Dave W Plummer
@davepl1968 • 101,987 subscribers
Hi! I'm Dave Plummer. You might remember me from such Windows components as Task Manager, Windows Pinball, Calc, ZIPFolders, Product Activation, etc. Cheers!
Shorts
![My AI broke the world record on Tempest yesterday! But I still hold the human record :-) [on Extreme difficulty settings] Here's a little demo reel of the Tempest AI doing inference and training at the same time up on the hardest Tempest levels. This is all running on our Dell Technologies 7875 Workstation, with the 9995WX CPU handling 2000 fps of Tempest while the dual Blackwell RTX6000 GPUs do inference and training.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2027092452193251734/amplify_video_thumb/2027091957403787264/img/-a2Czn1TjOzMLLZ7.jpg)
Videos
He was the multimillionaire software visionary that created the Zip file format still used almost universally to this day. And now, at the age of just 37, Phil Katz was dead. His life came to an inglorious ending in a lonely hotel room somewhere in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. He had a home nearby, and the cops had been summoned to it at least once before when neighbors complained of odors, insects, and mice infesting the neighboring luxury apartments. Once inside, the police were confronted with knee-deep garbage, decaying food scraps, and much more. When they later found his lifeless body slumped against a nightstand in that dingy south side hotel room, he was still cradling an empty bottle of liquor. A half dozen similar bottles littered the room. He was completely alone now, having long since been estranged from his family and now virtually a stranger even to the employees of his own company. His body could no longer sustain the abuse from years of chronic alcoholism, and he died alone that night of acute pancreatic bleeding. The Dark History of Zip Files: you might already know that I wrote the Zip file support that's been in Windows for about 30 years... But I had nothing to do with the creation of the Zip format, which goes back to Phil Katz. This is his tragic and cautionary tale... as told by me. I never met Phil before he died. I'd like to think that before he started his descent into darkness, we'd have a lot to talk about.
Dave W Plummer301,628 görüntüleme • 4 gün önce
Hard Drive activity indicator for the Mac: my first Swift app. Wrote it this morning because I wanted it. It monitors disk queues at 120Hz and triggers the LED for 10ms, which seems pretty realistic. What should I do with it? I pay the $100 Apple Developer tax, should I put it on the app store for $1 or just stick it on my GitHub and hope people can figure it out?
Dave W Plummer309,969 görüntüleme • 8 gün önce
Back in the early 90s, before the Internet, we had "Defrag and Chill". You'd start Disk Defragmenter on your 540MB hard drive, dim the lights, crack open a Surge, and just vibe while the little blue bars crawled across the screen like they were solving world peace. Forty-five minutes of pure, unfiltered anticipation. No notifications. No algorithms. Just the two of you, the gentle grinding of the hard drive, and the sacred promise that your Solitaire games were about to feel 3% snappier. This is MS_DOS 6.22, which I worked on, but I honestly have no idea who wrote defrag. Iconic utility though!
Dave W Plummer382,808 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce
Crazy example of how to remove sticky Duct Tape from Toilet Paper... I think the chemical in question is primarily Heptane. It seems to "deactivate" the chemical bonding of the glue, at least temporarily. Pretty magical for stickers, etc. It's on Amazon at Whereas Goo Gone is a citrus oil and leaves a residue, heptane seems to evaporate entirely cleanly. As I understand it, solvents like heptane actually work by temporarily penetrating and SWELLING that adhesive layer temporarily, which renders it useless. What happens chemically: The solvent diffuses into the adhesive. The polymer chains separate and soften. The adhesive loses cohesive strength and tack. The sticker can slide or peel away cleanly. The solvent rapidly evaporates. The remaining adhesive either re-hardens or comes off with the label.
Dave W Plummer28,255 görüntüleme • 9 gün önce
malloc() is lying to you. Find out why, and how the illusion works!
Dave W Plummer41,022 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce
If you're curious what a "Special Interest" is like with ASD, here's an example of mine: Tempest. I own three Tempest machines, an upright, a cabaret, and a cocktail (sit-down) machine. The high score on one of them was set by the game's author at the Atari Christmas Party. I have two spare monitors just in case. I hold the official world record on Tempest using the most difficult settings (Extreme mode). I reverse-engineered, disassembled, and documented the code from the game's ROMs on its motherboard. Next, I then wrote a Reinforcement Learning AI to learn Tempest and exceed my play; it can play indefinitely. I could go on, but I'll spare you the rest and summarize: I really like Tempest.
Dave W Plummer33,839 görüntüleme • 18 gün önce
Here are at least 5 things that you should know about print(), but probably don't!
Dave W Plummer18,472 görüntüleme • 11 gün önce
Back in 1994, I removed printf() from Windows COM. Here's the story of why! Share if you enjoy! Thx!
Dave W Plummer36,993 görüntüleme • 26 gün önce
Breakout by Grok3! If there's interest, I'll check the code into Github.
Dave W Plummer482,855 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
I wanted to recreate that optical illusion where it can be seen to rotate in two directions at once, as created by Etienne Jacob, but I'm clearly missing the secret sauce! If anyone knows what I'm missing, please do let me know. The code is less than 200 lines long and you can view it at
Dave W Plummer166,891 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
