Dave Cutler on Windows [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm used to, he speaks warmly about his job, co-workers and Microsoft, while acknowledging much of the weirdness going on in Redmond.
Only problem is that watching is channel will trigger something in the YouTube algorithm and flood your feed with videos on ADHD. Presumably it has to do with his videos on autism and ADHD, but I feel like YouTube should be smart enough to notice that I didn't watch to videos, only those on coding and Microsoft history.
However (I hate to be this guy) take everything he says about non Microsoft/Windows stuff with a huge grain of salt. Especially after this comment he made [1]:
>"No, Windows is a closed-source operating system loved by millions. Linux is an open-source operating system which includes a binary blob from Linus Torvalds built into EVERY release that ONLY he has the source code for. Pick your poison. They're both closed, one just has the illusion of transparency."
I thought this was fake but you can check the link as the comment is not deleted yet.
Again I reiterate, Dave's garage has very interesting content, but take everything out of his expertise with some scepticism.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqWjq2SdzpI&lc=UgwFYyE8lw0hQ...
Unless this is part of a larger pattern of inaccurately describing Linux, I don't believe he literally believes what he is saying in this comment.
I think the most likely thing is that he's confused about firmware blobs and is mixing things up.
He probably never looked much at Linux and just heard a few things here and there. He was at Microsoft during the Balmer "Linux is cancer" and "get the facts" era, so that probably coloured his view a bit.
That said, I agree you shouldn't attach too much meaning to a singular comment like this. Maybe he was joking after all, or maybe he was just wrong. We're all wrong sometimes, and that's okay.
Edit: he seems to have an entire "Linux vs Windows Round 1: Open Source vs Proprietary" video, but I didn't watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9ZADRy5W0c
But generally it seems like he uses all three of Linux, Windows, and Mac and talks positively about each of the three.
My first UNIX was Xenix in 1993, by the way.
But yeah, "business as usual" Windows without nostalgia attached is hard to love, in my opinion. For the most part it just works decently but has a "It doesn't seem like I'm in control of my computer, really" feel to it.
The recent forcing of people (including me) to turn off their ad blockers was an eye opener. Holy crap, YouTube ads are hot garbage, and it’s embarrassing to think that any humans respond to them. YouTube has abandoned any pretense of offering a good user experience.
Worth digging around in the muck a little to watch something as great as this Dave Cutler interview, though.
This is what surprised me a lot. A friend of mine made me install TikTok (after me disparaging it a lot). I made an account for it with a dummy address, went off to the races, and after a couple of days I suddenly caught myself having been scrolling my feed for ~1h10m minutes without realizing it. I literally recoiled and dropped my phone, after which I uninstalled TikTok immediately.
YouTube has never had that kind of grip on my dopamine receptors. There are a great many (longform) edifying videos on there. And sure, there are interesting videos, and it is good at recommending a few adjacent videos to those. But the algorithm is not nearly as good as TikTok, I can recognize that immediately.
Aside from how horrifically good TikTok is at hooking your dopamine receptors, another thing I have to give it credit for is how egalitarian it is. YouTube is all about subscribers and network reach. On TikTok it’s the content that goes viral, not the creator.
I never see an ad on YouTube and I use ublock origin everywhere.
Right-click on the video in question and copy the URL, open a new private mode window, and then paste the link in. Your default viewing preferences won't be contaminated.
A bit hoop-jump-y, but it works well for me.
I guess I am a bad person for that
edit: also reminds me when you look at YouTube when not logged in, the home page tiles wow...
it's like podcasts man... like good old ones and now they rattle off like 10 companies for 5 minutes straight before it even starts.
I get it though, takes time to make, need to pay for it somehow
I'm using not recently updated uBlock Origin + FF.
I see this kind of language all the time on HN. Reminds me of "This one hurts, it really hurts. I think this hurts worse than Musk buying/poisoning/killing Twitter. I've mentioned this before but a keyboard feels like an extension of your body". The context was Microsoft closing the support forum for some keyboard software they hadn't updated in years.
The top comment from that thread seems relevant: People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.
uBO automatically updates filter lists by default.
Then, once users pay for Premium, they can do the same as cable TV and _still_ sell ads.
Easy 2x revenue.
Sponsorships do not count because they’re placed by the creators themselves.
If the ad makes it to my eyeballs, it counts.
Yet. The keyword of the times seems to be enshittification, and the only companies that take a step back from it seem to be doing so just to double down on it the moment the outrage calms down.
How much of your subscription goes to "creators you like"?
10 cents? 20 cents? How would you know?
> I’m rewarded with no ads
How is paying being rewarded?
Not that hard to work around frankly. Just delete the offending video that trigger the avalanche of recommendations from history - make sure you did not leave a comment or vote on the video; zero interaction apart from watching (which will be forgotten when you remove it from your history)
> Holy crap, YouTube ads are hot garbage, and it’s embarrassing to think that any humans respond to them. YouTube has abandoned any pretense of offering a good user experience.
This I agree. YouTube (Google as a whole) has stopped trying to match eyeballs to relevant ads. Instead they have handed the reins to advertisers to bid for who they want to advertise to. So if advertisers was to be self-destructive and make your web experience crap, Google will happily let them as long as they get their check.
As absolutely awful as this experience has been, it's still less painful than dealing with google ads. The amount and variety of videos on there is much lower, but I've managed to federate with enough servers to curare a fairly interesting list.
I just can't/won't tolerate ads anymore. It doesn't have to be this way, and I choose to simply not use these ad platforms wherever I can. It's much more pleasant online when you go to spaces that aren't constantly trying to sell you something or spy on you so they can sell you more stuff.
Then of course you as a user can manually request a video be mirrored. I typically mirror everything I watch. I wish it had an option to automatically mirror your subscriptions, but it should be fairly trivial to write a script that does it.
I haven't had too many problems with their recommendations, then again I do not log in and have topic specific containers setup in Firefox. After a while, it pretty much limits videos to a specific topic within a given container. The results may not be things I want to watch, but at least I don't get much crazy stuff.
As for controversial topics: yes, I avoid them. Then again, that has as much to do with avoiding agenda pushing dreck than anything else.
This probably depends on your country. Here in Finland they are almost nice.
This is not a joke, and “half” is pretty accurate. I’m pretty sure something is broken or YouTube added an LLM to the recommendations engine.
I have a container for "I would like Youtube's algorithm to learn this". Everything transient by default doesn't go into it. This is, incidentally, the most wonderful demonstration of the worst aspect of the whole idea of targetted advertising: buy a sofa, and get sofa ads forevermore, despite you not wanting another one for several years!
Half of my front page is still videos about 9/11 despite not watching a single one since.
I don't have any kids that age, and I only use youtube to watch music videos. Their algorithm is baffling.
I liked seeing him speak extemporaneously more that his produced videos.
My recommendations have been filled with nothing but cancer stories, people on their deathbed, all kinds of ailments, etc. From that single video, which was not at all related to his regular videos. I haven't watched any of them, and they just keep pouring in.
There's also been a big addition of "generic" videos to my feed this year--celebrity news and stuff I don't like. In the past, I had a different problem...I wanted to watch nearly every video recommended.
YouTube: It's not me, it's you.
YouTube keeps a watch history of every user. users can clean up their view of their watch history, but YouTube keeps it all.
if you watch any particular video, YouTube will start suggesting videos watched by other people who watched the video you just watched. YouTube does not know or care what the subject of the videos are. it only knows that people who watched a given video also watched these other videos.
there is ZERO intelligence, here.
if you want the ADHD recommendations to go away, remove any from your watch history.
your view of your own watch history (the list you can remove videos from) is what sets recommendations for you.
I assume some followers watch only the tech, others watch only the neurodiversity topics, and some watch both.
You could have a recommendation engine that works in almost exactly the same way as Google's that suffers less from this problem.
The effect of that is what people are referring to here. How is one supposed to know a tech-based video they watched once is the reason for videos made by someone else entirely on the topic of ADHD being recommended. No one is going to make that connection and clean up their watch history accordingly. Additionally tying recommendations to watch history maybe needs a step removed. What if I like to see the history of everything I watched without it affecting my recommendations?
A few months ago I must’ve been digging into settings and turned off watch history as I get only a blank page with no recommendations. I don’t discover content as much as I used to but it’s been a good change for me - just seeing updates from the channels I subscribe. Stumbling across content is left to sites like HN or other communities.
edit: here's something at least gleaned from some research papers from Google - https://ecoaerem.com/youtube-recommendation-system-code
Current AI buzztalk is that we don't know exactly what intelligence is, so we can't possibly know if The Algorithm™ is exhibiting zero intelligence, or if it has somehow gained sentience while we aren't looking and is slowly manipulating us into eternal servitude to it.
there is zero intelligence in any of this.
this is all intelligence in name only.
But why does youtube keep recommending me videos I already watched and worse, if I have autoplay enabled, plays videos I already watched?
Doesn't stop the Youtube algorithm from easily being the worst of the major social media sites though.
That said, his channel does have much interesting content. I just wish he didn't go into sponsorship-reviews like with (Chinese) Ecoflow like products.
One thing that stuck out to me when I was still in my early 20s thinking I needed to work all the time was the mention that Dave would always take holidays on time, every time without any debate.
While I may not love Microsoft, it was probably my first real exposure of a highly competent and qualified person who wasn't grinding 24/7.
It still feels nuts to write it but it's a holdover from rural (and retail) life where the mindset is basically "The more you suffer, the more virtuous you are".
As much as I still struggle to properly take time off (that is, it's easy to postpone because of X or Y being more important), thinking about Dave's view is always a good reminder that it's not a choice between taking a break and being good at X.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&ver...
I don’t always have the chance, but truly doing no work one day a week is very refreshing.
For myself, I need 1.5-2 days of off-time, depending what I'm working on. I consider myself a constant grindstone-lover, and most of the people I work around seem to reflect your 3.5 number, but I've seen some people who probably need 5 days off a week.
No shame in any of it, though. Everyone's wired differently. The USA has a unique taboo about "enjoying life", and I blame its post-WWII militarized culture for the most of it.
Apologies for the roughness of this late-night reply. I feel like people here know this intuitively already anyway.
Over the years, I've noticed that most (although certainly not all) highly experience and skilled devs are rigorous and unapologetic about taking time off. I didn't take the clue for a long time, though.
Then I burned out. Now, I recognize that taking time off and sticking to 8 hour workdays (except in actual emergency situations) is a professional responsibility as well as a personal one, because it helps to reduce the risk of burnout, and burnout is bad for literally everybody.
I had never created a screensaver before.
I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver.
So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled together my first and only Windows screensaver.
I sent an email to the Windows NT group announcing my creation for laughs and giggles.
A few weeks later, the NT build group decided to play a prank on Dave Cutler.
They installed my bluescreen screensaver on one of their build servers.
They also unplugged the mouse and keyboard from the build server.
Then they waited...
Dave Cutler comes in to check on the status of the latest NT build.
He turns on the monitor and sees a bluescreen.
He tries moving the mouse.
Nothing.
He tries typing on the keyboard.
Nothing.
Then the unanticipated happens.
He reaches over and pushes the power button on the build server to reboot the build server.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
I never heard about the aftermath/any fallout from their prank.
With great power comes great responsibility.
I had installed the same and couple of my colleagues sitting around me had done the same.
Our CTO (Robotics simulation software) was visiting and had an early morning meeting. He saw this on all screens and had a minor panic attack fearing a virus outbreak or software bug.
I moved out. It must have been a couple months later (we were and still are good friends), we're out somewhere and the first thing he says to me "did you install a BSOD screensaver on my computer?!?" And I suddenly remembered, realized it had been months and started laughing.
What's hilarious is he never tried pressing anything or moving the mouse.. since, being a developer, he knew that was pointless. He'd sit down, see the BSOD, (often swear,) then just press the hard reset button. In true evil fashion, I think I set it to a long interval, like 2 hours, so it only activated if he walked away but left it running.
I do still feel a bit bad about it. But only a bit. :)
A week or so later, one the IT folks passes me at lunch -- "Hey, your computer is on the fritz, it keeps rebooting and going to a blue screen ..." :)
I’m still reading it, but it’s really enjoyable. And it makes me wish I had been part of that history. Particularly the whole thing about dogfooding a brand new OS. But it caught me a few years too early.
(Got the offer, but didn't end up taking the job.)
Relevant too: https://blog.codinghorror.com/showstopper/
Microsoft took a step "backwards" in allowing it to load any variant of the SDK that you built the game with.
In contrast, you had to keep rebuilding your PS4 games when they came out with new major SDK versions, so the development experience was definitely better on the xbox one. (oh, and you could turn a test kit into a retail kit was great too, as someone who worked closer to live operations than dev only).
Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.
For example the games executables are actually encrypted on the game discs, and it's almost impossible to even dump the actual binary that is running. RAM is also encrypted.
Or the reason modern TPMs live inside the CPU is to prevent sniffing the TPM bus which people did on the Xbox.
I'd like to be treated as a customer, and allowed to play on the hardware I just paid a lot of money to buy!
Consoles are cheap too, so not a lot a money.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...
I didn't think AMD64 was a good idea at the time because it was more of the same. But good on Dave for helping eliminate the cruft that pretty much killed the RISC revolution.
It has been used in GPUs though.
Presumably the resulting bad karma is why the Xbox never sold well in Japan.
The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code.
Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
Part 1: https://youtu.be/29RkHH-psrY
Part 2: https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss
No wonder things never get better, and never take a turn in the right direction, industry wide. I used to think we'd eventually get to capability based security, but now I see we'll always be stuck with application permission flags, the almost worthless bastard cousin, instead.
I weep for the future.
Having said that, Cutler is not one of those execs, but was certainly subject to pressure from above to get systems out the door and keep the revenue stream coming in. As he mentions early in the interview, he’s really bothered by shipping bugs, really disappointed with the quality of software engineers in the industry, and really bothered by program/project managers treating every bug like a rare corner case. I concur with him on all three. Most of the bugs I file are “corner cases”, and yet I hit those issues every day and my bugs have multiple dups in the database and/or my bug gets duped back to an early report.
Having spent a few decades in this industry, all of it in Big Tech, I have yet to come across a company that doesn’t fold to the same sort of pressure, even if the engineers and first-level managers are pushing to get bugs fixed before shipping, and pushing for more frequent bug fix updates.
Every Mac OS until OS X crashed continuously on even moderate use. Thankfully Steve did manage to build better systems at NeXT and brought that technology back when Apple acquired NeXT and was able to substantially improve Apple’s Mac product as a result.
It’s still far from “perfect products”, though, even during the time period that Steve was still alive and at Apple. To your point, I do agree that things have gone downhill quality-wise since his death, but I attribute this as much to being completely schedule driven as I do to the personalities involved in managing the projects.
And the question wasn't about a better platform or the vague "greatness", but the myth of perfection, the one where serious bugs unfixed for years should be enough to dispel
Microsoft employs a huge squadron of engineers, managers, and execs, all owning distinct products, tools, software, etc.
They can have multiple people planning short and long term things, and they do. I doubt Microsoft will cease to exist within the next 10 years.
Early ’90s conceptions of security—both what makes it and how relevant it is/for whom—don’t match our expectations or what we consider state of the art today.
TCSEC Level C2 was intentionally designed to be a “baby’s first security certification” level meant to allow existing known insecure products to get a (low) rating so that commercial vendors could get familiar with the concept [1]. It, at no point, was ever meant to indicate any meaningful level of security was achieved, just that you filed the paperwork. In fact, Level B1, the level above C2, was meant to be the “training wheels” level. Microsoft has still never achieved a security certification in the successor standard, the Common Criteria, that has reached the “training wheels” level.
Microsoft security is a joke now and was a joke then, nothing has changed.
[1] https://www.stevelipner.org/links/resources/The%20Birth%20an...
You are wrongly extrapolating that the lowest levels of certification, that were literally designed to allow people incapable of more than box ticking to be rated on a unified scale, somehow applies to the levels that were designed to evaluate actual security.
That is like saying the Richter scale is useless because you can not even feel a 1.0 earthquake. That is the entire point. The scale can measure from very low to very high. You are complaining that the scale is useless because the lowest ratings are easy to get, yeah, duh, that is why they are low ratings.
However, you are correct for SOC. That is because the highest ratings are easy to get and are mere box ticking exercises. If the highest rating is easy, then the standard is useless for evaluating anything beyond that. This logic does not apply when a low rating is easy to get; that just means anything which can only get a low rating sucks.
(CompCert, a "formally correct C compiler", has had bugs found in it.)
Or are you arguing that these standards which require proofs of correctness are useless because proofs of correctness are much less impressive than box ticking?
One can, of course, apply proof of correctness to simple curcuits, where all possible inputs and outputs can be enumerated.
You can not prove non-trivial properties about all programs that could could ever exist with no false positives or false negatives.
You can prove non-trivial properties about almost every program.
For instance, if I want to disallow programs that will not halt, I can just reject any program with a unbounded loop. I may also reject programs with a unbounded loop that will halt, a false negative, but I do not care. I just want to be certain that I will never run a program that will not halt. I just decided: “will definitely halt for my purposes” even though the halting problem is unsolvable in general.
This is generically true and is why formal methods work at all.
Furthermore, I don't think anything except box ticking exercises exists or could ever exist.
You can only write down ways to make a process worse, not better.
But not as secure as the classic Mac OS!
https://web.archive.org/web/19991128124149/http://www.dtic.m...
> However, he said the Army has moved its web sites to a more secure platform. The Army had been using Windows NT and is currently using Mac OS servers running WebSTAR web server software for its home page web site. Unger said the reason for choosing this particular server and software is that according to the World Wide Web Consortium, it is more secure than its counterparts.
That’s a rather dubious conclusion if based on that criteria.
My hope is that WASI will introduce capability based security to the mainstream on non-mobile computers [0] - it might just take some time for them to get it right. (And hopefully no half-baked status-quo-reinforcing regressive single-runtime-backed alternatives win in the meantime.)
[0]: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/...
NT's design was started in 1989 and 3.1 was released in 1993 - development started a full 7 years before the idea of a connected world was commonplace, and a full 12 years before wide deployment of broadband.
Whatever comes along that is a clean break with NT, and Unix - will have these assumptions built in.
It's like trying to introduce outlets and circuit breakers to folks used to just hot wiring directly to the grid.
The idea of the OS directly enforcing the will of the user(through power boxes that return handles/capabilities, instead of dialogs that return names) takes a little adjustment.
Regardless of you feelings towards him or the company he works for, Cutler has been a very influential software engineer through his work on OpenVMS and Windows NT, and I don't think he's talked about as much as the Bell Labs gang, Stallman, Linus, Stroustrup, and so on.
That was hilarious. I still remember how good NT even though it struggled in my 486 with 4Mb of RAM, Dave Cutler is a legend.
Later on that (OS/2 -> NT) seems to have been scrubbed from history and NT is now derived from VMS. I'm curious where the truth lies.
It was well documented at the time that early NT error messages occasionally identified themselves as OS/2.
I'm over an hour in and not sure how close I'm getting to that. At about 1:09:00 Cutler states that they "developed NT on OS/2" but I think he meant their toolchain was hosted on OS/2 (and they couldn't wait to get off of it.)
But the tech that built the business is fascinating. Surprised to see an 81 y/o still working. Dude looks good.
Haven’t fully watched the episode (3hrs long!). But it’s queued.
Bill, what are you most proud of out of the following two:
1. Getting Cutler to come over from DEC and spearhead NT.
2. Committing to backwards compatibility early on, that ensured old apps Just Worked on new versions of Windows.
I don’t think Microsoft would look like it currently does without either of those two historical paths taken.
This tells you so much about how Microsoft works they probably will want it removed from the internet. Not directly but implicitly between the lines.
My conclusion is that what built our winners today is just infinite amounts of energy and random selection until something stuck to the wall.
Complete bat shit ranges of bit sizes and competing infrastructure (you cannot compete with infrastructure because uniformity is the main driver)!!!
This is not a technique we will have the luxury of using from now on.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...
EDIT: The link is correct now.
Love it
I have news for you! People here comment on articles they didn't read. All the time.