in them with absurd regularity, which hasn't happened once in a year of use of notepad (sure, not saving manually is bad, but having functionality just not work and fail with regularity is worse)
Inside my IDE that's not a problem because my software projects are under version control and I can easily revert unwanted changes, but for general files somewhere on my hard disk… hm.
Not for me. Tabs and autosave are features I absolutely don't want in Notepad. The entire value of Notepad to me is that it's simple and basic. The tabs are irritating, but at least I can pretend the tab bar doesn't exist (although I wish I could hide it), and autosave as well as restoring the last document can be disabled.
But even having to start configuring Notepad to restore some of what makes it valuable to me reduces its utility. There is great value in having a bare-bones text editor. In those cases where more features are desired, using a more featureful editor is possible. That's what I do.
All that said, there are plenty of simple editors out there that I can use instead, so it's not really an earth-shaking deal. It's just a little sad to me. Notepad had managed to maintain its value proposition and avoid feature creep for a very long time. I guess all good things come to an end eventually.
Microsoft has absolutely no concept of the value that anyone gets out of anything they make. The one and only question they seem capable of asking is "how can we monetize this?"
They really pulled out the monkey's paw when I wished for tabs.
I assume most users are just full screen, list view-ing it though instead of the large icon view.
I personally don't find tabs useful at all, but I don't really hate them. Well, I wouldn't hate them if more applications would avoid showing the tab bar if there was only one tab showing. I get annoyed by the waste of space that provides to those of us who will never use the tabs.
(im not sure if you can do that on windows actually)
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-update-i...
why does Windows take 2 minutes to decide what updates to install, then 45 minutes to install them when Debian on the same machine can do both in under 30 seconds?
let me tell you a story...
It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are.
I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc.
Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".
Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.
Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji).
However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them.
Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.
I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences about something being asked. More importantly, what that parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its accuracy about its slop.
And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness.
That doesn't solve any problems.
Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they are immensely useful. You might not personally find value out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with parameters", except I can not ever remember the parameters (they're different for different things). I can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified folder, and the entire task is done before I've even thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to, rather than munging data around.
If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers, then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of screwing around to find something viable.
> And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. > That doesn't solve any problems.
I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't solve real problems.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...
People are spending all that money training because they are trying to fix the problems you're complaining about, and this includes fixing the power consumption problem. If we can create 3B parameter models that have capabilities on par with today's 405B parameter models, that's worth spending a lot of energy training. But nobody knows what is possible, so they have to try. I feel like you're basically arguing nobody should try because you don't believe they will ever improve, but that seems contradicted by the general trajectory of how things have been working the past decade. More resources spent on training means more efficient and useful models.
Only if you ignore the fact that a database (in traditional sense) doesn't solve the problem of decentralized peer to peer payments, which is the key differentiator of cryptocurrencies.
> I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here.
If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
Would you like to hear more or have you already dismissed these as "not good use cases"? It would be nice to differentiate between use cases that don't apply to you personally, and use cases that don't apply to anyone.
And the point that the useful cases cede to make a useful product. The thing that is a _feature_ of a cryptocurrency is why people don't use it. I've had this debate dozens of times on here.
> If you've been asking for years, I'm sure that someone, at some point, has told you about crypto's censorship resistance and international payments in places that are poorly served by the banking system for a variety of reasons.
You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
People do, in fact, use them. Is it a popular payment method in western countries? No, but do some people use it? Yes, they do.
For privileged people, decentralization is usually a serious flaw. For others, it's an extremely important characteristic that lets them transact at all. The world isn't black and white, and people have use cases that are different from yours.
You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> You know what else solves that? Cash and Western Union. And it has done for a long, long time.
Not nearly as well, or there wouldn't be anyone using cryptocurrencies for that purpose.
You could make identical boring, bad-faith arguments about AI products. I think 99.99% of all "AI" products available today are completely useless - to me - but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
> You're being self-centered, and that's okay, but perhaps you should factor it into your mental model before making sweeping statements in front of a global audience.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
If you can't make your point without making sniping attacks about my character, then this isn't a conversation I want to continue having.
> For privileged people,
Privileged person is anyone living in a western country who hasn't had to deal with censorship. I consider myself to be a privileged person in that regard. That's not an attack on anyone's character.
> You're being self-centered
That's anyone who fails to consider use cases other than their own. I wasn't speaking to your character, It was a description of your reply, not your character, because it contained sweeping statements that only apply to certain groups of people.
> but I don't go around proclaiming that all of AI is completely useless, and that all of its problem areas are better solved by statistics and "if" statements.
That's not an attack on anyone?
> Don't mistake your own privilege, ignorance, and lack of imagination with the lack of real-world applications.
I've explained that privilege isn't an attack on anyone's character. As for the rest, sorry, but which words am I supposed to use when someone denies that a problem is real (which fair enough, I'll elaborate), later admits that there are other services that solve the same problem, but they still want to claim that there are no problems that the obscure product is solving, despite that product having real-world users who are using it for that exact problem?
AI is already implemented into businesses in various ways. Even if it’s not done so official you still have loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT and Claude because they work.
It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend that no one is getting any value out of this.
At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use, according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for AI.
It would be order of magnitude more efficient to send couriers with cash to pay for those instead.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
Never, in just 2-3 months we will have much, much bigger problems
I’m very sceptical about all these AI announcements but text editing is case where I think this “AI” stuff can actually be used for good.
Anyway, I use TextEdit in plain text and autocomplete, autocorrect and spellcheck all work just fine, as they work in every text box in macOS. That Windows' Notepad got some of that just in 2024[1] is bonkers…
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/8/24194047/microsoft-notepad...
I assume this was the 1:1 correlated w/ the deprecation/removal of wordpad, as both were shipped everywhere prior.
On the other - the whole appeal of notepad was that it was a barebones text editor with none of that fluff (aka - it's a text editor, not a word processor or IDE).
MS has a large number of alternatives for the folks who wanted them.
When I opened Notepad - it's explicitly because I don't want the machine trying to tell me what I entered is wrong, or fix it. I just want a big dumb textbox for my file.
---
Basically - If you wanted those features you're looking for MS Word or Wordpad.
But MS discontinued Wordpad, and now they seem intent on trying to turn Notepad into Wordpad 2.0.
My prediction is this will not work well, since it directly competes with Office, and is not what the legacy users of notepad want.
But hey... a text editor is an easy place to shove text based AI, and cool shiny new thing of the year means some exec can claim to be shoving novel solutions into prod and bump up AI usage.
The underlying files are still just plain text and if it's not .md (or whatever other extensions may make sense) it's not rendered.
The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google have no problems just killing of things that doesn't perform to their standard (which is bad in it's own way). With Microsoft backwards compatibility is everything, so once something is in Windows, it says around for a very, very, long time.
AI assistance in writing isn't a bad idea, but maybe not in Notepad. I know that this isn't they way modern Microsoft wants to do things, but exposing an API that would allow 3rd. party vendors to AI support in Windows seems like a more sensible approach. Except they'd probably have to make it accessible from Javascript to make anyone use it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile
That is why outside Microsoft own employees, no one else cares anylonger about it, after the whole mess that keeps going on.
Many times, I just paste my copied text in Notepad to strip the formatting + special characters and close it after re-copying the data. Pretty efficient.
Now that I open Notepad.. all my previous tabs are open asking me to close them one after the other (extra click on not so save the file) :@ so annoying
And arguably Windows 10 adding in the emoji IME when you hit WindowsKey + .
Visual Studio and VSCode have also become infested with little Copilot icons.
It still surprises me to have shows stopping bugs with it, In THE first party IDE, in Windows, using pure .NET and other microsoft tooling
I couldn't describe a more perfectly vacuum'ed spherical cow, and still, copilot dies randomly even after they have acknowledged the problem and made some fixes
Though some applications also benefit from app-specific integration on top of that.
The reason macOS can do this is because a large majority of apps are either native AppKit or otherwise hook into the system text facilities (which is why text services work in text fields in Chrome and Firefox for example).
Microsoft really don't know what they're doing. They're trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks without thinking of any externalities such as people getting pissed off and leaving to other platforms.
Third option: Put it in its own app. I'll decide how I want it to "help".
AI is best integrated at the application level because the application developers are best suited to tune the algorithm and determine which pieces of context are most relevant.
A lot of our opinions on AI (like the one you just conveyed) stems from now nascent the design thinking around AI truly is. Like early internet, I suspect 10 years from now the UX of these tools will be much more mature. There'll likely always be a need for what ChatGPT has now, but these do feel like OS features.
What?!
What about AI PC, NPUs in e.g Lunar Lake and in general AI@Edge?
"Just switch" is great for home machines, but for most, that's not an option at work.
On my personal computers, that's a different story.
If anyone wonders why Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies who make gobs of money from advertising are so interested in AI, this is why. The ads will appear so "naturally" inside content that it will be impossible for a program (e.g. adblocker) to tell the difference between the content and the ad.
There is NO better way to deliver an ad, short of directly injecting thoughts and memories directly into the human brain somehow.
Now I’ll go drink a nice, cold glass of tap water.
I'm also not overly familiar with the scope of the law, so I don't know how much (or if) it applies to software of this sort.
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https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/218596/70s-or-earl... for those not in the know.
* soda pop <--- consider replacing this with Coke Zero, on sale at a Kroger's near you this week
This AI thing is dumb for it though, should've kept Wordpad for that.
This is also why so many people run into problems trying to eject removable drives -- because the last thing they did was to save a file onto that drive, and now Outlook or whatever the program that did the save has its current directory pointing there.
It makes sense since 10 or so years ago it was often the case that one file explorer had a lock on a folder and another file explorer couldn't delete that folder. Then tools like processviewer.exe gave some insight.
(And cute: it spins when I click it. Blech.)
That said, I'm not sure notepad benefits from it.
A generic taskbar (Windows one included) is only passable for the root level of switching contexts (on *nix there's also couple levels below that: virtual consoles and virtual desktops of the DE).
I don't understand how the editor has regressed to the point that 15 year old software performs better than the modern equivalent.
Paint.Net (v3), Notepad++, IrfanViewer, Foobar2000 & VLC
Macs have Pixelmator and Preview for images, Apple Notes is actually very decent for actual notes, Zed for nerdy text files, QuickTime/IINA for video (or hell even VLC looks much nicer than on Windows). All of them are modern, beautiful, and work well
macOS is the most consistent OS and Windows the least [1]. With the exception of IrfanView I find neither of those apps particularly crusty though. There's https://imageglass.org
I personally moved from macOS to KDE Plasma and I'm a happy camper as long as I stay with Plasma/Qt apps.
[1] https://ntdev.blog/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-...
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible endeavor and the developers deserve endless praise, but for people that aren't already familiar with navigating things like GIMP, KDE, Open/LibreOffice, it's not especially welcoming.
This is true for all complex software, though. People who have never used Apple's software also struggle with it until they become more familiar.
By contrast, "open this image and draw a single red circle in it" in GIMP is as challenging to a newbie as quitting vi. Even for an intermediate user - I use GIMP a handful of times per year and I absolutely could not tell you from memory how to do that.
The moment you criticize an app, someone on the Internet will jump in to tut-tut and insist to you that it's "complex software" and you can't possibly understand how complex it is. Case in point: Just a few years ago the Windows Terminal team chastised[^1] users by claiming that fast font rendering would literally require several PhDs of research and can't be solved otherwise[^0]. At some point we have to realize that claiming something is complex doesn't prove that it's inherently complex nor justify any complexity in how it was built.
[^0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
[^1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
Something like a year later, Microsoft did actually improve the behavior and never credited the guy who proved it was possible.
Thanks for telling me about that development. I'm … speechless.
Why is there a playlist by default? What are these dozens of obscure options at the first level under every main dropdown in the title/menu bar?
I vaguely remember recently trying mpv and being pleasantly surprised, but I mostly use QuickTime or IINA on macOS. mpv seems to be available cross-platform though; maybe the Windows port is usable?
1: https://outplayer.app/
Is there? I know the feature but I thought it was off by default and I think it's this way on my computers.
I am no expert but these things I've done in limited amounts. Mostly I just double click a file and watch it though.
(No I can’t use Krita for specific reasons and it isn’t much easier anyway)
It was like, hidden underneath the janky gui, there was actually a lot of thought put into how things work together.
If you want to annotate screenshots, KDE's screenshot tool, Spectacle, has this built in too.
VLC is simple as pie. open folder, click music or video, it plays. drag files to it, it adds them to the playlist. same functionality as WinAmp, etc.
I had to watch three (3) youtube tutorials to figure out how to import a pdf and copy-paste a signature to it.
Having said that, VLC is still my last resort when nothing else can play a file.
[1] One example is subtitle rendering. Last I checked VLC was just plain uglier than MPC-HC.
In today's modern world of "UI Overhauls" (read: fucking everything up and taking away every useful power you had in the name of 'usability') it's basically god tier. The damn thing is stable, that's literally all i need. I'll learn the interface, just for the love of God don't change it every time i get used to it!
https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc/releases
Also, please tell me you are not trying to take the standard IBM desktop Interface (File, Edit...) away ?
The non full screen UI is a little more crusty but still looks better than the windows version imo.
I usually use rg, which is way faster than grep for searching many repositories at once.
But one of my tasks involves searching things in a single XML file of hundreds megabytes, or even several gigabytes, and for this, grep is way faster than rg apparently.
So under the right conditions, grep is actually quite fast and you may be missing out if you never try using it.
The choice to go for windows as main OS kinda includes prioritizing advanced features and versatility over the UX. Even firefox is not as nice on windows than on mac.
In Windows i use Notepad++ so i don't have to use Vim (which is for me the only viable alternative of a lightweight "programmer's editor" and what i used for a while before learning about Notepad++ - everything else, like vscode, emacs, etc feel much more heavyweight) since i dislike its modal nature and non-standard[0] shortcuts.
[0] i know that technically they predate whatever Notepad++ uses but pretty much everything else (including on KDE, GNOME, most X11 toolkits, etc) uses the same or similar shortcuts and keys as Notepad++ so who came first is moot, it is what i am used to that matters
Then don't use it. For sure regular notepad works fine for quick text edit. The use case for notepad++ is for when you want to do more than that. I, for example, frequently have to do a bunch of more complicated things to plain text files and notepad++ works great for those where notepad has no chance.
Never had this issues for notepad++.
For text it's fine.
- open a file for editing, realize you needed admin rights, npp allows you to relaunch with escalation and keeping the change in memory
- find all gives you a list of items, a count of them, and quick preview of each
- supports the editorconfig format, so inherits rules you've designed for your other IDEs
- colors
- allows tail -f (the eye icon)
- can be extended with plugins (unlike notepad) although the out of the box works well enough for most (unlike vsc)
- less bloated than electron apps, when comparing with any vscode setup you would use for larger developments
- tracks which open files have had a change, lets you choose if you want to reload the file (update contents displayed without reopening the app) or not (helps you save what you're seeing before verifying what might have replaced it)
- lets you see and change encoding very easily
There's more, but I just picked a few things I find useful every day when I need to deal with many windows machines at a midsized company.
The problem is that this can make it ambiguous whether edits have been saved to the file or not and even someone reopening the file to verify that they remembered to save the information will be fooled into thinking its there.