Former Microsoft dev built a 2.5KB Notepad clone | Hacker News Reader

Former Microsoft dev built a 2.5KB Notepad clone

theguptalog.blogspot.com

28 pointssheelagay22 comments

This person's whole marketing seems to be based on "I built Task Manager", so much that it has become a meme, see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1sl5nv4/task_... (also apparently there's some dark history involved)

The linked article makes mention of some of the questionable stuff in the last paragraph, at least.

Mr. Plummer seems to be really good at semi-sensational and click-baity marketing. I want to watch his videos because I like the subject matter but I can't stomach the spin.

He started Youtube with this cool retired dad vibes. It went down hill pretty fast after just a couple videos.

Dave Plummer is the software engineering equivalent of the Navy Seal copypasta.

Even funnier, if you take most direct quotes from the PCGamer article [0] and concatenate them, Pangram (which is quite reliable) marks it as 100% AI-generated, and it does indeed read as AI-written. Someone in that Reddit thread remarked "I began watching his video and could not cope with him reading AI content from a teleprompter." as well.

"""

If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies.

It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not.

Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent.

I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now.

Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight.

"""

[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/task-managers-creat...

If this were on LinkedIn it would go straight to r/linkedinlunatics

Wow, you weren't kidding. Apparently, he (Dave Plummer) ran an entire company that used deceptive scare tactics to try to coerce consumers into buying his "anti-malware" software.

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

When I was younger, I decided I wanted to learn how to write games. I decided I needed to start simple, though, and I thought NOTEPAD.EXE was about the simplest thing out there. (This was in Windows 3.1.) So to learn how NOTEPAD.EXE worked, I opened NOTEPAD.EXE in NOTEPAD.EXE, and spent several hours trying to decipher the symbols' meanings.

My first attempt at coding was … unsuccessful.

So far and yet so close...

I did something similar with electronics. I thought if I applied voltages to random pins, and read voltages on other pins, I could figure out how an integrated circuit worked.

The crazy part is that my strategy actually worked on a single MOSFET transistor, which only has three pins. I just assumed it would scale up on computer chip with tens to hundreds of thousands of MOSFETS and a few dozen pins. Also, if my first test had been on a BJT transistor, instead of a MOSFET, I would have destroyed it.

This former Microsoft dev also created a business that scammed people money in the early 2000s by letting them think that their computer is affected by malware:

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

This is a fork of another tiny text editor written by someone else. So I wouldn't say they 'built' it

Honestly this headline reeks of social media clickbait

Sure, but it's basically a very thin wrapper on the built-in RichEdit control, with some added menus and niceties.

Don't get me wrong, it's hundreds of times better than whatever UWP abomination they call Notepad in Windows 11 nowadays (with logins and AI features), but it's not an actual text viewer / editor from scratch.

> thin wrapper on the built-in RichEdit control

> UWP abomination they call Notepad

Kind of weird for both of those things to be true. I thought the latter was mostly the former. But I’ve been away from Windows for a loooooong time it seems.

I think the original notepad.exe was just a Win32 Edit control (whatever it was called) with a window and some menus. I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa, too.

But yes, it's hardly writing a text editor to write a Win32 app in assembly. (Although, if they used the COM control and did that in hand-written assembly, that would at least be an impressively tedious mortification of the flesh.)

>I expect that Apple's TextEdit.app is just a wrapper around the rich text control in Cocoa

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...

Did you know that HE CREATED TASK MANAGER??

See the author's video here:

The Challenge: Can we build Notepad in 3K in assembly language?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG91c7xsNMc

> 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat, no telemetry, no nonsense. Just pure old-school Windows done right. Let's dive in and see how it's done.

> And today, we're going to answer the obvious question, which is not merely, "How is that possible?" The more interesting question is: "What does Windows already contain that lets a program that small behave like a real application?" Because the answer is hiding in plain sight, and it says something surprisingly important about native software, operating systems design, and why modern applications sometimes feel like they arrive towing a circus caravan.

> Suddenly, it wasn't just a stunt anymore; it was the beginning of something that could actually behave like actual software.

> A tiny native Windows program does not bring along its own entire civilization. It arrives with a lunchbox and a map of the city.

> And by the time the app even opens a blank document, it already has the gravitational field of a minor planet.

Those punchy comparisons, "not just" sentences are really a big tell of it being an AI-written script. I think a lot of people get fooled when YouTubers read AI-written text themselves, since you see it as a person talking, not as a pure text.

Some very ironic (unaware) comments from the video:

> It's so amazing to see this type of content in the era of AI slop where every app is just an Electron wrapper fighting for RAM with the other Electron wrappers. My favourite line from this "The OS is not just a bootloader for your browser and other apps, it's a giant library"

> Hey Dave, love all your videos, I'm curious how you manage not to fall into surrendering all your mental capacity to AI and what do you think of AI?

And other people noticing AI:

> Is it just me or does it feel like the script for the video was written by AI?

> I personally don’t like the style of narration used in this video, reminds me too much of AI generated fluff

> is it me or do daves scripts feel AI generated

> Is it just me or the whole script sounds like AI? It's not just x is, the comment about a compression goblin一 God, I have AI psychosis

> Why the AI text. You're a good storyteller.

> Dave, please tell me you are not using AI for your scripts... Your "it's not ____, it's ____", is making me worry

Thanks. I'll make sure to tell him that.

Ah, but does it have a copilot integration? I've heard users don't want tools without copilot integrations.

I’m not sure why I would want to use this over WINE Notepad, which seems a lot more stable and well-coded.

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