Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as "DoomPaint" or "MS Paint Doom" on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. [...] ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine.

A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. "Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."

As we are in yet another 5+ hour GitHub outage...

[justMichael]

Maybe he should be spending more time keeping their services up and running, instead of dicking around with MS Paint and Fable.

Re:

[robot5x]

still a million times more impressive than that shit Nadella was bragging about [slashdot.org]

Re:

[zlives]

if you are comparing vastly greater use of compute for even more worthless shit.

The CTO?

[oldgraybeard]

"Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich" Guess that is what happens when he does not have a real job!

Re:The CTO?

[Midnight_Falcon]

Mark Russinovich is a GOAT and as an old grey beard you have probably used his software, like sysinternals and psexec. Before he joined Microsoft when they bought his company, every decent Windows NT etc admin in the 90s and 2000s used his third party software. There are few people on earth with such in depth knowledge of the Windows operating system or who have made such useful software for IT. I've been a Linux/posix guy most of my career, but I respect him and when I had to use or administer windows I used his software extensively.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a re

Re:

[Midnight_Falcon]

I mean, he's nearly 60 years old, and been CTO of Azure for over a decade. Azure actually became a serious cloud provider (AWS had been outpacing for a while) in short order, and the Azure tools for Windows management are far better than the on-premise NT-era active directory solutions, lest anyone need to spend time in ADSI Edit again.

There are few people pushing 60 who made useful software in the 90s still "doing stuff," at least at the level of impact like he had in that era. It's like lamenting an A

With All Due respect...

[SlashbotAgent]

I've got huge respect for Mark Russinovich. He knows or knew more about Windows than any Microsofty ever did.

Then he went to work for Microsoft. Makes sense.

Then he worked his way up and became Azure CTO. Azure? Ick! WTF, Mark?

It's good to see he's back to wasting his time on what he enjoys. Even if it is weird.

Satya should be proud though. This is a clear demonstration of what AI is good for.

Is this why they just implemented token budgets?

[flibbidyfloo]

I'm sure it's a coincidence and not because Mark told some other C-Suite execs that he did this. lol

Sigh

[Wolfrider]

Having solved all other problems...

/ srsly, why do people waste their time on stupid crap like this

Re:

[drinkypoo]

This tells you how important he is to the function of Azure, a "service" which has been hacked multiple times so badly that there are no logs and Microsoft doesn't know what happened.

They hired him for his recognizable name, and he's so involved with the business that he has time to do... this.

Perhaps Microsoft should try to find someone who can solve Azure's problems to run it.

Re: Sigh

[sixminuteabs]

You 2 dipshits done jerking each other off? A guy using his free time to think of unique uses for tools help to spawn great ideas later. You would not know anything about that though

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

Having solved all other problems...

/ srsly, why do people waste their time on stupid crap like this

This is where innovative minds come from. People who want to play with stuff and figure out how it works.

Re:

[the_skywise]

Cool username, bro

not such a flex.

[usedtobestine]

Ólafur Waage did it better.

Fable can't be that great...

[Shaitan]

"Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."

You'd think the AI would have helpfully told him his 'joke' lacked anything with the potential to be funny. When someone recreates an Apple II using legos and a raspberry pi or makes it run in a browser; it's pointless nerding that says they have too much time on their hands. This isn't even nerding or pointless, it actually ads a stop for no purpose whatsoever. Straight up retarded.

Re:

[oldgraybeard]

"AI would have helpfully told him his 'joke' lacked" How is that going to happen? They would need Intelligence to deal with humor.

Re:

[Shaitan]

Apparently not, Russinovich has plenty of intellect but clearly he has no sense of humor.

Re:

[Shaitan]

See THIS is humor.

Re:

[Shaitan]

In soviet russia sarcasm explains YOU!

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[Uldis Segliņš]

Pointless nerding is what gives us all art and most nice things.You can't plan an invention. Some of pointless nerding gives non useful, non practical results. So what? There are way more important stuff in the world to worry about.

Re:

[Aighearach]

You're basically saying, "Some blargs are borgles. Borgles are good. Therefore all blargs are good."

Re:

[Uldis Segliņš]

No. I'm saying: "Some blargs are borgles. Borgles are good. Therefore all blargs are not bad."

Re:

[Aighearach]

Nope, you failed even worse by not being able to match the pattern you actually used, and instead just regurgitated a known-true one.

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[cmdr_klarg]

My goodness you're a lot of fun. You're telling me that you've never spent any time on anything that was ultimately a waste of time? And that you hated every second of it? Or maybe you did it for the sole purpose of seeing if it could be done, and enjoyed doing it?

Lighten up man. You sound like my ex when I'd play video games that she thought was a waste of time better spent being productive. My reply was: "Waste of time? That's the entire point of video games: spending time on something I'm having fun d

Ha Ha

[nsuccorso]

So funny

And despite all that

[rsilvergun]

It's still a better framerate than the 3DO version.

Is this called Paintmaxxing? Doommaxxing?

[outsider007]

In my time we just called it goofing off.

Re:

[TeknoHog]

This is Microsoft so it's more like Suxxxmaxxxing.

Chief Time-wasting Officer

[devslash0]

Once again it proves that people at the top don't have real responsibilities but have too much free time.

Re:

[iwulinux]

You don't think he should have evenings and weekends off like everyone else? I've been an exec, albeit more C-tier than C-suite, and can confirm the existence of free time in limited quantities.

Re: Chief Time-wasting Officer

[paul_engr]

You were the exec of your mom's balls. Go fuck yourself and huff some jenkem, you skank

The meme is dead now.

[bistromath007]

There's no reason to port Doom to stupid new things ever again.

Re: The meme is dead now.

[peppepz]

Especially when doing it requires zero effort from the programmer.