271–280 of 558 posts
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What's weird is that AI is supposed to make development easy enough that native applications are just as fast to build than web apps Somehow in this timeline AI can only be used to make things worse and sloppier
Software used to be built for users, now it just has to look good as a screenshot.
I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month. 20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46971516 Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (804 points, 516 comments) 20260210 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20... > "An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad" Other recent Notepad issu…
This is my favorite part of this story. Do you want remote code execution? Because [fixing things that aren't broken] is how you get remote code execution.
I'm being facetious of course, but this recent rhetorical trend of people confidently vouching for "pet" in "pet vs. cattle" is not a sustainable decision, even if it's admittedly plain practical on the short to medium run, or in given contexts even longer. It's just a dangerous and irresponsible lesson to blindly repeat I think.
Change happens. Evidently, while we can mechanistically rule out several classes of bugs now, RCEs are not one of those. Whatever additional guardrails they had in place, they failed to catch this *. I think it's significantly more honest to place the blame there if anywhere. If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad *, you can be confident they're introducing RCEs left and right to other components too **. With some additional contextual weighting of course.
* Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
** Under the interpretation that this was an RCE, which I question.
[0] https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/2/19/cve-2026-20...
I was about to make a joke about how I'm surprised they haven't shoved Copilot into Notepad yet, but surprise - they have ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri... )
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Oh I’m well aware, I just think this reaction is ridiculous. Just make your own damn notepad if it bothers you lol.
We used to have a perfectly good application that came with the OS. Then Microsoft ruined it. Yes I can make my own Notepad, but I shouldn't have to. If Microsoft really wanted a built-in text editor that had features Notepad didn't, they should've made a second application rather than ruining the minimalist one.
How so? If all you do is load plaintext, you’ll never come across this feature. Even if you do, what’s the problem?
step 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar. I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
step 1: remove wordpad step 2: omg there's demand for features step 3: turn notepad, whose point was to be a dumb simple thing, into a wordpad step 4: get a raise because you "solved" the problem
Yeah IDK. Wordpad is built around rich text, with all the weirdness and complexity that comes with it. I know for a fact that .rtf is absurdly complicated to work with, and I assume that .docx is similar. I’m willing to bet that adding markdown to Notepad was a lot simpler than trying to make it work in Wordpad, especially since you’d probably still have to support rich text.
Why is progress always assumed to be about adding more stuff? Sometimes, taking something away would be best, but humans tend to overlook it. Article: People systematically overlook subtractive changes - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y
We are hard wired to perceive addition as value.