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Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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I don't understand all the negativity. An integrated AI assistant in a text editor sounds like it could be amazing.
Sometimes, programs just need to be simple.
Put that AI shit in Word, notepad is supposed to be a plain text editor and it did so quite well.
“Do one thing and do it very well” - Unix philosophy
Windows has never even slightly pretended to follow that guideline
And that's why it's awful
It sounds awful. The draw of notepad is its simplicity. I wish software companies would stop ruining their good versions of popular software.
We haven't seen how this feature will be implemented yet, it could be done without impacting the simplicity of Notepad.
Personally, what I'd like is a button that pops open a side window where I could either ask the AI questions about the text that's currently in Notepad or tell it to make edits to the text, and it'll just do that. Seems like it could be perfectly straightforward if it's something along these lines, and if you don't want to use the feature you just don't.
That's near impossible. It will bloat notepad, at the very least. Longer loading, more chances of crashing, creating unnecessary data-traffic... literally no one using notepad in the last 25 years needed any of this, they used it for it's simplicity, speed, reliability, all of which it becomes less with features like these. Put that shit in word and o365, where it belongs.
The technology hasn't existed until this year, so Notepad's last 25 years of usage patterns don't really mean much to it.
If you don't want it creating data traffic, don't use the feature.
And don't put words in my mouth. I would love to try out something like this and could well find it quite useful, depending on the details of how it works. So "literally no one" falls flat right there, I'm a counterexample.
Technology for rich text formatting has existed for many many decades. It was not a part of Notepad. People using it were well aware of this limitation, and used notepad because that technology was not a part of it.
A non-used feature will still cause unnecessary data-traffic. At the very least to install it and update it periodically, more likely constantly because it will become part of the microsoft telemetry / advertisement profiling / tracking package that is called windows.
You want the feature. I'm interested, too. But I don't want the feature in notepad. I want notepad to stay as freaking basic as possible, because the main thing I (and I think other people too) like about notepad is the incredible speeeeeeed at which it opens on any device because it's "show text" and nothing else.
Notepad.exe is a 356 kilobyte file. You're really so concerned about the data traffic that will come from occasionally updating a 356 kilobyte application that you're spending your time arguing about it at length on the Internet? Do you realize how many bytes it takes to download and display this discussion here on the Fediverse is? Here on Kbin.social it takes 712 kilobytes for me to view it. When you click on the notification that this response is going to give you you're going to be downloading the equivalent of several notepad.exes all at once. If you respond, you'll likely re-download the whole page again for your browser to display it to you.
Complaining about the bandwidth usage that would come from downloading an update to notepad.exe is ridiculous.
And that is fine for a social networking app like lemmy/kbin. When I am using notepad I just want speed to view some text on a standalone machine, not a bunch of crappy bloat. Same for all of the other notepad users who outnumber people reading this by 1 million to 1.
It's a 356 kilobyte file for now.
I'm mainly complaining it's a stupid ass way of microsoft making their bloatware tracking operating system complete. There is no good reason for them to put this stuff in notepad instead of, again, where it belongs and where 99.000 other features to juggle your texts around have been put before: Word, O365.
The amount of code required client-side for interacting with an AI's API is a few hundred lines at most. I've done it myself, with actual real software projects, so I know how this works. There's no reason to expect that AI integration would cause Notepad to become significantly larger.
Microsoft might make other changes, sure, but that's a separate issue.
They’re still going to ruin a supposedly no frills text editor with this.
What they could’ve dove to showcase it instead is revamping Wordpad, instead of removing it, and integrate the AI stuff there, since it’s supposed to be one of Microsoft’s example apps
If notepad makes a connection to the internet and waits for a connection and response then it is enshitified. If MS wants to do that they need for fork the code and offer the enshitified version under a different name "Notepad AI"