Issue: Feeling bad after interaction with OSS developer at <BIG COMPANY>.
Steps to reproduce:
1) Report a bug.
2) Get called dumb by developers at <BIG COMPANY>.
3) Demonstrate that it is, in fact, a bug with examples, test cases, and offer a potential fix/PR.
4) Hear that it’s being “handled internally”.
5) Wait for the blog post re-iterating what they called dumb, talking about how great the team is that fixed it, and see your demonstration code or test cases in the linked commit.
6) Why are you still here? No, you’re not going to be credited, this is going in my promotion packet.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen this over the past 20 years. Whenever I’m about to report a bug in a <BIG COMPANY> project I smile to my girlfriend and say “OK, I’m going to go get called dumb.”
And the Windows Terminal team reeks of this. There's so many blog posts saying look, we're so smart because they're reimplementing something both Linux and macOS had for *years*, as if the whole world of CLI was waiting for their savior.
I get the feeling that there's a bunch of people working for, or being paid by, Microsoft who really love functional programming. Some of Microsoft's best outputs comes from those teams/folks.
It could just be a coincidence/confirmation bias, so I wonder if there's actually something to that.
> I get the feeling that there's a bunch of people working for, or being paid by, Microsoft who really love functional programming.
Simon Peyton Jones, Simon Marlow, Edward Kmett, Conal Elliott, and I’m sure a lot of other people with fundamental contributions to the Haskell ecosystem who I can’t remember offhand all work or previously worked at Microsoft Research, so that part is just straightforwardly true.
I figured I'd get this from someone. ;) I'm approximating that 99% of people who use Windows use default terminals for built-in legacy shells, and thus effectively analogous terminology. You're correct though!
True, the slow startup is annoying (especially if you load modules in your profile), but overall I still think it's better than the alternatives. I usually just keep a terminal window always open.
the part where "he" is wrong, is the part where he tells everyone that his reference software can be compared to a real terminal. You cannot compare shoes with towels, nor cats with a TV. The tiling renderer "he" wrote as part of the reference software to demo isn't that bad as a product (to some degree), but that piece of software is garbage, as it has zero use. And almost none of the techniques "he" brags about can be applied to a real terminal. I mean, I like being educated. But so far, noone of the internet fanboys "he" has, has so far ever provided a real product out of his reference software. Admitted, some people tried (just look around), but they all failed. I wonder why. Do you know it?
> the part where "he" is wrong, is the part where he tells everyone that his reference software can be compared to a real terminal
He very clearly states that his implementation is a terminal renderer.
> And almost none of the techniques "he" brags about can be applied to a real terminal
Elsewhere one of the people from the screenshots says "we implemented the same approach" because these techniques can be and have been applied. Both in Windows Terminal and, as I understand it, in every single modern terminal emulator.
No. No you're not. Because you keep shifting goalposts and ignoring inconvenient truths.
First you claimed that "almost none of the techniques "he" brags about can be applied to a real terminal".
To which I linked and quoted Windows Terminal team: "We actually took the same approach Casey suggested. A lot of terminals implement it that way."
Then you shifted the goalpost to saying "We should distinguish here between renderer and VT terminal backend."
To which I replied: he implements VT parsing and rendering.
Is it a complete VT parsing and rendering pipeline? No. Does it invalidate his approach? No.
And to put this into additional perspective, Windows Terminal was abysmally slow with no VT parsing, and with no color output to begin with. It couldn't handle most of Unicode, wide characters and dozens of other things.
And so on. Now it's "sickness", "plain garbage" and other stuff. Tell me, are you perhaps on Windows Terminal team? Because that's a fine if exaggerated example of their behaviour just a year ago. Now they are like "yup, we're doing exactly the same things that Casey is doing".
But wait, don't tell me. I'm definitely not going to engage in this useless thread any longer.
> No. No you're not. Because you keep shifting goalposts and ignoring inconvenient truths.
I still am. Please submit a PR to refterm to that implements the VT sequences I mentioned above, until then I must continue to believe that you just repeat what other people say, without using your own brain. Shifting goalposts is probably not the best wording here. I keep listing arguments.
> First you claimed that "almost none of the techniques "he" brags about can be applied to a real terminal".
>
> To which I linked and quoted Windows Terminal team: "We actually took the same approach Casey suggested. A lot of terminals implement it that way."
"Almost none" does not mean "none". What WT applied is related to the tiling renderer. And I am sure I said "isn't that bad as a product" with respect to that. But Cassay also said that such things are super basic (if you know about it).
> Then you shifted the goalpost to saying "We should distinguish here between renderer and VT terminal backend."
>
> To which I replied: he implements VT parsing and rendering.
>
> Is it a complete VT parsing and rendering pipeline? No. Does it invalidate his approach? No.
VT parsing and actually doing something based on it, how often do I need to write that until you do understand that (!?), are two entirely different things. VT parsing is done in refterm, because it's needed for SGR and CUP, obviously. But everything else is discarded. All the other VT sequences that are parsed are not interpreted. Again, Please implement the VT sequences I mentioned above in refterm, without degradation of refterms claims.
> And to put this into additional perspective, Windows Terminal was abysmally slow with no VT parsing, and with no color output to begin with. It couldn't handle most of Unicode, wide characters and dozens of other things.
You use Cassays wording here. I'm fine with that, WT was and is in fact still slow. Just fork it, and make it faster. You guys keep saying it's simple, it's easy, it's all proven numerous times. Yet noone of you ever provided a terminal that is implementing enough VT sequences to be taken serious. refterm is a joke, it's garbage, and simply harmful. Not to its entirety, certainly not, it prove a point on rendering speed (7000 frames per second in a terminal-like application). Ignoring the usefulness of such for a moment, the reason why this whole rant of Cassay and his demo program is harmful to the public is, because you keep blindingly following him. Without questioning, without thinking about it, because thinking costs energy, one could say. I do not know your true reasons, but I can just encourage you to try.
I HEREBY CALL YOU OUT! Please work on refterm, and proof your point by implementing:
1. DECSTBM, DECSLRM
2. SM/RM/DECRQPM
3. alt-screen
4. DL, ICH, IL
5. rectangular operations (DECCRA, DECFRA, DECRQCRA, ...)
6. SD, SU (respecting margins set by DECSTBM)
7. DECAWM correctly applied.
> Tell me, are you perhaps on Windows Terminal team?
I am not part of Microsoft nor their WT team. I do however know how terminals work internally, because I have implemented one. So I do know what I am speaking about here. I even took refterm very serious and looked into the source code and tried to learn from it. Again, I was already saying repeatively that there are some good techniques applied, and also has some architecturally good decisions. But this does not hold on the performance level when you actually start implementing more than just bling-bling SGR plus CUP. Ignoring DECAWM is also a damaging descision.
> But wait, don't tell me. I'm definitely not going to engage in this useless thread any longer.
Because I call you out? That's cheap. Please at least have the balls and react on the actual content of my post (the VT sequences): technically!. Until then I must just assume you are (amongst many), a sickness of the internet: just repeating what narcissistic influencer keep saying, yet knowing nothing.
He never claimed refterm was a fully working terminal ready to use. He said it was a renderer. The entire point of refterm was:
<casey> Windows Terminal is slow at rendering things
<microsoft> Yes, rendering is a hard problem worthy of a doctoral research project
<casey> No it's not, you literally just use a glyph atlas
<microsoft> You are naive
<casey> *writes refterm to demonstrate glyph atlas*
You keep complaining that it's not a fully working terminal. Casey, on the other hand, writes:
"These features are not designed to be comprehensive, since this is only meant to be a reference renderer, not a complete terminal."
Exactly. Therefore you cannot compare a renderers performance with some other that has a fully functional VT backend attached. The comparising result is meaningless. His renderer is good, but the VT throughput performance claims he makes are wrong. For that to be fair, he should not take shortcuts in functionality.
Thing about Casey's rants is that he's completely right though. This is obvious to pretty much anyone who isn't being disingenuous about it. And his writing takes on an admittedly aggressive tone because, frankly, we've been dealing with shitty software that keeps getting shittier written by self-aggrandizing people for a decade or so now. He tried being diplomatic in his issue report and he was shit on for it. That happens all the time.
> There's so many blog posts saying look, we're so smart because they're reimplementing something both Linux and macOS had for years
It doesn’t really read like that for me, more of a look at this cool thing we made with an undercurrent of fucking finally, and that seems entirely fair.
I've pointed out flaws to the dev team at MS they were pretty quick about acknowledging it and fixing the problem. There were some showstoppers in the media encoders early on when they were developing win10. The only thing they asked is that I prove the issue was real and as soon as I did they were on top of it.
They were also pretty quick and helpful with answering any question I had. I guess it depends on what team you get ahold of. Or, maybe how you ask the questions. I always try to be polite and patient, which is hard to do when you're in a time crunch.
They really were trying to push azure hard in a situation that didn't require it. It was odd at the time. I chalked it up to the team evangelizing a new feature that they knew was going to rake in money, so they were required to bring it up. I remember it was funny and a little annoying to have to keep saying no... now let's get back on topic.
But, they never insulted me. It was a very professional experience. Sad to hear this kind of thing is happening now.
Reading your post feels good, man. But your last sentence kind of bothers me. Why do you feel they are insulting you now? I think, if at all, someone else was, and kept doing, and still is, insulting them instead.
In the last paragraph I indicated that they never insulted me. The very last sentence is referring to the article and that I'm sad to hear that this is the case now for others. When I personally interacted with Microsoft that wasn't the situation I had at all. I had a good experience.
I think this goes both ways. As a developer at a big company, I've definitely been called dumb or obstinate on issue trackers for not prioritizing certain feature requests, or for not moving forward with a specific design despite explaining why that design is incompatible with other requirements.
You're a liar. The entire thread on github [1] shows that it is a technical discussion about the unacceptably slow performance of virtual terminal sequences in Windows. Solutions are kicked around and debated until a Microsoft person steps in and calls what is essentially a weekend fix a 'doctoral research project' and accuses Casey of being 'combative'. Casey is rightly annoyed by this, closes the bug report and goes on to implement a proof of concept showing his blazingly fast approach that did indeed take a weekend. He's a good programmer, a good communicator and doesn't suffer fools gladly. This blog post merely proves he was right all along.
All your talk of 'narcissistic injury' and his personal motivations for anything is pure projection and tells me a lot more about you than about him. And yes, the New York Times is no better than reading Twitter.
Not a liar. Casey was being combative, and still is. He keeps mobilizing his entire community against a small team because 1 GitHub issue didn't go the way he wanted. I can't believe this is still going on.
Yeah man, Casey just needs to leave poor Microsoft alone. Can't he see it's completely helpless against his good code and the people who follow him online?
I sometimes wonder if there are any adults on this site.
I don't believe Casey was being combative in the original thread, but ...
> And yes, the New York Times is no better than reading Twitter.
You're high as a kite if you believe that. Toking the dankest shit anyone's ever toked, long deep inhalations. You're dropping LSD you got from your friend's friend who you think is homeless and you're not sure what it's laced with. You're consuming craft psilocybin perfected in the lab to give the most detailed, most immersive hallucinations over hours and hours. You're babbling that you've seen God, that you know the secrets of the universe, that you're being bugged by the KGB, that your brother isn't really your brother but is an imposter who just looks and sounds exactly like your brother.
I'm a perfectly sane and sober individual, mrtranscendence. I think it's you who might need to ease up on the mind-altering stuff. Besides, I know the New York Times is a crock of shit because it's lied about me several times on its front page. So I have personal experience.
The original discussion. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way the Casey individual approaches it. At all. And yes it is simple. If your basic text terminal gets 30 FPS on modern hardware (or worse), you have started with a bad foundation. That is just gross.
The NYT commentary is a bit hilarious as you see that claim on here daily, repeatedly.
Your reply says it’s not rude it’s factual, and you defend it as factual by saying easy/hard is subjective with the skill of the developer (i.e. not factual), and you defend that it’s not rude by insulting the dev skills and calling them mediocre and laughable? And you don’t address the bit where he storms off in a huff when much less is said back to him?
Even if I agree it’s factually easy, walking up to someone and saying “walking is easy if you’re not a cripple, am I missing something?” is rude if the person is disabled and even more rude if they aren’t. “But they’re crippled! Fact!” doesn’t make it not-rude behaviour. He isn’t Linus Torvalds and even LT insulted devs on behalf of userland and good code and not just to make himself feel superior. And doesn’t have an eggshell thin skin.
> "Can you be more specific here about what you are talking about? While text output can be "hard", for some not particularly hard definition of "hard""
Insulting, dismissive, rude.
> "to me that a great deal of improvement could be made to the performance of the product if one were so inclined."
After someone said they'd been working on improving performance for 2 years and engaging in good faith with many detailed replies, someone who said they were dependent on changes in the OS which they couldn't make; to then insinuate that they just "weren't inclined" to make improvements is rude.
> "When we're at the stage when something that can be implemented in a weekend is described as "a doctoral research project", and then I am accused of "impugning the reader" for describing something as simple that is extremely simple, we're done. Consider the bug report closed."
Closing a bug report about performance which affects all users, an issue with many detailed comments from many people, because he's taken offense? And at something which was far less rude than the things he said to them in the same discussion? Prima-donna bullshit.
I like. Please submit a PR and make Windows Terminal as fast as refterm, trivially speaking, 2GB/s, no slower than the unoptimized refterm. Just to quote you: simple.
This is worse than it looks, since the person who wrote the blog post is the same person who insulted the dev, and is the same person who joined that dev's related discord under a pseudonym. [1]
The fact that he went unmentioned is pretty damning. I don't give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here -- this reeks of stealing credit under the guise of "open to feedback".
I’m against ganging up but I think adding a relevant comment to this thread won’t count as such.
Something the Microsoft API team did irked me slightly. One day the Microsoft 360 API (used for email) seemingly stopped working. After a whole week of troubleshooting and discussion with other devs around the planet I fixed the issue. New headers had to be included. It was a one line fix that stole a week of my life. The API had changed. I could have been ok with this but when I made a post on the repo explaining the fix and that I had no idea why it had even changed, instead of a thank you- a Microsoft API dev chimed in to say it was a trivial change and didn’t see what everyone was so upset about. Knowing no documentation had been updated and every system around the planet had been broken for probably a week that depended on it. No apology no gratitude. I can handle that. But an insult to say I was being impertinent and overblowing the importance.
Well I never forgot it, and eventually this stuff comes out. I hazard to say there are toxic dangerous people in every major company I just don’t understand why these people aren’t cautioned as soon as these public incidents happen it’s as if no one is really watching the behaviour in the irc channels or repos but are instead focusing on internal metrics which in my opinion don’t measure the devastation cause by these bad apples - who should atleast be checked up on.
So I've got to say that IMO, all of this seems pretty silly.
Casey does come across as pretty rude sometimes (saying this with respect, as I love Handmade Hero and his other work) and the Windows Terminal developers seems like they were a bit egotistical to just discount his idea as they did.
The blog post by Leonard H seems pretty tame. The "solution is trivial" comment I took as sarcasm (but I'm British so maybe I just assume everything is sarcasm :).
The only bit I found a little odd was about one of the developers joining a Discord server under a fake username. If that did happen, it seems like it was a bad idea.
Looks like Microsoft finally found someone good enough at terminal emulator development to fix the performance issues.
I can't shake the feeling that the original Github issue and the heated discussions in there were more Windows Terminal devs not wanting to admit their knowledge gap in this area than impracticality and complexity.
To be fair, the GitHub commenter in question had made this statement:
> It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated.
I think they deserved a better response from Microsoft, but I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct.
>most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated
He means exactly what he says. Notably, refterm had almost no optimization applied to it.[0] The massive performance increase was entirely due to non-pessimization.[1]
>refterm actually isn't very fast. Despite being several orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal, refterm is largely unoptimized and is much slower than it could be. It is nothing more than a straightforward implementation of a tile renderer, with a very simple cache to ensure that glyph generation only gets called when new glyphs are seen. It is all very, very simple. A more complex codebase that parsed Unicode and rendered glyphs itself would likely be much faster than refterm for many important metrics.[0]
If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently.
Blunt, hyperbolic statements like "massively overcomplicated" can feel like a shot across the bow when someone is talking about code you wrote. Kindness and gentleness go a long way in OSS.
> If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently.
I'm not the commenter you replied to, but no, I'm not my code, so I'm not going to get offended by someone criticising it. If someone does, it's on them.
There were a number of times in my career when someone called something I wrote overcomplicated, and I've never been even close to feeling any emotion about that fact at all. That remark always prompted me to hear carefully what they have to say about improving it. That's not a brag, just a certain level of emotional maturity.
People shouldn't be held responsible for every emotional reaction people have to their actions/words, because part of the responsibility for that rests on the person experiencing those emotions. In that case I don't think Casey said anything offensive, so if that made someone angry, they have themselves to blame for that.
> If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently.
I'd much prefer to-the-point feedback like that, even if it's somewhat vague. But maybe that's just my ability to swallow my pride/ego.
> Blunt, hyperbolic statements like "massively overcomplicated" can feel like a shot across the bow when someone is talking about code you wrote. Kindness and gentleness go a long way in OSS.
Casey's statements don't seem hyperbolic to me at all - they accurately reflect the performance and simplicity that the Windows Terminal developers were leaving on the table. We know this because Casey literally created refterm to prove his claims.
If anything, the developer's response in the initial GitHub issue, that optimizing the performance of a terminal requires "an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation", is more hyperbolic than anything Casey has said.
> If it was your code they were talking about, you may feel differently.
If you do anything out in public, you either develop a bit thicker skin or have a bad time. Frankly, if this bothers you at all that is indicative of a very fragile ego and not anyone's problem but yours. The rest of the world doesn't exist to coddle you and this cultural shift folks sometimes try to propose into that exact behaviour is unhealthy. We're adults, not children.
Honestly the vague reference is what turned me off. It’s not thing to point at a specific item and suggest different approach, but to simply say the whole thing is over complicated makes it seems deliberately vague to be inflammatory.
Context: they are making a terminal emulator. Something we've been doing for close to 60 years already.
At the time of this writing their repo has over 1400 open issues.
At the time of the "kerfuffle" their code couldn't output more than 10 (or was it 40?) characters per second to the screen on what is essentially a supercomputer. And they claimed it required "a doctoral research into performance" to make it better.
What other trivial improvements to their code also "require a doctoral research"?
Yes. Their code is definitely massively overcomplicated and I doubt they have any control over it any more.
They represent a trillion dollar enterprise, they have to consider how they they interact with their customers, behaving professionally when faced with criticism especially in a public forum shouldnt be something they need to be taught to do. Instead they acted like they were still in Middle school. If something like this happened at a company I worked for their manager would be having a word with them right now.
When you receive feedback like that, the appropriate response is: "A lot was learned while and since writing that code. Now that requirements and bottlenecks are more clear, it could surely be improved by doing a second pass. We might not get around to doing it soon, but PRs are welcome."
That kind of response is pretty much never an outright lie and will always make you look good.
Or... you could get defensive and turn it into a months-long saga of bile, half-assed apologies, and bad PR.
Perhaps you shouldn't wrap so much of your self-identity in code that you wrote for a paycheck. The correct response when given such a clear fix is to learn from this person, thank them, and move on.
To me this feels like a case of of the team feeling like it's "their code" and not "the company's code". I say this coming from someone who still struggles with that concept myself. It's really easy to get defensive when you can't divorce yourself from ownership.
They did, they implemented a crazy fast terminal renderer (that still supports advanced features like right-to-left languages in Unicode, etc.) from scratch in about 3,000 lines of code just to prove their point:
A closed PR would have been even more damning for Microsoft. Especially given that Casey could have provided apples-apples benchmark results - not, what amounts to, a micro-benchmark.
From my perspective, there are two reasons why someone would build an entire project instead of opening a PR:
* Merely to be able to point and it and say, "see? see? I was right!" How obnoxiously childish.
* Implementing his ideas into a mature/non-greenfields codebase wasn't in-fact "extremely simple."
"Irrespective of if they were correct". I disagree, if they were correct about something simple being massively overcomplicated that definitely warrants a response.
Anyone who knows anything about Casey Muratori knows that nice and humble are not usually words associated with him. That is not to say the devs he is calling out are in the right. Frankly, I just see a bunch of combative assholes arguing with each other.
Yeah, DHowett's and LHeckler's responses were kind of dickish, but Casey's own words, tone, and attitude aren't doing him any favors either.
Casey happens to be right on the technical issue in this case and people are just glossing over all the ways in which he was also wrong.
Now, personally, I believe it was the WT Team's responsibility to let it go as they're representatives of a larger organization and as such how they interact with people reflects back on the organization they work for.
"Happens to be right" is kind of misleading here. It's not like he "happened" to call tails on a coin flip or something.
Microsoft has a history of writing unreasonably shitty software, abstracting it to all fuck with ten thousand layers of manufactured complexity, and then claiming the problem itself is hard. Casey was like, no, the problem is actually trivial, and if you just write code in a straightforward way without pessimizing your own code, you can easily get something 100x faster than Windows Terminal. He even wrote refterm to prove it: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm
No one wants to be told that something they're working super hard on is actually trivial, and that all of their problems are basically self-created. There's no nice way to say that. It's basically saying, "stop doing 90% of the crap you're doing, and the problem solves itself." But it's true and it should be said.
and casey seemed very reasonable to me, possibly except maybe the last message. Apart from that, i don't really see an issue with the tone or attitude tbh.
The salt was primarily reserved for a series of followup videos he made, and twitter. You're right that his conduct on the issue itself was mostly fine.
Just because you don't think he was polite to some arbitrary standard does not make him wrong.
If people are this sensitive to "tone" and "tact" about technical matters, then we (as a community I guess) have much deeper issues then the technical matters themselves.
If you are looking for someone to do something for you, it's best to approach them in a way that won't make them upset with you. He didn't do that. His approach was obviously wrong as evidenced by the dust cloud it kicked up.
And your criticism of people who are "this sensitive to "tone" and "tact"" are equally applicable to Casey. He apparently didn't like the way the WT team talked to him. And it seems a lot of people in this very thread don't like the way the WT team is talking to everyone.
But you're not chastising Casey or everyone in this thread for being sensitive to tone and tact.
Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi!
This tweet misses the mark only a little bit; in a previous blog post, we apologized[1] pretty frankly to everyone involved in this discussion. I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have. In turn, Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology[2].
This blog post is matter-of-fact, but Casey is right. However, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?
Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.
Using a texture atlas was a great idea, and we didn't know about it until you told us. We should do better to credit you.
(Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look. It also originally contained "I get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah." As the message evolved, that became more and more out-of-place.)
This kind of tone really doesn't engender sympathy:
> We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.
> I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?
Your "apology" really is anything but. If anything you and your team come off as combative, thin skinned and hostile to outsiders. But, you do you bro.
This is Microsoft culture spilling into the real world. There were several times when I pointed out a fix for a flaw or problem we were suffering from and was mocked and told it’s a silly idea that I shouldn’t be wasting time on. Fast forward 1-3 months later and that same person is singing the praises for the same idea someone else “came up with”. Except it was me shopping my idea around. Seeing the tweet and the thread makes me realize this is systemic to MSFT as an org (who now is the champion and host for all major open source organizations)
Cut scene to me explaining my new product to a Google VP (hoping to get funding) who instead made a crappy copy and released it 6 months later. Don't meet your heroes.
This really is every org, even if someone starts lukewarm to an idea it can percolate, get established and then come back out again as a fresh opinion without any malice intended. It’s always fun to get your own ideas back almost verbatim.
Even in this case they seemingly "forgot" the idea that was told to them.
I don't doubt that this is a possibility, but there is also a possibility that they could've just stolen it.
Oh yeah people also steal other peoples ideas pretty regularly but I'd not automatically assume malice.
From this example the same feeling would be generated by someone else internally already working on the same idea without needing any prompting from anyone in the actual meeting. This can actually be quite common in games where people will give a lot of unsolicited design ideas as feedback or part of bug reports. There's going to be collisions there without anyone's ideas being copied or stolen without credit.
Recently former Microsoft here. This is the culture of one specific team. My prior role interfaced with both customers and product teams in Azure. Interactions were constructive and collaborative. There certainly were the occasional individuals that lacked interpersonal skills, it was the exception not the norm.
Yeah I get the feeling that the general "tone" around Microsoft is "making sarcasm your defining personality trait". Maybe that flies in Seattle, but in the world of silicon valley, we've moved past caveman-like sarcasm into the superior snark and passive-aggression personality traits.
yeah I get the feeling that people look for any reason to shit on Microsoft then do it with glee, without care about the human beings on the receiving end.
Oh that's definitely true, even moreso for shitting on the company itself. Well I haven't encountered many MS employees, so I'm mostly basing it on the two who have been replying here. Extremely unscientific and probably wrong, but I couldn't help but dogpile.
> We admit this feature began with a kerfuffle we caused in the summer of 2021. When confronted with being told our rendering pipeline had terrible performance, we turned inward. We relied on our existing experiences and we leaned heavily on our partner teams’ work to conclude the DirectWrite general purpose renderer was the best fit for our product. We were wrong. As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch. We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes. Thank you for sticking with us. We strive to make this an experience we can all learn from to not only improve ourselves, but to improve our product and delight you all.
That is "combative, thin-skinned and hostile to outsiders"?
They say they caused it. They explain the cultural attitude that led to it. They plainly state they were wrong.
The "We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah" is responding to the typical outraged rants from immature people who think it's cool to leverage extreme levels of criticism at people and teams who work in large corporations.
>That is "combative, thin-skinned and hostile to outsiders"?
Yes. They reference an apology, didn't actually make one, and it was roughly a year after they were combative, thin skinned, and hostile to outsiders. So their words now don't negate the fact that they were actually those things.
And the original now-edited response here was itself still combative, so I don't have much reason to believe they've actually changed rather than just trying to put a nice public face on about it.
I don't see it as twisting the blade. He's calling them out for having insulted him and then making a half-hearted (at best) apology without giving proper credit (which the MS employee up the thread admitted they should have actually done.)
I dunno. I can read that as a ‘sorry’, but it kinda feels like ‘we know we were being assholes but we’ll be good from now, forgive us please’ kind of thing.
There’s too many fluffy words in that.
“We were dicks to the person (people) that pointed out a better way. We didn’t truly investigate the proposed solution at first, we acted combative,
and we were wrong.
We’ve now implemented the proposed solution in an experimental renderer that you can all use and we’ll try to do better from now.”
I don't know about others, but that does sound like a real apology to me. At least they plainly write that they were wrong and not only "sorry for how this was handled" or something similar. I'm really curious what more you could expect...
Specifically naming Casey and specifically apologizing for the specifics of how it unfolded. The fact that a team member went into Casey's Discord to harass him would be one example to apologize for.
> I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? ... We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.
Someone is upset and venting. This comment comes across to me as "Ugh we already said the right words. Their distress is so inconvenient to me, why isn't it stopping?"
EDIT: Typically in this community we denote when a comment has been edited to change a critical piece of the message...
I'm detecting very little genuine authentic empathy
A fake smile at least tells me they know that a different response would be unprofessional, rather than making the an unprofessional comment and not being self aware enough to realize it until it's pointed out.
Since this is not a professional place I think it's OK. I mean if Casey can rant then he should be able too. Of course I guess it doesn't look good and I'm fine with that.
Sure, this is an informal environment, but Casey is acting as an individual working on an issue in their own time. The MS employee above is acting as a defacto representative of MS whenever they speak about their work in public.
Casey is also responding to unprofessionalism initiated by MS. (Though admittedly the "they started it" defense isn't a great one)
Would you be empathetic to a jerk who keeps insulting you?
I don't get where the big issue is, a guy smugly makes a suggestion, the devs argue with it and point out that his tone isn't helping. The guy turns out to be right, the devs implement his suggestion. They don't have a history of thanking people by name so they make a vague attribution. Guy continues to be hostile against them, dev calls him out and now he's the asshole? Come on.
> They don't have a history of thanking people by name
That's... Not better?
EDIT: Actually, I thought of a way for that to be better, but it still doesn't make anything better here. If MS is used to working with b2b, where a customer comes in with a bug and MS fixes it and pushes the fix out, there it could be reasonable to not give credit; I don't condone it but it does match the culture there. The problem is that this very much does not translate to FOSS and/or public collaboration with individuals, where there very much is a culture of sharing credit.
MS: "In our defense, our reflexive response it to never give other people credit for their ideas, so you can see how it's not really our fault, it's just instinct."
> except to note that it was not an apology at all.
Ctrl-F there doesn't show a single "sorry" in the text. Or "Casey" for that matter.
Why is it so difficult to say: "Casey, we are sorry, you were right and we were mistaken.". Instead there is a nebulous ~extended a branch to community and hope to accept our apology~ (paraphrasing) without offering an apology in the first place.
1. Know what you did wrong: > When confronted with being told our rendering pipeline had terrible performance, we turned inward. [...] We were wrong.
2. Keep it simple, being careful not to start up a fight, a disagreement, or open up the situation for further discussion or recriminations. Subjective. You decide.
3. Be prepared to meet resistance. They are here meeting their resistance.
4. ...I hope you will accept my apology. > we hope that you will accept our apology
5. Be polite. Subjective. You decide.
6. Remind the person of all the fun times that the two of you had together. > experience we can all learn from to not only improve ourselves
7. Try not to smile. It's text. Sure.
8. In some situations a small gift may serve as a token of apology. > As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch.
9. Express yourself. > a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
10, 11 remain to be seen.
This is a good exhibit of an almost perfect apology. If you've been okay hearing "sorry" your entire life then I am afraid you've been lied to more often than not.
>This is a good exhibit of an almost perfect apology. If you've been okay hearing "sorry" your entire life then I am afraid you've been lied to more often than not.
If you specifically focus insults on an individual and call into question their competence and then make a vague statement that avoids actually saying you did something wrong ("We turned inwards), you have failed to do #1, which is arguably the most important step.
It was an awful attempt at an apology that could easily pass for something written by a politician. Directness is a virtue when it comes to apologies.
Counting check marked boxes on a wikihow list isn't a good way to measure the quality of an apology.
...except that they literally write "we were wrong" - so I'm not sure how you can interpret that as "avoiding to actually state they did something wrong"?
> Counting check marked boxes on a wikihow list isn't a good way to measure the quality of an apology.
If anything, it's a way. Suggest something better for your definition of "good", as it looks like you're making a speculative criticism for your own edification.
>Suggest something better for your definition of "good"
I already mentioned two things that would make it a "good" apology:
- Directly mentioning whom you are apologizing too. In some cases addressing a group might be appropriate but in this case it seems like he should have mentioned Casey.
- Directly mentioning what you did wrong instead of phrasing it in an intentionally vague way like "we turned inwards".
Apologies are simple in composition. The hard part is getting over our egos.
In this scenario it really isn't Microsoft who are demonstrating a bleeding ego.
Whatever you think about the apology, Microsoft made it without being called to do so. As an inconvenient data point, the apology (again, whatever you think about it) was omitted from the tweet. Casey blatantly rephrases the employee's words from "could be seen as impugning the reader" to "you are impugning the reader". This is all p-hacking convenient facts into one specific world view, and the fanbase is all too eager to echo it.
we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
If we’re being critical it’s missing the “we apologize” and skips to “hope you accept our apology” and then jumps down a “we’re only human” escape hatch.
It sounds like a big part of the issue here is that someone from the team joined Casey’s discord server pseudonymously after the drama, and more drama ensued.
If stuff got that personal, then I’m not shocked that an impersonal apology was not accepted. If I were to apologize in a situation like this, I’d probably have started by talking to Casey directly about the whole thing before posting in public.
> We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
If someone said that to me, I would say "oh ok, no problem dude" and move on with my life. Not even defending the microsoft guy, I have zero skin in the game and couldn't care less. but people being weirdly pedantic about which words do and do not constitute an apology just because the source is Evil Microsoft Guy.
Syntactically it's a reference to an apology. Semantically it sort of is, but the phraseology of indirect an apologies are common when the speaker wants to distance themselves from the wrongdoing. This tends to happen either from embarrassment or lack of sincerity.
In this case, the comment from an MS employee in this thread indicates a potential lack of sincerity. If not for that I'd probably give more benefit of the doubt.
But not to Casey. You dotted out who they apologized to and it was not the person they insulted, but to the "community".
> We were wrong. As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch. We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
There is a "we hope you (the community) accept the apology" - which apology ?! there wasn't one to begin with, because there is no "I/We apologize/are sorry" in the first place.
And the apology should go to the individual harmed, not to the "community"
I find the format of "I've done wrong; please accept my apology" to be common and sufficient; clearly we have different expectations though -- or they are getting unanticipated amount of pedantic and semantic scrutiny (which in turn will eliminate posts like this, we'll get more corpo-santized-PR, but somehow I don't think that'll make people happy either :).
But there's a big difference between saying that directly to a person and not. Addressing many people, or rather trying to and failing, without getting specific severely reduces the sincerity and effectiveness of the apology.
The apology focuses more on what they did wrong internally, without getting into enough specifics of how it affected the external parties. And, some very serious issues weren't even mentioned.
But this is not direct speech that they use - they use indirect speech referring to "the community" and "our" apology, trying to avoid associating personally with either the problem or the apology.
Then they come out and blame Casey for "not accepting the apology".
So in fact if they can't own the mistake, issue a direct apology, and act like adults, perhaps it's better to let the corpo PR speak in bland tones.
EDIT: the GP of this thread edited their post:
> Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake!
Except "but we hope you will accept our apology" is not an apology. If they'd written "but we hope you will accept our apologies", it would have been an overly formal apology. In the informal tone they are otherwise using, saying "sorry" would have been most appropriate.
That's not an apology, as written. You say you did something wrong and say "we hope that you will accept our apology", having not actually given one. Maybe English isn't your first language, and so you don't know the difference between "accept our apologies" (which is a formal/distant apology) and "accept our apology" (which refers to a previous apology).
Also, good apologies come with admission of fault and steps you'll take to make sure you don't make the same mistake again.
> We were wrong. As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch. We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
> We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.
This response shows how little you value users feedback (and how unafraid of them you are). Probably should leave this kind of thing to your developer relations team...
Yep, Naming the person and linking to the "kerfuffle" inline that you created would be minimum to consider that post an apology. Calling it a "kerfuffle" is odd phrasing that downplays the actions.
> I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved
It's only an apology in the manner of soulless corporate jargon then. A generic statement following a personal/directed insult does not count as an apology.
Edit: also the following
> (Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look.)
I think your comment and it's different iterations demonstrated very well how you guys (still) feel about this.
Aight, bud. When I was a kid, my parents taught me how to apologise.
first, I have to acknowledge what I did wrong. Then, I have to actually say the word ('sorry', if you don't know) to the person I wronged. finally, I need to offer some way forward. don't know how your team works, but I hope at least you (as a team) are mature enough to actually apologise in a clear cut manner.
They acknowledged what they did wrong. They said "we hope you accept our apology" which, according to what I was taught, is a replacement for "sorry." They offered the renderer as a gift I guess, and they did a mini post mortem and talked about what they learned. Really seems like you're reaching for straws here.
> Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team. Hi!
> Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology
> Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.
Your edited post starts of with the feeling that you are pissed at Casey, they are dunking on your team yet again. Then you go on to apologize to them.
Jesus fucking crist mate, no post would have been better than this.
>except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology
Well, it wasn't a real apology. It was "We hope you accept our apology
When you apologize, you say "I am sorry [insert other words of explantion]." Then you can say "We hope..."
What you did simply refers back to an apology that wasn't actually made. Considering that he was correct in saying the problem was simple, his tone was not actually combative, it accurately characterized the problem. So you belittled him & insulted him, and as you admitted you then failed to give credit where due to him & others. He has a career as well. Wouldn't it be nice for him to be able to pad his Vitae with a win on something like this?
Then your initial response he was, as you said, "not a good look". The edited post is better, but still not very good.
> Another day, another Casey post dunking on my team
Man, you have to take criticism better than that. Remember, we don't know anything about this other than the tweets plus these replies from you and your colleague here on HN. So the tweets honestly didn't seem to describe a particularly bad problem, the only thing that stood out to me was the fake-name-on-discord thing which is yet to be substantiated. I was willing to chalk it all up to an OSS contributor feeling ignored and ranting a little, but the feeling I have now is that there's some pettiness and bickering going both ways.
Wow, that's sure a weird way to post something on behalf of your company. Curious how long will it take to delete this message, seeing how it was written mostly in the heat of the moment.
Okay look, you've probably stopped reading comments at this point and have thrown your Hacker News password into the ocean. But just in case you haven't, here's how to fix this: Just go away. You're clearly not sorry at all, so the best thing you can do, for your own sake, is to stop trying to fool everyone into thinking that you're sorry. We're too smart for that. Just go radio silent and have someone else do PR for your team from now on. In a few years everyone will have forgotten about this incident, and you can start posting again.
Here is some extremely simple advice: If you are going to publicly lecture someone because of a technical opinion that hurt your feelings, you better yourself be a grandmaestro on the subject of tactfulness. That might work within your company if the company had a culture that includes radical candor, but these are public conversations with community members. Setting the merits of your point of view aside, your communication skills suck.
I'm impressed you could write this without the self-awareness to realize this only makes your team look worse.
The idea that vaguely saying sorry to an abstract community should resolve this entire issue is repulsive. Merely stating an apology does not thereby grant you forgiveness.
I had a neighbor who once tore up my yard doing construction. They apologized profusely, but outside of words never made any meaningful recompense. If I complain about the damage am I in the wrong simply because he utter some words of apology?
The tone here sounds like you're more annoyed that Casey was right and wish you could go back to feeling clever.
Have you thought about not managing your team in such a way as to engender hostility from the outside world? It would be a good start to credit people outside the team for their work improving your product, instead of trying to take credit for it yourself.
Writing an "apology" for taking credit for someone else's work, without naming the person who did the work, is just adding insult to injury. Actually making amends would involve giving credit, both in your apology and by adding their name to the top of the original announcement if you can still edit it.
Yeah, that's not an apology. That's something saying you did apologise. It doesn't look like you actually sent an apology, and you never mentioned Casey at all.
If this were a security vulnerability Casey would have gotten a mention (and a Bug Bounty). I guess Microsoft don't care about credit for other stuff.
In the future, when you think someone is being a fucking moron, never actually call them a fucking moron. Because if it turns out they weren't a fucking moron and you were wrong all along, you're going to look, well, like this.
The way to navigate the conversation would have been something closer to this: "I thought it was already doing this, but I'll check again, maybe we misread the doc. Also there's X, Y, and Z to consider that may make what you suggest harder than it seems on the surface".
That all being said, I kind of don't like anybody in this kerfluffle. I think your assessment of his character isn't terribly off the mark and now you're caught in a version of "the worst person you know actually has a point".
Now, we can sit here and discuss whether his approach engendered a response in kind or not, but at some point, someone has to be the duck and let the personal slide off their backs.
In short, be humble, and don't assume your own position is always correct, and leave room for doubt and criticism. Seek to find why someone else would consider your position wrong - it can't hurt because if you can find proof that your position is correct this way, it only strengthens your position, and if your position turns out to be wrong, you can learn and gain experience (while thanking the people who critisized you).
unfortunately, ego is what prevents this in a lot of people. Their self-worth is linked to being correct, and people pointing out that their foundational beliefs are wrong cannot be acknowledged.
> Using a texture atlas was a great idea, and we didn't know about it until you told us.
One is forced to wonder how, in an entire team working on a terminal emulator, no one thought to use the texture atlas. I mean, that's basically how the actual physical terminals the software is emulating worked in the first place. Then, when told about the obvious implementation, the reaction was not to slap one's forehead and say "Of course, it was so obvious!", but instead to tell a decades-experience game engine developer that they didn't understand how rendering works.
- You insisted this was a "doctoral research" (your words) and that he was "misguided" (Leonard's words)
- When it turned out he was right, you posted a non-apology (you didn't even name the person you were apologizing to)
- A year later Leonard who claimed it was so hard now writes a blog post that "solution is trivial" and was "suggested by a community member". Once again failing to acknowledge the person who gave you this trivial solution
> Please take into consideration that Casey's definition of the solution as "simple" can sound quite insulting as well.
It can sound insulting only to people who originally claimed that what Casey suggested requires "doctoral level research into performance". Only to then implement exactly what he suggested.
> If someone stated that something is "simple" with an overtone of "are you blind", instead of showing more humility
He is there trying to understand an issue, providing suggestions etc. And generally being baffled how a modern terminal on a modern machine can output text at something like 5 frames per second.
After that Windows Terminal team barges in with "what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation" to... only do exactly that later.
Read the thread, read the posts, read this reply... it would've been trivial to write a nice apology and move on, but instead you tripped over your own ego (twice). Well played! Should've just let it go when you had the chance.
> Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?
Good question why insult him for his use if you feel its appropriate language?
> As the message evolved, that became more and more out-of-place.
The wording didn't "became more" it was inappropriate from the start and instead of acknowledging this you and lhecker have tried walking back every excuse to downplay this. You both don't think it was out of place or inappropriate you are both just upset that you got called out on it.
"We admit this feature began with a kerfuffle we caused in the summer of 2021. When confronted with being told our rendering pipeline had terrible performance, we turned inward. We relied on our existing experiences and we leaned heavily on our partner teams’ work to conclude the DirectWrite general purpose renderer was the best fit for our product. We were wrong. As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch. We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes. Thank you for sticking with us. We strive to make this an experience we can all learn from to not only improve ourselves, but to improve our product and delight you all."
You have to scroll down a bit. Whether that's an apology or just "please accept our apology that isn't actually here," is debatable. An actual "We were wrong, we're sorry" would have been clearer.
I have no skin in the game, but I don't think the paragraph above meets the specification claimed by the GP: "we apologized[1] pretty frankly to Casey and everyone else involved in this discussion."
This does seem more like they're apologizing for being wrong and not apologizing for how they treated him. Like, if they were right, it would have been fine in their eyes to use that tone.
Maybe it's a non-native speaker thing, but "I hope you'll accept my apology." makes me think "Maybe I will, maybe I won't, depends on what apology you are going to make ... So where is it?"
It's halfway. In my book, MS did a half-assed, semi-asshole-style token apology. It was indirect enough that you need to know English quite well to see the actual apology.
> We were wrong. As such, we dedicate this experimental renderer to the community as an olive branch. We know we have so much more to learn, but we hope that you will accept our apology and understand we’re humans behind this product with a capability and willingness to learn from our past mistakes.
What more really needs to be said? Feels like one of those times where if everyone just sat around at a pub with a beer, everything would be resolved. Instead it's just little snide remarks back and forth. It's a shame, I really like Casey, and he was definitely right, but it's probably time to move on.
An actual apology. Jesus Christ, has no one at Microsoft ever apologized to a human being? I mean apologized, not passive-aggressively, condescendingly issued a generic apology line in the P.S. to an email on a completely different topic? It goes like this: heeeey, Casey, we're really sorry about <whatever we did> and we would like to apologize. We understand we were wrong to do it because <reasons>. This is not how we want to treat people and the fact that we let it happen was a mistake. I'm sorry we went through this but <here's what we plan to do so that we don't make the same mistake again with someone else>.
That is an apology. Once you say that, you're entitled to asking the community at large to accept it. But you can't say "please accept our apology" without issuing a damn apology. That's like saying "please accept our complimentary cake" without sending any cake!
I realize basic human decency may be a faux pas in large corporate settings but doesn't Microsoft employ at least one PR person who understands PR 101?
The quoted text is vague and non-directional, whereas the biting response to the GitHub issue screenshot posted in TFA are incredibly directed. I'm new to all of this, and so I dunno if the author was being catty and insulting when making their suggestions, but the responses posted certainly are.
I tell my kids this all the time. An apology has several parts:
1. In clear terms, admit fault. "I responded to a comment with some vitriol, and at the time that seemed okay but looking back that was insulting and rude, and not how I want to address our community members. This is true in any case, but doubly so when the original commenter turns out to have provided good advice that I was ignoring."
2. Express remorse. "I'm sorry. I regret letting my passions get the better of me and hope I didn't damage any relationships."
3. Offer to remediate. "As you can see, we're embarking on doing exactly the work that $AUTHOR suggested, and I'd like make sure they receive appropriate credit. If it helps, I'll link to the original thread and this apology."
3. Do better.
The quotes above are just examples off the top, I have no horse in this particular race, but I do have a lot of experience eating crow and having to apologize for being an ass to someone who later turned out to be right.
"I just don't know what else he's asking for here."
ASK HIM
We've created the most incredible communication platform in human history and no one actually talks to each other, everyone just tries to publicly snipe.
Any response to his claim that the author of the blogpost was talking about Windows Terminal in his Discord? The license of Casey’s project would be an issue if you guys used it.
> I'll admit that we didn't list him by name, but neither did we list the other handful of folks involved. We should have.
This week's blog post refers to them as a "community member" [of Microsoft]. Such a self aggrandizing term.
Someone reported a bug on github. Your team dismissed them and peppered them with deflective words to pretend that the team is making a safe space for employees that don't care at all.
> I get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.
Unironically, yes, UNLESS...
- You're willing to take a serious look in the mirror (and understand that the way you reacted to the situation was defensive, passive aggressive and inflammatory rather than direct, constructive and conciliatory)
- You assign credit where credit is due
- You do a good faith post-mortem and come up with some way to make sure this won't happen in the future
Now, if that happens, then obviously you should not be fired; if anything, you should be rewarded as handling difficult situations like this correctly tends to be the true test of one's capabilities as a professional. Unfortunately, it's high stakes, high rewards -- which also means high risks and consequences.
It's not easy to say "We made a mistake. Not only that, but there's no easy 1-shot fix to undo what went wrong. Let's sit down together and discuss, and we'll listen. Then, we'll go and think about that for a while and come back to you with where we align, where we differ; and so far as where we agree, where we think we can improve. What do you say?"
I'm all for firing these people for their disrespectful and unprofessional behavior but... being assholes and writing shitty software is on-brand for Microsoft. It'd be hypocritical of them to fire these people for this (although I guess hypocrisy is also on-brand for Microsoft, so who knows lol)
For what it's worth, I think it's commendable that you are engaging this externally no matter the tone, instead of the usual cowardly radio silence like most big cos. I find the this-is-not-actually-an-apology nitpicking disappointing; community should be encouraging this kind of conversation, not squashing it.
They are engaging externally because the issue has gained traction in the community. I also don't think people need to be grateful because they were blessed with a response.
Really cool apology! I wonder why you're choosing this hill to die on with this tone. Belligerence in the original post is what led to this and you're continuing with the same tone. You and your team do deserve to be dunked on
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
> "(Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look.)"
So you stole his idea and realized a one-liner dismissal was not a "good look" for yourself, so you wrote an "apology"? It's not about him, it's about saving yourself from the blowback. This and the events documented are the closest thing to a psychopathic programmer I've ever seen.
This is dishonest. The issue did go the way he wanted to, it's how the team responded to it that is the issue. And how is Casey the narcissist when the OP started a pure vent post and had to backtrack it, and who should you blame for being exhausted given that?
But I'm not angry, and I have to create my first account one way or another. Am I not allowed to create my first account because I want to respond to a contentious topic? Is you saying what you're saying not just selective bias? And do you have an actual counterpoint?
It's so ironic that people are criticizing this comment and the linked apology for their language but fail to see that the original issue was caused by Casey's language and not the actual technical details.
Thanks for your response; you're getting a lot of flack here, even repeated suggestions of ESL, by people who I feel have unreasonable expectation of perfection of others that I doubt they'd be able to fulfill 100% in every facet of their own life.
English is indeed not my first language, but I've lived in North America for 25 years and stakeholder communication is part of my job description. "I did something wrong; please accept my apologies" to me is boiler-plate standard, sufficient, acceptable way.
Your blog post goes way past that! It says "We caused the kerfuffle". Even "We were Wrong", explicitly! I for one understand your frustration and probably real question of "What else do you want from us - keel over and die?" - it's just that humanity is not an acceptable feature to show from people HN wants to hate on already.
That's OK though. Their reaction here will simply mean we'll get less sincere humane posts like yours, and more corporate-sanitized meaningless PR, which I'm sure will make those very same people much happier. And yes that's a pointed /s :-)
You're missing out on a lot of details. For instance, one of the team members went into Casey's discord to harass him. That was not apologized for in any way. Secondly, the apology doesn't mention Casey specifically, and it's arrogant to believe you can address everyone adequately without mentioning specific names with specific apologies for the exact errors.
The apology is written almost tactically to avoid dealing with specifics. When the OP additionally started this entire thread with anger, the idea that steps have been taken forward is pretty much dead.
Casey's next stream [1] will probably be very entertaining! Back when the original drama unfold I could very much empathize with his frustration. Let's not forget they told him that what he was suggesting was the work of a PHD when any game developer worth his grain of salt could do that very trivially.
> when any game developer worth his grain of salt could do that very trivially.
Just to note that Casey isn't any game developer, but one who is an expert on 2D UI rendering and popularized his own gui rendering type (probably more or less used in some older games but not articulated?): immediate mode rendering:
Sure but in this case it was grossly over-estimated compared to the under-estimated side. Casey did the implementation [1] to prove the point and also made explanatory videos [2] of it.
This is so insulting to Casey, he does his instructional videos for the world to see and educate a new generation of programmers about how to make a game completely from scratch. This isn't his full-time jobs. This isn't some streamer trying to gather new audience by brewing up drama.
Good for him. Sounds worthwhile. I'd be more inclined to watch him or recommend him based on that instead of learning of his existence by him yelling "I told you so!" in reaction to the kind of thing that happens every day in large software projects.
No, this is just a temp account because I mainly lurk HN. Given your previous tone, I wouldn't suggest accusing others of being part of an "angry mob".
Casey streams every day, usually with very few viewers. This drama fell into his lap, a perfect package-wrapped gift from the Microsoft team. What you're saying is like accusing NPR of profiting from a war of famine or something.
Fair point. He didn't need to deliberately generate the conflict. But he sure seems to be enjoying it. Instead of maybe moving on, or using the experience to build connections and strengthen relationships with the people he interacted with. Sounds like plenty of apologies have been sent his way. But accepting them isn't as much fun as yelling and throwing rocks. Also, temper tantrums get more attention.
I blame the disagreement on online communications. Can you imagine this conflict lasting this long if these guys had been talking about it in person over coffee? They would probably behave with much more restraint and respect for each other.
When you're a global company serving a billion plus users on every continent, you can't expect face-to-face discussions with everyone who reports a bug or makes a feature request. You need to be able to handle written feedback.
That's a downside of exclusive reliance on written communication, not of remote work. You can avoid this with a phone call or a "can we pair for a bit?" session as well.
After the Windows Terminal Teams' half-hearted attempt at an apology a few months ago I actually believed they might improve their behavior. I guess that may have been too optimistic.
Hi! I'm the person who wrote that blog post.
If you have any questions whatsoever, please let me know!
English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex.
I'd also like to mention ahead of time that DirectWrite/Direct2D is very fast at drawing western (Latin) text without coloring (>2000 FPS). In other words, in most situations Casey's suggestion doesn't help much, but it does address his termbench issue. At the time we assumed we were using the API incorrectly, after all Direct2D already had everything Casey suggested we should implement and it ran very fast outside of termbench. The new solution is largely identical to regular Direct2D with the only major difference being that ClearType/Grayscale gamma-correction is run on the GPU instead.
Casey's suggestion wasn't unique to me, as a significant number of other terminals do it exactly that way in OpenGl, something I was quite familiar with already. Originally I credited alacritty in the blog, because that's how I knew how to do it, but I removed it to keep the article as succinct as possible.
Update: I'm very sorry for publishing the blog post without giving proper credit where it is due, and it's been updated since. I'm sorry for my continued, overly defensive behavior.
Removing a credit or a reference is probably the worst way to add succintness to an article.
It's literally saying "the contributions of people whose work I based my work on is less important than the least useful sentence in describing my work".
Yeah, Leonard inadvertently gave away the game with that comment. Removing credit from a blogpost because you want it to be "succinct" is not justifiable. I think he's trying hard to pretend he didn't know any better; that excuse seems increasingly thin given the developments of this thread.
I'm not sure editing the article would be the proper thing to do at this point. Someone else suggested to edit in 1-2 weeks for possible future readers.
I can add back the sentence where I accredit Alacritty for the general, underlying algorithm/idea then, because that's where I heard about it first. There isn't really any other alternative, performant way to implement GPU-accelerated terminals, so I don't think hearing about it again from Casey changed my perception of what the only alternative to Direct2D is, in case it's fundamentally flawed for our purpose which it turned out to be.
Sometimes logic isn't enough. YOU caused a huge amount of anger among the community by being condescending, and insisting "I learned this from alacritty, not the person I was condescending towards" isn't going to make anyone less angry. I'm just telling it like it is here. Humility is, unfortunately, what you need, and you can't fake humility.
> I'm not sure editing the article would be the proper thing to do at this point. Someone else suggested to edit in 1-2 weeks for possible future readers.
There's nothing improper with adding "Edit: credit to the <name of the person> who suggested the solution. While the solution seems trivial, there are certain technical challenges to overcome".
> because that's where I heard about it first.
No. That's not where you heard it first. Otherwise you wouldn't have written "this needs doctoral research on performance" in the original issue.
Edit: I misattributed this quote, you didn't say it.
> I don't think hearing about it again from Casey
There's an actual, verifiable screenshot of your reaction to his words. That was not an "again".
The point of the waiting to edit suggestion is to avoid a bunch of reactionary edits during the most heated period. Immediately implementing every edit demanded of you when different people are demanding different edits all at once seems improper to me and waiting a short period seems a level headed approach. It also avoids the look of just trying to cover everything up the quickest way possible instead focusing on well thought out sincere reactions.
> No. That's not where you heard it first. Otherwise you wouldn't have written "this needs doctoral research on performance" in the original issue.
You've attributed the quote to the wrong person, it was not lhecker who said that.
> There's an actual, verifiable screenshot of your reaction to his words. That was not an "again".
There is nothing in lhecker's response that suggests he hadn't heard of the alternative. His comment argued it should all be able to handled in DirectWrite without using the alternative not that the alternative hadn't been thought of.
> You've attributed the quote to the wrong person, it was not lhecker who said that.
Ah, true. I definitely misattributed this statement. For this I apologize.
> His comment argued it should all be able to handled in DirectWrite without using the alternative not that the alternative hadn't been thought of.
His statement was "it isn't worth it" and "we ready doing it via the framework we're using" to only state, a year later, [1] "We actually took the same approach Casey suggested" while insisting that "it doesn't help much".
If he'd heard about this approach before and seen it in, say, Alacritty, he has a very shitty way of showing it.
I'm not sure I'm much of one for being able to untangle interpretations of chunks taken from comments spread over literal years but I think the distinction missing here is previously the WT team thought they could get away with using DirectWrite's built in approach to handle the precise issue. It was never that they didn't know there was an alternative to DirectWrite just they thought DirectWrite had a way to do it that would work just as well. They then found out this wasn't the case, completely backpedaled on which was the right architectural way to achieve the goals, and wrote this blog post about having implemented it the other way. This is what the full blogpost tries to detail the history of.
It might be a good olive branch to extend thanks to cmuratori for trying to push that it was the right architectural choice but it was never about being the source of the idea. In either case it probably is a good idea to credit the other terminals that had already proven the implementation can work prior to all of this even starting though.
The problem that the poster has is that his input is basically being dismissed.
He was too 'overconfident' with his 'opinion'. But it is exactly what has been implemented.
It's basically this scenario:
> "You don't understand, it's very very hard, next to impossible, to create a website where you can leave an email address. i think you should reread all the RFCs and a bunch of programming books. You have no right to say anything, WE are Microsoft, not you, so you have NOOOOOOOOOO idea"
> 1 year later: "We created a website where you can leave an email address. It was actually not that difficult. But look, WE are Microsoft, so let us explain how smart we were to figure it out".
That's not how I interpretted the github thread and blog post. It seemed like the MS team was saying "yes we know this is one way to solve it, but it's incredibly difficult", and one year later they post "we finally did it and this is how difficult it was". As the author of the blog post mentioned here, the sentence about how "trivial" it was, was actually sarcasm, and the rest of the blog post highlights the technical challenges
That's not how interpreted it.. there's way too much elitism in tech. And also aggregations about how easy or difficult things are.
"AI will solve things" -> they have no clue, and just trust it's gonna work itself.
"It's difficult to add a field to that form, it'll take 2 weeks" -> usually bs.
I read the thread, and I fully agree that it should be a weekend work. So yeah, it's just other devs mismanaging their time, and therefore saying that things take way longer.
The issue created 2 days afterwards (https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10461) starts with the previously suggested solution which didn't make any sense because the original post "didn't understand how DirectWrite works, and yadayadayada". The solution is as trivial as "but just optimize our render pass instead"
No sarcasm there.
The whole sarcasm is just covering up their own ass
1 day later implementation starts.
2 days after that it was implemented..
> Yep! And I'm entirely on it!
So eager to work on an issue created by himself instead of someone else!
> Terminal cannot turn away valuable performance work simply on ideological grounds.
The "Atlas-Engine" label hasn't been added to the original issue either.
It just stinks like people using politics to improve their HR performance review.
I find it weird that github user cmuratori is willing to write in so much detail about how to do it and how it's only a weekend of work, but doesn't submit a pull request themself. To me, it's rather easy to make requests and speculate about different approaches, but actually implementing the solution can be much more expensive.
Not to mention, as some of the other HackerNews threads mention [1], they very well could have already gotten cmuratori's idea from another person (in fact they say they already heard it from alacritty), and it could have already been an idea in consideration but they hadn't fully explored it yet because they chose a different path to try first. The github thread you linked seems to indicate the same thing. For cmuratori to just write a few github comments and then demand credit seems a bit much.
Also note that the blog post has been updated to mention cmuratori, although that could just be to appease the outcry.
It's pretty clear the disconnect here, there's one side that says "Do this optimization it's trivial" and the other side going "We have to write an entire text renderer that's far from trivial" and the result was this blogpost saying "Hey we didn't this thing and it was trivial! All we had to do was write an entire text renderer first". So in a straight forward sense yes, the concept is trivial, but in a more real sense it's not, since your straight forward idea is straight forward only once you've done something difficult.
okay. so. a bit offtopic, but ... how come it's 2022 and Microsoft, with all its glory and industry leading best practices and trillions of microdollars of Azure-colored dollars valuation ... doesn't have a library for this? you know, the company that makes the thing, the suite that is used worldwide, underground, spacestationside, all the 365 days of the year.
I mean it's no wonder the introduction of the computer doesn't show up on the GDP charts when the industry is in fucking shambles and isn't even ashamed for it ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY&t=35m40s
1) When did this person insult him? Note that there was more than one microsoft person in that issue.
2) I don't get why so many people talk about this as if it were some horrible thing. I don't use my real name on discord the vast majority of the time, I don't see why you expect others to do so. The person in question admitted who they were when it was mentioned and later apologized for not stating it when they first joined.
3) I'm personally more mad about it not crediting the other terminals that have that kind of approach like wezterm, or whatever prior art they used.
My understanding is they thought DirectWrite did caching internally, which made the suggestion unnecessary, but it turned out that wasn't working quite as they thought it was. I didn't think the terminal people were combative at all until Casey himself was.
Ultimately, I think a big part of the outrage is just people assuming the worst interpretation of anything Microsoft.
I don't your name, pc86, is a real name, too. That's the life of them internet. So much about Pseudonym. So if already the very first statement is that questionable, how can I believe the rest you write had any truth?
That this may or may not pseudonymous is mostly a coincidence. I've talked about current (at the time) and past employers, I've posted my emails in comments and my profile before, my LinkedIn, used my first and last name separately, etc. This is not an anonymous profile by virtue of any effort on my part. I think just about every account - including my discord - is associated with my real identity and uses my real name.
The GP seems to use similar naming conventions for all their accounts. GitHub, HN, Twitter, are all "lhecker." It's a pretty standard naming convention - I'm pcopley on a ton of services. So I can see how it could raise an eyebrow when you get an aberration of that norm or habit or brand or whatever you want to call it. The simple (and honestly maybe even likely) explanation is just "it's not an anonymous account I just have a different username on discord." But if you're inclined to pick up a pitch fork every now and then it's easy to take that as some sort of nefarious act.
Besides what pc86 wrote: there’s a difference between ‘not a real name’ and ‘a fake name’. A dog is not a fake cat. Being a fake entails pretending to be the real thing, which ‘pc86’ - as should hopefully go without saying - is not.
Just don’t take anything personal. Being defensive / know best is in this industry everywhere at all levels and organizations.
Being humble in general is hard, being humble in code reviews is harder, being humble to Internet comments in any forum… sometimes impossible. Then repeat that with two super genius experts - eek.
You find everyone is usually trying their best if you ever have face to face (except server admins, they are stone-cold psychopaths, stay away).
Would bet you both are helpful and open minded at the end of the day.
Oh yeah, for sure. I can't tell you how much I regret being that defensive about something that benign. This was certainly a life lesson. I've apologized to Casey in person before (well, to my best ability) and I'll apologize again if given the opportunity to do so.
I just wish people wouldn't say I'm taking credit, when it's an old, widely used idea and when I spent such an incredible amount of time reading and understanding DirectWrite/Direct2D's code in order to ship this renderer in the state it is.
It's not that you were taking credit, or that you were somehow wrong, it's that you initially put down Casey's idea so vehemently and so publicly. I think the lesson is, if you're going to step into the public arena, be humble, or be very, very right.
Maybe you should post in that github thread pointing out to the people originally arguing with Casey that the solution is in fact trivial and that he was right all along. It sounds like you and he are both on the same side in this discussion.
This is great advice (except the server admin part :-) !!)
It's sometimes tough to dissociate the problem with the people involved. Hope this will have a positive resolution as most of the people seem to be experts at what they do.
Most people are just performing the narrative that they use to shape their life in front of you (and the rest of the world). When someone comes at you overwhelmed with a disempowering emotion (e.g. locked up by anger, envy, snark, etc), how they behave has very little to do with who you are or what you did.
The first time this really hit home with me was when I was dating a girl who laughed at inappropriate times (e.g. it was extremely amusing to her how much my ski boots would squish my feet the first few days of the season). It was only after I broke up with her (for unrelated reasons) and saw her go through her own struggles that I learned that her family of origin was horrible and there was no one to comfort her when she would get hurt. Laughing was her way of dealing with the emotions of physical injury because she didn't know how to soothe herself or others.
Anyone who has the misfortune of having a friend or family member get ensnarled by the Qovid / Trump / populist zeitgeist can see that most of these people have gone through immense emotional suffering (often involving betrayal by a government agency, big business, or spouse), and are just bereft of the self awareness to understand what is going on with their emotions.
So yes, don't take anything personal. It almost never is.
>You find everyone is usually trying their best if you ever have face to face (except server admins, they are stone-cold psychopaths, stay away).
The server admin is a reflection of the union of the community of devs, maintainers, designers of their hardware, and users/benefactors of their boxen.
If your server admin is a psychopath. You may want to take a hard look what goes into keeping their boxen ticking along smoothly, and the demands of those using it.
Sometimes you get to be a peaceful, serene shepherd.
Sometimes, you're trying to keep that last critical link to reinforcements alive under siege from all threats, foreign and domestic, all at the same time.
You need to handle your PR better, dude. Whenever you speak out, always get a chance to acknowledge the help/ideas of others, unless they are your competitors. Make sure your work isn't understated though. Like "Turns out, many users complained about <...> and even a few shared patches (<link>, <link>). We even had a conversation with Mr. Smith suggesting <..>, so we finally took a good look at it and made a universal solution that covers all the bases".
It's not like you will get less credit for mentioning it - you still delivered the solution and that is what counts. But if you mention other people, it opens a few doors:
* They will like you and will be more likely to share further suggestions or code snippets (that will help you build your promotion package).
* The management will see you as a person who knows how to work with people, so you'll get a higher chance to get into the management track.
* Once you discuss a technical solution with somebody, and don't leave them in dust like an asshole, you get basic mutual trust. If you ever lose your job, they might gladly recommend you to their company, or vice versa.
If you don't mind a comment about your English, I'd suggest that what you wrote seems like it's better described as "tongue in cheek" than "sarcastic". "Sarcastic" can have connotations of meanness or snarkiness whereas "tongue in cheek" suggests good-natured joking, which seems to match the tone of the original post better.
> English is not my native language and "The solution is trivial" was meant sarcastic. The solution isn't trivial at all, nor is it complete, because solving the corner cases is complex.
I think it's really difficult to convey sarcasm well in text, and what seems obvious to you as a writer might not come across as sarcasm to readers. I certainly didn't understand that as sarcastic right away.
It might be better to address it directly and in a friendly way, like this:
> Like I did, you might be wondering right now why we don't just create our own, much larger lookup table and wrap it around Direct2D. Well, we can’t just tell Direct2D to use our custom cache [...]
Thank you for your suggestion! I believe I can't just edit the article now, since that would be disingenuous, but I'll try to avoid sarcasm in the future and use something like you suggested instead.
You could edit the article in a week or two, once things are calmer (maybe leave the original text in crossed-out form, or a link to the original via archive.org); it might help future readers who don't get there via this controversy.
Perhaps worth considering is that sarcasm doesn't transmit easily over text, and certainly not in contexts where it's not expected. If you want to be clear about it, a common convention is to write /s after your sarcastic statement.
It might also help to acknowledge that Casey's feedback and the interaction with them was constructive and instrumental to this improvement being considered and deployed, even if the team ultimately took another approach than the one that Casey suggested.
We actually took the same approach Casey suggested, at least when it comes to the drawing part which is what this is about. A lot of terminals implement it that way. We have a long way ahead of us to improve the performance of our text ingestion now though.
I'm not sure what role Casey's feedback had in this being considered for implementation. His original termbench tool was _incredibly_ valuable for sure, but I'm not sure later discussions changed the outcome of that. If we had figured out a way to solve the issue while we continue using Direct2D, we would've definitely sticked with Direct2D. Since there was no solution, there was only one other way to solve it and it's a way that has many other terminals already do it.
It’s a good idea to have a native-English-speaking editor (and sometimes more than one!) — ideally one who has full situational context — review draft blog posts before they are published, and this is a good example of why. Doubly so if you’re representing a big company.
Just going to add that referring to someone as a community member [of Microsoft] is such a self aggrandizing term for "someone reported it on the project's github issues page"
> Casey's suggestion wasn't unique to me, as a significant number of other terminals do it exactly that way in OpenGl, something I was quite familiar with already.
In your reply to Casey you made it sound like you where unaware when you say things like "I'm somewhat surprised that other accelerated terminals aren't already doing this" is OpenGL not accelerated? What am I missing here?
You got the wrong person, I didn't write that. Once it became obvious that it's the only way to solve the issue and that a different use of Direct2D can't help with this, I implemented a prototype based on my pre-existing knowledge and explained how it works to the team.
The names of the commenters may not be highlighted but they are still in the images. If "the first, insulting, reply" refers to "of the screenshots on Twitter" lhecker would be the second to reply.
Sarcasm is usually very easy to spot if you assume the best in people. If you let cynicism take over then things said can be interpreted in the worst possible light.
There's no need for highly opinionated discussions. Differences in opinion should be a trigger to find a common understanding, it shouldn't result in defensive behavior. Everyone's just a person trying to help.
Seems like the solution was to convert a true type font to a bitmap font, I remember doing the same thing for my video games when I was a kid in the 90s its good to know I wasn't the only one that found it challenging.
Caseys suggestions were pointless because Direct2D is fast at drawing western text without coloring? Didn't casey open an issue because the terminal was slow with coloring?
It seems like you managed to optimize Direct2D with your 'glyph cache' pixel shader but that doesn't mean caseys suggestions were pointless.
I didn't say they were pointless anywhere. They were anything but.
I did say however: If we had figured out a way to solve the issue while we continue using Direct2D, we would've definitely sticked with Direct2D. Since there was no solution, there was only one other way to solve it and it's a way that has many other terminals already do it.
You didn't use that word, but you did say "in most situations Casey's suggestion doesn't help much", which is probably what your parent post was responding to.
Despite the apologies you or your team have given, you continue to denigrate and downplay. First, Casey's suggestion "doesn't help much"; then, "Casey's suggestion wasn't unique". And so on. Casey suggested a solution, spent time proving it was easy, and you even used the suggested solution to good effect, and you're still trying to downplay Casey's contribution or involvement.
If Casey hadn't kept pushing, it's doubtful you'd even have gotten around to doing this, so some actual credit is warranted, along with perhaps a real apology.
Baffles me that people think sarcasm is a good way to communicate on the internet. You are begging to be misunderstood, either accidentally, or maliciously.
It's not really sarcasm (which usually connotes contempt or mockery, which I suspect the blog writer didn't intend). It's irony, and irony has been widely used in written communication since we stopped using writing exclusively for record-keeping.
It can and does work on the internet, provided (i) the writer is prepared to accept that a subset of readers won't "get it"; they'll fail to pick up on contextual clues that signal irony and (ii) you have to be a good enough writer to include those clues so that at least your intended audience knows not to take it literally.
EDIT: To clarify, in this case, irony was a bad idea because it was badly executed. The context that would allow readers to interpret "The solution is trivial" as ironic was only available to people who were privy to the original conversation, while the blog post was intended to be read and understood by a much wider audience who lacked that context.
Irony should not really be used in technical communication at all, though. The goal of technical writing is that as many readers "get it" as possible. Therefore, any rhetorical technique for which you have to "accept that a subset of readers won't 'get it'" is a bad technique for technical writing.
Writing is hard. Writing for a multi-lingual audience is harder. Writing in your non-native tongue is harder still.
> EDIT: To clarify, in this case, irony was a bad idea because it was badly executed.
That was exactly how I felt reading it. Had it been the last statement of a long and complex explanation, it would have landed differently and warranted a chuckle.
A number of creators, especially cosplayers, have recently shared posts encouraging their use.
I don't know how widespread it is, because TikTok and IG both tend to feed you content relating to your niches. So I may be seeing a disproportionate number.
(I had to Google what NBH was about, it means "This isn't aimed at anyone specific reading this".)
Gosh this seems like a brilliantly effective next step in the TikTokers’ campaign to drain life of any and all colour and playfulness and spontaneity. As an autistic person, I’d cast my vote for ‘occasionally misunderstand things’ over ‘have ridiculous sarcasm warnings on everything so that you can’t actually be sarcastic, or anything but grimly solemn and annoyingly earnest 100% of the time’.
(Also, Lord save me from people who call themselves “allies”. It’s just called being a normal decent person, but that doesn’t let you brag about it or use autistic/black/etc people as fashion accessories, so I s’pose that’s off the menu..)
I think it's about writing for one's audience, and being inclusive.
I've got autistic friends who struggle with open questions. They strongly dislike opening greetings without quickly taking the conversation somewhere.
They often miss stuff that's implied in conversation. It has to be explicitly stated.
They suck at gauging tone and intent in written language. They worry about the feelings and opinions of others. It can be upsetting and stressful for them.
But they're smart, capable, fun, artistic and creative, kind, thoughtful and inclusive.
They are certainly not lacking in colour or playfulness. (Possibly lacking in spontaneity to a degree, but I don't think that's a deal-breaker.)
And it's great that you're comfortable enough with misunderstanding things for it to be preferable to an alternative.
I choose to change my language to suit them. If using /s and /nbh or whatever helps them to correctly parse what I write, and assists in me communicating, why would I choose not to do that?
When using spoken language, I denote sarcasm through tone of voice. Does that render it pointless? If not, why would using /s?
> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
The internet lends itself to immediate/premature responses. People read headlines without reading the article. People stop reading in the middle as soon as they feel they have something to say about what they’ve read. People don’t take the time to think about what they’ve read before responding.
And that’s before you even get to the internet’s tendency to read what’s written in the least generous way possible in order to score internet points with a response to something wholly divorced from what the author intended.
Now add sarcasm to that mix. Pulling sarcasm out of context often leads to quick-draw responses to the exact opposite of the point the author was making.
If you limit your communication online to a subset that cannot be willingly or unwillingly misunderstood, then you will say nothing at all. People's capacity to misread is infinite.
"It's generally not good communication to use intentionally ambiguous language" != "It's only good communication if you literally can't misunderstand it"
Re-read what you just wrote and break down what you said:
> Baffles me that people think sarcasm is a good way to communicate on the internet.
The subtext here is that the idea of using sarcasm on the internet should be obviously stupid to everyone, thus you're stating anyone who exercises it is stupid. That or you're clearly smarter than everyone else.
> You are begging to be misunderstood, either accidentally, or maliciously.
Thus, if you're using sarcasm you're either stupid or evil.
Was your intent to insult people?
Sarcasm and irony can be effective means of communication, the same as exaggeration. Communication is hard and people posting on the internet don't() invest much thought most of the time.
What I haven't understood yet is what significance "The solution is trivial" being sarcastic or not has on the article itself. I understand it's reflecting poorly on it due to what I said earlier, but is there something that makes the article harder to understand due to this?
(I realize this question sounds a bit rude, but I'm genuinely curious and I don't know how else to phrase it.)
Firstly, I think people are making a mountain out of a molehill. The article remains comprehensible on the whole. It’s a good article.
What is presumably meant is the following: sarcasm and irony require a lot of skill and nuance to get right, precisely because they can be understood as saying something along with its inverse. More often than not, a sarcastic written comment will divide the audience into people who understood it to say P and those who understood it to say !P. This is especially true when your audience is large, culturally diverse, and (on average) rather literal-minded.
But don’t beat yourself up too hard. It’s a good article by any measure, and even more so for someone who is not a native English speaker.
Thank you for being reasonable here. A lot of "feedbacks" saying that person should "avoid personal stuff" in technical articles are more likely showing their taste instead of actually work on how the writer could express better his irony. Which I understood reading the "trivial" not so trivial xD
> What I haven't understood >yet is what significance "The >solution is trivial" being >sarcastic or not has on the >article itself.
If there’s no significance either way it shouldn’t be part of the blog. It adds no value and takes away from your goal of being succinct which you stated in one of your responses.
General (well meaning) advice from a stranger:
1. Always leave personal feelings out of blogs, technical and professional communication - especially the broadcast type communication. We tend to think about a small number of people but a larger number of people without context will interpret things very differently.
2. Sarcasm, irony etc need context and sometimes are also differently perceived by people from different cultural backgrounds. Your goal is to represent your and your teams efforts while helping your users. Everything else will detract from it.
3. When faced with feedback take it gracefully even if it you disagree completely or it makes you mad. You don’t need to get defensive and explain ‘your side of the story’. It almost never goes well.
Also why the hell were there such rude responses in the community post in the first place? I’ve worked at Microsoft before and I’d have roasted my team if one of them responded in that disrespectful manner - even if the community member may have trivialized work.
I think there is a lot of overreacting here to your blog post. That’s just the final piece. What rubbed me the wrong way was how your colleague castigated this person in the issue. I know people can be rough around the edges. I know they can be blunt and sometimes rude. But I think as MSFT you have a duty to rise above that by not engaging in it.
In any event, this whole thing is blown out or proportion and doesn’t deserve 300+ comments let alone another from me.
"The solution is trivial: [possible solution]! Well, unfortunately, [problem with solution]."
The issue here isn't so much sarcasm than that "is" should be read as "seems" here. But I don't see any other idiomatic reading that is sincerely calling the solution trivial.
I for one caught on that the writing was analogous to, but more subtle than, "It sounds simple, you can just do blah, right?!; but actually you can't! So we had to do this complex thing to get it to work."
So yeah, as noted, sarcasm is a tricky tool in writing. While I enjoy it in technical writing often, it's definitely not as common on a company-associated blog post (for various good reasons).
My own takeway for myself is a reminder: be careful crafting snark/jokes/sarcasm. Length of the statement probably increases the chances of being misinterpreted.
It’s a bit silly to berate a customer for their use of ‘it’s easy’ and then use it yourself. ‘It was sarcastic’ and ‘it was a language issue’ are weak excuses.
It’s just poor form, why make an excuse in the first place? You can just say this was a mistake and try to be better next time.
if it was an open project the narrative would be "reaction to the suggestion was mixed; then it was adopted." Its not like Microsoft is a singular mind here; the poor slobs working there do not deserve to be tarred with all the sins of that name, and vice versa.
That said, why suggest anything to Microsoft? I no longer advocate for the dissolution of the company and torment of its employees with the fervor i used to, but they're still not deserving of engagement and assistance as if they were actual members of civil society.
The author of the blog post is the author of the second comment on GitHub. Also[1]:
> Afterward, the same dev also used a fake name to hang out on our discord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there.
Vice versa is fine and correct, however I have experienced a few open source Microsoft teams in the past couple of years with a similar opinion to issues and contributions who are clearly hiding behind the brand (and its direction), it also negatively effects my opinion of Microsoft.
1) 1980-2000 Microsoft was evil. I find 2022 Microsoft to be ahead of Google and Facebook on the ethics front, so YMMV. Microsoft doesn't do much antitrust anymore, is /more/ respectful of privacy than most of the tech industry, and by some measures, is the world's largest contributor to the open source collective. Tools like Visual Studio Code are pretty good too, and run on GNU/Linux.
2) Even with evil companies, contributing doesn't always mean helping evil. Companies are, as you pointed out, abstractions. I find much of what Facebook / Meta does to be particularly evil, but they have some very good, ethical projects I'd gladly work on or contribute to.
3) Even so, if an organization were evil, there are different tactics. Microsoft isn't going away. One can affect change from the outside or from the inside. In many cases, the best way to turn evil into good is to engage and contribute.
> Tools like Visual Studio Code are pretty good too, and run on GNU/Linux.
All of Microsoft's tools are full of "telemetry", which is something they've repeatedly proven to make more comprehensive and invasive as time goes on. That project is nothing but a vehicle to get those questionable practices on your machine.
> Even with evil companies, contributing doesn't always mean helping evil.
It does, because this project has their name associated with it. The better it becomes, the more impact they can have on society. For an evil company, this is more frequent and impactful opportunities to do the wrong thing.
> One can affect change from the outside or from the inside.
Large US corporations exist only to oppress and bully. There's no way to change that, from any side. It is better to operate as if they do not exist at all, where you can.
Pavlov (one of the other comments) has it right with the Overton window comment:
- Compared to ChromeOS or Android, Windows 11 is the ultimate in privacy.
- Compared to Google Docs, Office 365 is the ultimate in privacy
... and so on.
With Google's or Meta's surveillance infrastructure, if we get a Putin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or similar (and I'm by no means trying to equate those individuals), individuals who checked their data in will be !@#$%ed.
On the other hand, I don't feel like people are putting themselves in danger using Windows 11.
Do you have concrete examples on how you would consider Android and Docs worse in terms of privacy?
I'm trying to imagine how Google Docs could be worse than Microsoft Word stored in your One Drive, or Microsoft Word Online. Both services don't access your private word document unless required by law enforcement.
1) Android keeps a log of everywhere I've been. It randomly turns on Google Assistant and records my voice. There is a ton of telemetrics going to Google, and no way to know what it is.
2) Google Docs literally keeps a keystroke-by-keystroke log of everything I've ever typed into Google Docs. If you typed the n-word and erased it 3 seconds later, that's in your permanent record.
3) Google lies about what data it collects and stores. Your Google Export won't include things like #2. That's a violation of GDPR.
As a footnote, #3 came up when I had my GSuite account attacked by an insider. I couldn't do forensics without a security up-sell. I wanted to know what IPs had accessed my accounts, at what times, and what they did. That kind of auditability once one tier up -- if I switched away from the (at the time free) tier, permanently.
It’s not that Microsoft became less evil, but the Overton window of what’s acceptable for tech companies has been constantly translating towards evil.
In 1977 Bill Gates wrote a public letter saying that software piracy is wrong and developers should get paid; this was highly controversial at the time and launched the hackers-vs-MSFT dichotomy. A lot of people sincerely believed it’s evil to use copyright law to prevent anyone from making copies of software.
40+ years later, evil in the software industry is pretty much “willingly assists in genocide”. All other evil behaviors have been adopted and rehabilitated into a business growth narrative, helped along by Google’s gaslighting slogan “Don’t do evil” which led a generation to believe that anything Google is doing can’t be evil.
| software piracy is wrong and developers should get paid
... while at the same time stealing everything they could find. One of the most obvious examples was Bill Crowther's ADVENTURE, which Microsoft sold for multiple platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Adventure
Yeah, it's evil to take advantage of a copyright regime that authors like Crowther didn't really consider when releasing their code.
But it's more of a contract dispute between two parties. The scope is very narrow compared to some of the hair-raising practices of Google, Meta, Uber, Elon Musk, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other contemporary tech barons who reach billions of people.
I really hate when fellow devs say things are "simple" like Casey Muratori said in the first place. Nothing is simple in the software (and hardware) world! If something seems simple then most likely because smart people have written libraries for you that abstract the hard part away.
It also shows a certain arrogance to call a topic "simple", because it is supposed to show the audience that you are an incredible expert in the field.
the solution to the problem is simple and thus widely used in prior art. the person in question has written such a library (well, a reference implementation). the person in question is an expert in the field.
Maybe I’m nitpicking since it’s OSS, but sometimes it’s not even the code. From the outside it seems like a few lines of code but internally there’s a whole org and OKRs and what not.
Look at the settings menu, it looks like a setting menu from iOS, huge controls, everything is a list, endless scrolling
No wonder why they didn't know what they were doing
So that kind of behavior doesn't surprise me
What's even more surprising is it's the same for everything windows related, including windows 11, performance issues all over the place, nobody acknowledge it, and whenever they face criticism and complain, it's the ugly trolls!
Sometimes i feel like some managers doesn't want to give up their position and salary, so they surround themselves with tasteless people
Culture and hiring problems at microsoft, as usual, apple is being hit by the same issues these days, just like google and facebook
Lot of money to be made in these positions, it always attract the wrong people
This seems like pure drama to me. Does it really meet the bar for the HN front page? It doesn’t further this site’s mission to inspire intellectual curiosity.
I read through the Windows Terminal Github a lot, and have for a long time. It's a really interesting project to follow. I saw all these threads play out in real time. No, the Microsoft team was not perfect, back then or now, but it's not the witch hunt it's being made out to be here. DHowett, lhecker, zadjii, and probably some I'm forgetting readily admitted that multiple times on multiple Github threads with Dhowett even saying a literal "sorry" to Casey in name while accrediting the in progress work to his suggestions as early as November of last year despite the countless comments here about the blog posts in 2022 not being proper enough apologies because of the lack of these things. I also don't blame any of these folks for not wanting to link back to the GitHub comments of what amounts to flame wars on issues, some closed and some still open as they do actually care about making the performance better for more use cases, and instead leave them to be focused on the technical aspects now that they are finally steered in that position.
It's also worth noting there was a non-Microsoft individual out of China cmuratori et al had a lot of early communication issues with. They also apologized individually and ended up dropping out of contributing to the project (mostly performance related commits) last year due to some of the things said about them on GitHub and Twitter.
Imperfectness of the terminal committers aside, past and current, I don't think I've ever seen something approaching an apology for anything from cmuratori (though admittedly I don't follow anything outside Github as I'm just trying to follow the changes). I have seen the guy go out of his way to write an alternative demo terminal (licensed in a way the Microsoft folks can't even read it on GitHub if they wanted to) rather than actually try to help the project... and have folks like lhecker kindly responding to GitHub comments about it while he was working on making it happen in the real Windows Terminal codebase.
For all that still just want to gang up on the Windows Terminal team here because they can find something they did that wasn't perfect I'd just say they've handled it better than I think 95% of HN would have, better than I would have for sure, and you shouldn't give this troll more of a platform even if he was right about the technical approach in this case (though wrong about a lot of other things about it along the way). If you must talk about it why not instead focus on what better examples of handling this kind of situation have been instead of easy quips about why this didn't go as it should have? Or handling toxicity in online communication since it could easily apply to many of the comments here as well.
I will say, looking through the Windows Terminal GH repo, their whole page seems unnecessarily curt in tone:
>I built and ran the new Terminal, but it looks just like the old console
>Cause: You're launching the incorrect solution in Visual Studio.
I realize that comforting language isn't a priority for a lot of devs/documentation writers, but it's always good to keep in mind that we are dealing with other people reading our docs and we should take the time to care of each other with our language.
Eh? That's an FAQ, in the FAQ section, written in the style of an FAQ. The next line, which you didn't quote, has the solution. There's nothing wrong with it.
I dunno, that seems reasonable? It's very much to the point, and it would be better if it didn't lead with "You're [doing it wrong]" (I'd prefer to couch it with "This most likely occurs because [reason]"), but the written version seems fine.
The fact that, months later, this guy has still not let go of the self-perceived insult of someone else's software not meeting his own expectations of performance, is the very definition of being combative.
You don't get promotions from speeding up code, unfortunately. Nobody cares about something that's difficult to motivate to the program managers or demo.
Clearly some egos have been bruised, but that's the reality of open source. You aren't just dealing with pre-screened colleagues. Some higher management should step in to mediate and cool things off.
Absolutely unsurprised that the Windows Terminal team wasn't focused on this or didn't pull in, say, a rendering expert. Microsoft is very siloed.
Yeah, maybe there's more context I'm missing but the screenshotted comments don't seem particularly "insulting", and the blog post announcing that they're implementing the idea does credit Casey (just not by name).
I'd summarize this more as "Microsoft employees initially disagree with dev's idea, but eventually admit he was right."
Maybe, but my point is that "takes credit for their idea" is inaccurate. The post clearly says the idea came from "a community member"; not that they came up with it themselves.
It stands to reason that Microsoft, being a professional company, can better determine whether their writing is a great look or not. Unclear that your speculation is based on a higher degree of subject matter expertise.
A custom text renderer was exactly the trivial solution suggested and demonstrated to them when they claimed it was extremely hard and required a doctoral research.
I know nothing about this fight, let alone having a dog in it. But I'm getting downvoted for understanding English.
For my point it doesn't matter if they are in the wrong, if it was easier than they claim, if they are rude, etc. All I'm saying is that the complaint on Twitter is that they now called something "trivial" that they said wasn't simple or easy before. They clearly didn't do that.
They said the trivial idea was a larger lookup table and Direct2D. And then they said that unfortunately the trivial idea doesn’t work. So instead they had to write their own custom text renderer, which they never imply is trivial.
Its not trivial, but it is widely understood that fonts baked into GPU texture is the way to go for fast text rendering. The decision, if they care about performance, should have been trivial, their listed excuses are not valid.
Dear ImGUI also does this, and while font baking is not trivial, integrating ImGUI is almost.
To be honest, this tweet comes across as incredible unproductive behavior in an open source project. If I were the MSFT guys, I just wouldn't be responding to community members who behave like this.
Idk, personally I hardly think of DHowett's comment footer as insulting. Going through the Github thread the OP does come off as standoff-ish. It's just a reminder that being right is not always enough.
Same here, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I didn't see anything offensive in the discussion. It wasn't even a particularly productive discussion worth crediting OP for.
This whole interaction, on both sides, is childish and makes our entire profession look bad by reinforcing the stereotypes peoples have of us. I would avoid working with anyone involved in this.
> We certainly handled the original issue poorly, and we're trying to do better.
> We may not have taken the feedback seriously to begin with, but if it appears to have been completely dismissed then I am sorry.
> Personally I'd like to also welcome @ cmuratori and @ mmozeiko back to give any comments if they wish to do so. Of course it'd be entirely understandable if they don't.
> We‘re quite aware about the code and are extremely happy about what was created there. I mean it seriously: It sets a great goal for us to strive for.
Unfortunately the code is intentionally GPLv2 licensed and we‘ll honor this wish entirely. As such no one at Microsoft will ever look at either of the links.
Claims that they tried to communicate with Casey:
> I‘ve talked with the author before and they made it abundantly clear they don’t wish to ever speak with us again. They‘re entirely welcome to return and take part in this project‘s discourse of course… I‘d be delighted if that was the case!
We should have a linter for issue/PR comments that flag out sentences starting with “You are...”. The scope of the comments should be limited to the issue or code and must never extend to the person that bring it up.
I remember watching the casey youtube video on terminal performance. Inspiring! In generally I find his content quite refreshing. Sorry to see he got the cold shoulder after all his useful input
Recommendation to the MS team: instead of engaging, wait a couple of days and this will blow over. In these situations, if you engage, you will always lose.
Hmm, not sure what I'm doing wrong. It displays correctly in PowerShell. In Windows Terminal, it shows a blinking cursor instead of the box, and it makes it look like the cursor is one to the left of where it actually is
Not sure about the cursor being 1 to the left of where you'd expect but the box behaviour is something you need to specify in your .vimrc otherwise it'll use the default cursor for the terminal. Something like this may be what you're used to:
let &t_SI .= "\<Esc>[4 q"
let &t_EI .= "\<Esc>[2 q"
You probably also want set ttym=sgr if you want mouse interactions to be sent properly.
On the contrary, I'm surprised that this purely drama-driven non-technical post is surviving at all. I guess it has enough comments to break through the flags.
>That speaks more about the community than I want to believe, sadly.
You're the one passive-aggressively chiding me for not rehashing a technical conversation already discussed to death three for four rounds of refterm submissions ago.
I really wonder why OSS developers often have so big ego issues. I mean I get it, attribution is nice and all, but trying to force attribution for evey small idea you might have had in your life by trying to rally the public against "the evil corporate enemy"? Really? How low can you sink
There's keeping your head down and silently not giving attribution, and then there's publishing a blog post, boasting how smart you are, and merely mentioning that the idea came from "someone in the community".
Steps to reproduce:
1) Report a bug.
2) Get called dumb by developers at <BIG COMPANY>.
3) Demonstrate that it is, in fact, a bug with examples, test cases, and offer a potential fix/PR.
4) Hear that it’s being “handled internally”.
5) Wait for the blog post re-iterating what they called dumb, talking about how great the team is that fixed it, and see your demonstration code or test cases in the linked commit.
6) Why are you still here? No, you’re not going to be credited, this is going in my promotion packet.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen this over the past 20 years. Whenever I’m about to report a bug in a <BIG COMPANY> project I smile to my girlfriend and say “OK, I’m going to go get called dumb.”