6 ms·

One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus. I mea

One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus. I mean, Chen has decades of winternals in his head. Microsoft has been gutting their staff for years now. When the Petzold/Chen generation hang up their spurs, does Microsoft still have a critical mass of people who understand Windows from the metal up?

majorchord 1mo ago
Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.
im3w1l 1mo ago
One trend to watch is AI cheat devices. Instead of running detectable software they have a fully separate device that uses AI for object detection and aimbotting. If cheaters move to using those, then the argument for kernel mode anticheat weakens. And that is the cornerstone keeping gamers on windows.
- matheusmoreira 1mo ago
  Now I'm looking forward to these AI cheat devices. It's going to be hilarious if the kernel anticheat malware finally gets killed by AI aimbots of all things.
  - inigyou 1mo ago
    The term "AI" used in video games is not really related to the current LLM craze.
    - matheusmoreira 29d ago
      In what other ways could "AI cheat devices" and "uses AI for object detection and aimbotting" possibly be interpreted?
      - inigyou 29d ago
        As a misunderstanding. The curenet high-end cheat devices use the PCIe bus to read main memory without relying on any AI. Since they also plug in to the HDMI port to overlay their information on top of the game screen, this might be misunderstood as them detecting objects in the video output. But detecting objects in video also doesn't fall under the new definition of AI, which means LLMs and image diffusers.
  - not_a9 29d ago
    The significantly increased capabilities of cheats if you can read/write memory and the dogshit that AI-oriented anticheat approaches continue producing (look at VACnet, though I am sure there are other companies producing better things like Anybrain - the thing is, 99% of the time the products of said companies are integrated along with a proper strong anticheat like EAC) will ensure kernel mode anticheats will be alive and well.
- not_a9 1mo ago
  While I’m not sure if this is a bot (where did vidya enter the convo?), game hacking on both cheat and anticheat side has genuinely deep Windows internals knowledge (admittedly somewhat lopsided, but deep nonetheless)
  - im3w1l 1mo ago
    Producer and consumer sides are tied. If there is strong demand for windows development then there will be money sloshing around which will attract devs. I predict demand will decrease, at least for this particular niche. To go even further off topic, being called a bot is certainly a wake up call for me that the internet is dying, and I'm not ready for it, and need to reposition myself asap somehow.
    - pjc50 1mo ago
      Windows demand is overwhelmingly corporate. Just like Nvidia is barely bothering with gamers at the moment, Windows is not being kept alive for games.
LatencyKills 1mo ago
I was a dev on the Visual Studio and Windows teams in the 90s. I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities. I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger. I’m not being critical; they are just focused on higher level abstractions.
- arjvik 1mo ago
  Arguably the lower level abstractions are more interesting too! how exactly Windows does ring-0 is less interesting than writing your own ring-0! And unless you care about writing driver-level software for Windows or contributing to the kernel, learning this is also less useful. I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.
  - LatencyKills 1mo ago
    > I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer. Really? Understanding the cost of ring transitions is incredibly useful. I recently consulted with a company that was having horrible performance issues, and it came down to the fact that the primary developer didn't know that certain Win32 calls forced ring transitions. The entire fix was switching from a mutex to a critical section (one causes a ring transition, the other doesn't). Treating the OS like an impenetrable black box will bite upcoming engineers/companies... eventually.
    - arjvik 27d ago
      This makes sense, and I guess as someone who’s never written Windows software I didn’t realize it was a leaky abstraction!
- AdieuToLogic 1mo ago
  Speaking of debuggers... I still twitch whenever someone says "use ddd" and they are not referring to Evans' seminal work. :-D
dataflow 1mo ago
> who can Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least. > and want to Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.
mrheosuper 1mo ago
Obviously it's Copilot /s
AdieuToLogic 1mo ago
> One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus. A similar "brain drain" has occurred in macOS (formerly known as OS-X) over the years, as evident in man page documentation for "newer" daemons shipped. An easy way to verify this is to run: ps -A | awk '{ print $4 }' | grep 'libexec/.*[a-z]d$' And compare the man pages for the daemons running with the man page for `launchd`. While this exercise is illuminating, it is also depressing IMHO.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  And the documentation, now it is mostly generated, the famous Apple books are now gone, at least the archive is still available.
- masklinn 1mo ago
  > formerly known as OS-X It was never OS-X, it was OS X, and originally Mac OS X, as in the one after Mac OS 9. The Mac prefix was dropped with Lion (10.7). The Mac OS lingo having itself been introduced with 7.6, before that the OS core was called System.
  - AdieuToLogic 28d ago
    >> formerly known as OS-X > It was never OS-X, it was OS X ... If my worst sin is an introduction of a hyphen, then I can live with that.
charcircuit 1mo ago
Why do you think that is not already happening within Microsoft?
pjmlp 1mo ago
Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess? Microsoft new blood has been educated on Macs and ChromeOS, even if they do games it is most likely consoles. On WinUI community calls you usually would get puzzled faces when the Q&A touched when would WinUI be able to do "insert basic Win32/Forms/WPF" feature. Management apparently doesn't care they actually understand Windows, or get the required trainings to meet the quality of their predecessors. That is how you get Webview2 all over the place.
- wolfi1 1mo ago
  i fear the times when the chip makers change their architectures and the OS makers have to change the inner working of their OSes but then again, I guess there is an equivalent in the chip-making industry as well
- mesrik 1mo ago
  >Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess? There have been some writings and posts here about Microsoft. Here is one from last spring, from a guy that was long time Windows core developer and moved to Azure group. It's well worth reading, what he writes about challenges they have had and most likely still have if not even worse now. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... and the related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 And from what I've understood old chaps like Dave Cutler are involved much less than they were for a very long time.
  - pjmlp 1mo ago
    I have read that, yeah it also shows a lot how things changed. As per his interview on Dave's Garage, besides being of an age where he really doesn't need to work, at the time he was involved on getting Linux running on XBox on Azure, apparently Microsoft uses idle consoles from XBox Cloud for AI. https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10743 https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10743
delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago
As someone within that age group who moved back to Windows for development and entertainment, I find systems programming on Windows more fun and engaging than on competition OSs. Oddly enough the open-source nature of the latter kind of takes away some of the thrill. Eerything is just... there, whereas with Windows there's always quite a bit of digging and investigation involved. Or maybe this is Stockholm syndrome; I dunno.
- stelonix 1mo ago
  Funny feelings in my tummy reading this! I worked with winapi back in late 2000s to early 2010s and I remember having some great fun with it. Although there was MFC and WPF I didn't want to learn them because I wanted the fastest & leanest (catch the reference :) executable I could get; I'd then run gnu strip over the .exe too. Stack Overflow was essential to figure out arcane flags that could solve my issues (when even MSDN, another great site with its examples, couldn't) and Raymond was very present in SO at that time, iirc he replied to one of my questions too. That's when I found his blog, always great reads! Now I've been a 14-year Linux user and none of the toolkits and libraries give anything close to the winapi experience.
  - delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago
    > fastest & leanest Surely you mean leanest and meanest :P I'd also say that tooling on Windows is simultaneously better and easier to use than on Linux; the noob case of green play button in an IDE is taken care of, but if you want detailed performance and memory profiling, record-replay debugging, hot-reload, all of this is straightforwardly available on Windows.

majorchord 1mo ago

Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.

im3w1l 1mo ago

One trend to watch is AI cheat devices. Instead of running detectable software they have a fully separate device that uses AI for object detection and aimbotting. If cheaters move to using those, then the argument for kernel mode anticheat weakens. And that is the cornerstone keeping gamers on windows.

matheusmoreira 1mo ago
Now I'm looking forward to these AI cheat devices. It's going to be hilarious if the kernel anticheat malware finally gets killed by AI aimbots of all things.
- inigyou 1mo ago
  The term "AI" used in video games is not really related to the current LLM craze.
  - matheusmoreira 29d ago
    In what other ways could "AI cheat devices" and "uses AI for object detection and aimbotting" possibly be interpreted?
    - inigyou 29d ago
      As a misunderstanding. The curenet high-end cheat devices use the PCIe bus to read main memory without relying on any AI. Since they also plug in to the HDMI port to overlay their information on top of the game screen, this might be misunderstood as them detecting objects in the video output. But detecting objects in video also doesn't fall under the new definition of AI, which means LLMs and image diffusers.
- not_a9 29d ago
  The significantly increased capabilities of cheats if you can read/write memory and the dogshit that AI-oriented anticheat approaches continue producing (look at VACnet, though I am sure there are other companies producing better things like Anybrain - the thing is, 99% of the time the products of said companies are integrated along with a proper strong anticheat like EAC) will ensure kernel mode anticheats will be alive and well.
not_a9 1mo ago
While I’m not sure if this is a bot (where did vidya enter the convo?), game hacking on both cheat and anticheat side has genuinely deep Windows internals knowledge (admittedly somewhat lopsided, but deep nonetheless)
- im3w1l 1mo ago
  Producer and consumer sides are tied. If there is strong demand for windows development then there will be money sloshing around which will attract devs. I predict demand will decrease, at least for this particular niche. To go even further off topic, being called a bot is certainly a wake up call for me that the internet is dying, and I'm not ready for it, and need to reposition myself asap somehow.
  - pjc50 1mo ago
    Windows demand is overwhelmingly corporate. Just like Nvidia is barely bothering with gamers at the moment, Windows is not being kept alive for games.

LatencyKills 1mo ago

I was a dev on the Visual Studio and Windows teams in the 90s. I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities. I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger. I’m not being critical; they are just focused on higher level abstractions.

arjvik 1mo ago
Arguably the lower level abstractions are more interesting too! how exactly Windows does ring-0 is less interesting than writing your own ring-0! And unless you care about writing driver-level software for Windows or contributing to the kernel, learning this is also less useful. I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.
- LatencyKills 1mo ago
  > I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer. Really? Understanding the cost of ring transitions is incredibly useful. I recently consulted with a company that was having horrible performance issues, and it came down to the fact that the primary developer didn't know that certain Win32 calls forced ring transitions. The entire fix was switching from a mutex to a critical section (one causes a ring transition, the other doesn't). Treating the OS like an impenetrable black box will bite upcoming engineers/companies... eventually.
  - arjvik 27d ago
    This makes sense, and I guess as someone who’s never written Windows software I didn’t realize it was a leaky abstraction!
AdieuToLogic 1mo ago
Speaking of debuggers... I still twitch whenever someone says "use ddd" and they are not referring to Evans' seminal work. :-D

dataflow 1mo ago

> who can Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least. > and want to Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.

mrheosuper 1mo ago

Obviously it's Copilot /s

AdieuToLogic 1mo ago

> One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus. A similar "brain drain" has occurred in macOS (formerly known as OS-X) over the years, as evident in man page documentation for "newer" daemons shipped. An easy way to verify this is to run: ps -A | awk '{ print $4 }' | grep 'libexec/.*[a-z]d$' And compare the man pages for the daemons running with the man page for `launchd`. While this exercise is illuminating, it is also depressing IMHO.

pjmlp 1mo ago
And the documentation, now it is mostly generated, the famous Apple books are now gone, at least the archive is still available.
masklinn 1mo ago
> formerly known as OS-X It was never OS-X, it was OS X, and originally Mac OS X, as in the one after Mac OS 9. The Mac prefix was dropped with Lion (10.7). The Mac OS lingo having itself been introduced with 7.6, before that the OS core was called System.
- AdieuToLogic 28d ago
  >> formerly known as OS-X > It was never OS-X, it was OS X ... If my worst sin is an introduction of a hyphen, then I can live with that.

charcircuit 1mo ago

Why do you think that is not already happening within Microsoft?

pjmlp 1mo ago

Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess? Microsoft new blood has been educated on Macs and ChromeOS, even if they do games it is most likely consoles. On WinUI community calls you usually would get puzzled faces when the Q&A touched when would WinUI be able to do "insert basic Win32/Forms/WPF" feature. Management apparently doesn't care they actually understand Windows, or get the required trainings to meet the quality of their predecessors. That is how you get Webview2 all over the place.

wolfi1 1mo ago
i fear the times when the chip makers change their architectures and the OS makers have to change the inner working of their OSes but then again, I guess there is an equivalent in the chip-making industry as well
mesrik 1mo ago
>Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess? There have been some writings and posts here about Microsoft. Here is one from last spring, from a guy that was long time Windows core developer and moved to Azure group. It's well worth reading, what he writes about challenges they have had and most likely still have if not even worse now. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... and the related HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 And from what I've understood old chaps like Dave Cutler are involved much less than they were for a very long time.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  I have read that, yeah it also shows a lot how things changed. As per his interview on Dave's Garage, besides being of an age where he really doesn't need to work, at the time he was involved on getting Linux running on XBox on Azure, apparently Microsoft uses idle consoles from XBox Cloud for AI. https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10743 https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10743

delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago

As someone within that age group who moved back to Windows for development and entertainment, I find systems programming on Windows more fun and engaging than on competition OSs. Oddly enough the open-source nature of the latter kind of takes away some of the thrill. Eerything is just... there, whereas with Windows there's always quite a bit of digging and investigation involved. Or maybe this is Stockholm syndrome; I dunno.

stelonix 1mo ago
Funny feelings in my tummy reading this! I worked with winapi back in late 2000s to early 2010s and I remember having some great fun with it. Although there was MFC and WPF I didn't want to learn them because I wanted the fastest & leanest (catch the reference :) executable I could get; I'd then run gnu strip over the .exe too. Stack Overflow was essential to figure out arcane flags that could solve my issues (when even MSDN, another great site with its examples, couldn't) and Raymond was very present in SO at that time, iirc he replied to one of my questions too. That's when I found his blog, always great reads! Now I've been a 14-year Linux user and none of the toolkits and libraries give anything close to the winapi experience.
- delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago
  > fastest & leanest Surely you mean leanest and meanest :P I'd also say that tooling on Windows is simultaneously better and easier to use than on Linux; the noob case of green play button in an IDE is taken care of, but if you want detailed performance and memory profiling, record-replay debugging, hot-reload, all of this is straightforwardly available on Windows.