I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something.
I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.
Yeah, I've been working around that for now by uninstalling notepad. Which actually uninstalls the store app, which in turn exposes the actual notepad executable that ships with Windows. Really confusing, and will probably break in some future version of Windows.
I don't understand why they didn't just stuff all the AI things and new features in Write, where it belongs…
It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.
Yeah I switched to Windows 11 recently and was a little annoyed by that - Notepad was always a place to paste formatted junk to get the plaintext - I don't need anything persisted.
Someone got their use of child porn leaked this way. They opened notepad on a twitch stream and a bunch of CP links came up. I don't remember who it was.
He still streams on Twitch, he got a temporary week "long" ban and then came back claiming it was a virus or an accident while also claiming he has a porn addiction problem... but don't worry he's very "sorry" (to have been caught).
The state of this Amazon-owned streaming platform is wild... and that's without even looking at the rampant antisemitism (their second top political streamer, Hasan Piker, currently has a bipartisan US House resolution (H.Res.1239) in progress calling him and Candace Owens out for their antisemitism), repeated call for violence (their top political streamer, Asmongold, was recently banned for a few days for calling for the murder of immigrant's children by ICE) and the repeated reckless/distracted car and even truck driving streams with some even leading to accidents (luckily enough without any deadly one... yet).
All these are against Twitch rules, but the staff and even the CEO (who cosplays as a streamer) selectively apply the rules and unban the streamers who are under contract with Twitch or are well connected with the staff.
I have no idea why Amazon or Twitch shareholders have not cleaned house already (e.g. ousting the CEO and the people in charge of the moderation), especially considering the fact that even with all these transgressions, Twitch isn't profitable after years of activity.
They are waiting for someone to actually die I think, with clear links to Twitch... if that ever happens there are plenty of evidence that Twitch and Amazon know what is going on and barely does anything about it.
You definitely shouldn't assert that someone is antisemitic based on the current US House, even if bi-partisan. And I thought bills of attainder were unconstitutional?
To answer your question of why, it's probably because they make money.
There are plenty of evidence of Hasan Piker's antisemitism to the point that people have been collecting and contextualizing them: https://whoishasanpiker.com/antisemitism
Also plenty of groups fighting against racism and antisemitism have come out against him (ADL, AJC), it's easy to Google.
That House resolution is just the latest good indication that it's not just some isolated incidents.
Piker's only answers are that he's taken "out of context" or that he's "joking", there's literally no context that make his public statements better or less antisemitic though, if you have any I'm interested. He also publicly voice his support to groups that are openly antisemitic (Hamas and Hezbollah) and recognized as FTOs (Foreign Terrorist Organization) by the US government.
Now, it's his First Amendment right to be this way but Twitch/Amazon share a responsibility when they platform this content, and even more when they apply moderation selectively, in my opinion that should forfeit their Section 230 protection. They are deliberately shaping the discourse on their platform by permanently banning other streamers with opposing views and never taking similar actions against Piker.
EDIT: Regarding the bills of attainder, it likely doesn't apply here because they aren't trying to punish these two antisemites specifically, they just use them as examples of the proliferation of antisemitic content on platforms like Twitch and want Congress to condemn this practice and encourage platforms to address the issue.
I only skimmed the first half of this list but I believe truth is an absolute defense to antisemitism just like defamation, right? You're really gonna say that "netanyahu is a jewish supremacist" is antisemitism, when it's well documented and probably relevant to whatever he was talking about at the time?
He must've really pissed someone off to get his own hate site. I think we all know who he pissed off. That hate site would be illegal in the EU btw.
You asked for evidence, I've provided plenty, with context.
Skimming them and picking one that doesn't fully meet your criteria, then call it a "hate site" and then use vagueries like:
> He must've really pissed someone off to get his own hate site. I think we all know who he pissed off.
Tells me you have no interest in engaging in this in good faith.
Also nobody cares if a website quoting someone being hateful would be illegal outside of the USA. Piker is an American citizen, spewing hateful antisemitism on an American platform... but nice attempt at a red herring.
Are you aware of the bullshit asymmetry principle?
When you cite a parade of bullshit I'm not obligated to refute all of it. A representative sample is enough to demonstrate that it's bullshit and that the bullshit asymmetry principle applies.
Pointing at a single item in a list that you pretend to have only half skimmed is not refuting anything. And it's also not a "representative sample". It's called cherry picking. Nobody asked you to refute every single one either.
The same goes with not addressing all the other points made and sourced in my messages above.
The fact is that there are enough blatant and contextualized statements in that list and the rest of the points I've made. They show his antisemitism.
Piker is openly supporting Hezbollah and Hamas "10-toes down", again irrefutalbly antisemitic terrorist organizations.
Most recently he had a slew of Democrat figures at the national level either denouncing him or distancing themselves, again, for his antisemitic comments (Hakeem Jeffries, Corey Booker, Josh Gottheimer, Hillary Scholten, Jeremy Moss, Abdul El-Sayed and so on).
This happened because Hasan Piker rambled about Jews, and specifically American Jews being responsible for the antisemitism they endure and that they shouldn't be surprised if someone "takes action" against them if they continue to want a state for Jews:
> And if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone's going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.
> [...]
> You're running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as, basically, Jewish ISIS... You're making antisemitism worse.
But keep running around saying "bullshit" if you want, it won't change facts.
I wanted dark mode, tabs, and autosave, and now I don't have to use a different app to get those, so that works out great for me. Not sure what "breaking changes" even means for that though. Did it suddenly stop being able to open text files? No, it still just works.
That's a really fair point, but i'm not sure if that's what they meant by "breaking changes" if that was followed with "autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot"
"Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1].
The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words.
(Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.)
I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode.
I don't use Windows, but I have to say that TextEdit on the Mac is absolute crap. Literally every default is wrong. Text is too small, looks like crap, cut-and-paste always brings absolutely crappy styling with it, its autocomplete and autocorrect is bad and wrong and annoying. No one at Apple uses this application with any regularity and it shows.
For a long time I used metapad as a notepad replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapad (I even renamed the exe to notepad). Very fast and minimal.
It's a pixel-perfect modern clone (with some actually useful extras that won't get in the way unless you look for them), and yes, you can clone the repo and run it locally.
Background removal is really useful though, saves a bunch of time.
Unfortunately, some of the regular paint tools like eraser don't erase in a smooth antialiased way and just end up looking jagged (also only a square shape for eraser...no eraser brush mode unfortunately), so it ends up being a better looking option (well, when it works properly, which it does often enough to be useful). For whatever reason a bunch of tools and transforms (scaling, rotating), just produce such garbage jagged looking results, it's not serviceable even for those basics.
I've been using ComfyUI to do fine background and watermark removal. Might take a look into that as an alternative. Run Flux.2 Klein or Comfyui's own workflow.
Key point, saves a bunch of time. Copy, paste, click button, done in three seconds. The app is also just there, preinstalled. It's great precisely because it doesn't require "looking into" anything. Yes, there's a bunch of other apps and services, but that's all besides that point. It also works pretty much on any pc made in past decade and half without crazy gpu/vram requirements for a relatively miniscule task.
It's been a "bug" for several decades now. Not everything was of shitty jagged quality in either 90s or 00s. Particularly when using some more capable image editors.
There's a bunch of smaller editors that don't have such problems, like paint.net for example. It's an arbitrary "limit" (accidental even) stemming purely from bad quality implementation of basic features, not from how basic that feature set is.
Again, even a "pure" paint app with very limited functionality can have it be implemented badly, and it has nothing to do with how "fancy" or complex or advanced of a feature set it has.
If you don’t mind CLI, rembg is a good option for background removal. It lets you swap between different models depending on the type of image so you can use something like `birefnet` for photorealistic images and `toonout` for illustrations.
If you read the article instead of the headline…….. it’s adding a fairly standard mark to AI generated images to let’s others know, in the same manner a giant swath of the GebAI industry has agreed to.
That's just nostalgia. Why do we set the bar at windows XP paint instead of windows 1.01 paint which was different? Probably because winXP paint is the one we grew up with, and also the best version. But if we said no new features ever, we'd be stuck on win1.01 paint. The best version of Paint was a complete UI redesign away from the original.
I don't so much mind about Paint, but modern Notepad is completely unusable. We had "Notepad but with Rich Text formatting" -- it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.
last place i worked at had internal telemetry on end user machines. i dont know the way it was being used, although i suspect it was a document viewer.
The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.
For you. I mean, obviously it's still high enough that they're not switching. Beside the point, I'm bouncing between the different OSes at home and work, and honestly they're all deeply broken in different ways that require significant effort to make the best of it. I get people hate ads, so Windows is at the bottom of the list, but honestly I could care less for that additional 2 min of initial tweak when I'm spending half a day doing the setup anyway.
On Notepad stopping being raw text only, the main issue to me would be the safety it provided. Being first party meant never having to care about security (e.g. the company getting bought by a random malware vendor) or availability.
>The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me.
What confuses me is how people think theres anything close to an alternative for corporate environments.
Windows isnt Windows. Windows is the best supported OS by the Microsoft cloud stack. They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go.
>the cost of switching is just not that high.
Lol, lmao even. The cost of switching one laptop to linux is quite low. The cost of taking an enterprise using Microsoft everywhere to linux is something else entirely.
> They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go.
I think a lot of large corps could function quite well with a model like: (a) allow employees to choose a MacBook instead; (b) use various macOS enterprise management tools (such as Jamf); (c) use Windows virtual desktops for Windows-only apps
The main reason many don’t isn’t because this strategy won’t work - it is because it would cost them significantly more than a Windows-only strategy. So they won’t do it, or they will but limit it to only certain job functions (engineering, executives, sales) where the business benefit is clearer
The problem with adding Linux to the mix, is the variability of hardware and distributions can make it a lot more complex to manage, compared to a Windows-only or Windows+Mac fleet. And you also need people in your IT org with the skillset to handle it
>The main reason many don’t isn’t because this strategy won’t work - it is because it would cost them significantly more than a Windows-only strategy. So they won’t do it, or they will but limit it to only certain job functions (engineering, executives, sales) where the business benefit is clearer
Yeah VDI is getting close to universal adoption, but security is always where things come back to. Eventually an end user is going to have something sensitive on their macbook, and they will have fallen through some sort of compliance gap.
Its easier from a compliance standpoint to control everything permissible.
I’m not sure why you were downvoted. I have to use Windows for work. The barrier to entry is simply lower for many system administrators and users alike. The homogeneity of a Windows rollout is extremely attractive. You are going to have a hard sell getting your accounting team and receptionist onto Linux. Your developers will complain and make do. I love complaining about Windows!
Oh, my sweet summer child. Please realise that such blanket statements like that are profoundly ignorant. (Note: I'm running an entirely Windows-free household. )
The problem is changing the way companies build themselves up to work. Business logic. Even for medium-sized companies (100-1000 heads), what you're proposing is paying scores of business analysts months (years?) worth of time to review business processes, before you even get the teams of IT people to start making the switchover.
And that's not even taking into considering the fact that many large software packages simply do not work under nix and there is no realistic alternative. Basically every industry related to engineering simply cannot switch.
The processes and systems required to build Big Things in the real world are gargantuan and terrifying and sickening. Companies spend hundreds of millions every year putting up with Microsoft's bullshit because there is no alternative.
> Yes, using original paint in 16 colors saved to PCX in 640x480 should be enough for anybody.
There's a wide, wide gap between adding features that your users need and adding features that you want to cram down their throats to promote other products that you want them to use.
> Or we could let owners of properties add features as they see fit.
Or we could let paying users offer legitimate criticism of the products they use, without essentially telling them to shut up.
I don't think adding an identifier which can most likely be mapped back to user is "standard mark".
It doesn't explicitly say it, but there is hardly any other reason why it would add server generated ID (from authenticated session) to the saved file.
We've probably lost the fight over GenAI marks, at least for now, and I do understand the need for them. However the same technology that can embed an invisible watermark that survives a round of photographing, printing, crumbling and scanning back - can be used to embed more information than just "it's AI generated". Encoding GUID is just a harbinger; as a next step, why not encode the app that produced the image? Also a hash of its license key? Hell, what's stopping an app from doing it itself, watermarking its own window before passing the pixels to OS for compositing?
EU law requires the mark. Did you know about the level of the “so many levels”? If such a large market requires behavior by law, and quite reasonably so, it’s also quite reasonable to mark AI generated content as such.
All the slippery slope nonsense on this page has failed so many times it’s not worth debating. If you don’t like this tool, use another. When they embed your social security number and face and address in the mark get back to me.
it is kind of interesting when you think about it. what utility does something like paint actually have? did it ever have any real utility? (icon editing?) it always kinda felt like a demo that came with early versions of windows that didn't actually do anything useful.
I haven't used that in kde, but I've used the windows snipping tool and that one isn't as useful to me. Usually I want to take the screenshot now and then edit it a minute later. Paint works great for that.
The utility of Paint is that lightweight software is an absolute fucking godsend (which, Microsoft being Microsoft, is on a mission to ruin). I have all manner of professional tools - Photoshop, Aseprite, Manga Studio, etc, and if the edit is something that can be done in Paint, I will use Paint over any of the others, because I'll be done editing before I've even managed to open the file in another program.
Used to be you saved and shared screenshots by pasting into Paint and saving it. Printscreen didn't save a file and only some programs (Skype) let you paste the screenshot directly from the clipboard. That's how I remember it anyway.
I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.