Re: PSA: Quick startup on the dedicated Duck.ai LLM/AI WebView2 chat mechanism

On Sun, 8/9/2026 2:34 PM, Maria Sophia wrote:
> Maria Sophia wrote:
>> If you already use this interface, please let others know what you think.
>> If you know of an unlimited no-registration chat on Windows, let us know.
> 
> BTW, I don't understand "what" this DDG webview2-whatever-that-is 
> thingamagidgy is actually because the shortcut TARGET turns out to
> be a zero-length file, created today at install time. Huh?
> 
> How does a shortcut target that is a 0-length file, actually work?
> TARGET=C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.exe
> 
> Dated today, are thse two related zero-sized additions:
>   C:\Users\{me}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.DesktopBrowser_ya2fgkz3nks94\DuckDuckGo.exe
> But the hash on that empty file is an error:
>  Errors: 1
>  Files: 0
>  Size: 0 bytes
>  SHA256 checksum for data: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
>  SHA256 checksum for data and names: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
>  
> There is also an executable one level up though but of the same empty hash.
>  C:\Users\{me}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\DuckDuckGo.exe
>  
> What the heck?
> What is this DDG thingey anyway?
> 
> Moving on to testing... drat. After only a handful of turns, I get the error:
>  You've reached the maximum chat length in this conversation.
>  Start a new chat to continue.
> 
> Which means we have to start all over again. Sigh.
> 
> I'll flip some switches (e.g., Reasoning vs Fast and/or mini versus nano)
> to see if the character limit is extended, but this is a big limitation
> on complex research which requires the chat mechanism to remember stuff.
> 

That's the packaging method for a Windows.App .

At one time, the "blah.exe" file was a PE32 stub with zero execution time,
that could cause the screen to flash. The file was actually a manifest file,
with the manifest text staged after the PE32 stub.

They liked the scheme so much, they reduced "blah.exe" to zero length.
Now, you cannot click on it and make things blink. The manifest is
still in the folder, somewhere. The manifest has sufficient signing
and crypto, to ensure the thing loaded is "authentic" and has not
been modified. If a hash of a file is incorrect, that should trigger
a re-download of the materials.

And for some of those, the folder is "access denied". Making your
study of the materials a bit more difficult. That's not really a problem
of course.

The SHA checksum of a zero length file is not 0.
It would be Bad Karma if that were to be true.

   Name: BadKarma
   Size: 0 bytes
   SHA256: E3B0C44298FC1C149AFBF4C8996FB92427AE41E4649B934CA495991B7852B855

What happened there might well be Access Denied.

I dare you, to make a source file, where the SHA256 output is all zeros :-)
I'll wait. If you could do that, if you could manage to make an
all zeros SHA256 legitimately, all the Bitcoins in the world
would be worthless. A worthy objective.

   Paul