Taskmaster
Table of Contents
Dave the Guy from Microsoft
Dave's Garage is the YouTube channel of former Microsoft employee who, according to himself, was the original Author of Windows Task Manager. He also wrote a book titled Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire, which has quite positive reader reviews and may well be as excellent as it appears to be.
Dave's channel contains a lot of videos covering interesting topics such as the history of Microsoft BOB (sorry, the SECRET history), the SECRET history of Task Manager, as well as more general videos on programming languages, some vintage computing, and "drag race" comparisons of Windows vs. Linux, C# vs C++ vs Python, and so forth. Fair enough, most of these comparisons are executed reasonably well, although there's one disturbing thing noticeable: In one moment, he dives into what appears to be extreme detail, flashing bits of assembly code and talking about how compilers implement certain functions. That's great, if actually not as deep as it would appear at first because he's often not really saying anything aside from the obvious. But then the pendulum swings and things happen that he has no idea about, and which make his conclusions questionable. Like in this Linux vs. Windows test where he encountered a sudden bump in performance under linux with increasing threads vs. how windows scales:
He has no explanation for this and frankly it's hard to tell what could cause this with what little information he gives, but instead of finding out what the problem is we just move on. Oh well, maybe that was a one-off. His code is quite pedestrian but not at all terrible. However, it was clear that whatever language he used, his code was written like C-code. That sloppyness and weird mix of detailed information and glossing over basic things is a continued theme.
Another example: C# vs Java drag race with a prime sieve. Now, aside from the fact that this probably isn't the best test of real world performance for a general programming language, he makes a lot of problematic statements, like he's claiming that Java is never compiled into machine code, but rather interpreted from bytecode. This is of course wrong, and Java has had JIT since 1996.
I don't know about you, but if I made a video about a "drag race" between two programming languages, I'd probably at least read up on the basic performance-relevant specifications and features of an unfamiliar language. Watching him waffle on about what may or may not have given Java an ever so slight edge over C# (in a rather unsuitable and limited single-scenario benchmark) is painful to endure, as nothing is actually said and everything is "maybe" and "who knows".
Subscribe for more half-knowledge
Making sloppy mistakes and being very VERY proud of every line of code he contributed is one thing. But you know you're dealing with dangerous half-knowledge when stuff like this emerges:
No, Windows is a closed-source operating system loved by millions. Linux is an open-source operating system which includes a binary blob from Linus Torvalds built into EVERY release that ONLY he has the source code for. Pick your poison. They're both closed, one just has the illusion of transparency.
Uh...
No.
The troublesome thing is, not only is he completely wrong about this, but this person has over a million subscribers on YouTube and some of his videos have viewcounts in the millions.
Dave has experienced many things during his time at Microsoft, and no doubt that has been a very interesting time. That's also a big reason for his subscriber count: Many people, myself included, love to learn about what the inside of Microsoft was like back when Windows 95 and XP came to be. He's simply trying to create engaging and interesting content, using his time at Microsoft as reference. Trouble is, you can say "I wrote Task Manager" a thousand times, you're still spreading half-knowledge. I am surprised he has never deleted his comment about the Linux kernel.
Make no mistake, this isn't PirateSoftware levels of fremdschaemen. And at least we can rest assured that, given his surface-level grasp on so many things, he's not doing things like trying to explain DeepSeek to his viewers.
