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When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

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Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#211

Post by Arwill »

jtbayly wrote: post #15
tubs wrote: post #5

Pretty sure the "trivial" in the blog post is sarcastic, or at least slightly self depracating.

The "trivial" solution doesn't work. And they thus had to do the non -trivial thing and write their own custom text renderer. If I'm right in my reading, the author of the tweet is wrong to complain about them saying it's "trivial," because they never did.

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.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#212

Post by lhecker »

gldnspud wrote: post #172
lhecker wrote: post #139

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 (>200…

Perhaps leave sarcasm out of technical blog posts, or add a footnote to indicate sarcasm? I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic and it seems others couldn't as well. I only found out through this comment. Text is the worst medium for sarcasm since sarcasm is often signaled by vocal inflection or body language, neither of which are present in your post.

I'll try to avoid sarcasm in the future.

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.)

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#213

Post by ineedasername »

RL_Quine wrote: post #100
mellosouls wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Seems pretty sincere and decent to me.

Nah, this is the pestilent child response when they are wrangled into giving a "sincere" apology.

It's at least a small step up from "We're sorry if you feel bad but..."

I'd rate it 4 out of 10 on the NOTSORS scale [1]

[1] No Apology to Sincere Apology Rating Scale™

And I wouldn't even be so hard about them if their initial now-edited reply in this thread wasn't also combative & demeaning.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#214

Post by rob74 »

chevill wrote: post #156
zamalek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Genuine-Apology 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 t…

>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 impor…

...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"?

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#215

Post by ergocoder »

lhecker wrote: post #139

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 (>200…

Your team needs to get the story straight. The other person in your team indicated it wasn't sarcasm.

I couldn't imagine how bad your team would treat team members with inferior authority when your team treat your own users like this.

Non native speaking skill is really no excuse here.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#216

Post by chevill »

Supermancho wrote: post #201
chevill wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 impor…

> It was an awful attempt at an apology > 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.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#217

Post by Aeolun »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #154
eric_b wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 t…

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.”

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#218

Post by gertlex »

gldnspud wrote: post #172
lhecker wrote: post #139

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 (>200…

Perhaps leave sarcasm out of technical blog posts, or add a footnote to indicate sarcasm? I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic and it seems others couldn't as well. I only found out through this comment. Text is the worst medium for sarcasm since sarcasm is often signaled by vocal inflection or body language, neither of which are present in your post.

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.

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#219

Post by rob74 »

10000truths wrote: post #31
lelandfe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct. Why not? I see nothing wrong with this sort of feedback. It's blunt, but constructive.

Ok, so a "community member" may be blunt, but woe to the M$ employee who dares to point that out (in very polite terms)...

Re: When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

#220

Post by colinmhayes »

lemper wrote: post #76
DHowett wrote: post #30

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 a…

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.
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