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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"

#171

Post by helpfulclippy »

mellosouls wrote: post #86
ddalex wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#172

Post by gldnspud »

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.

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

#173

Post by nickmancol »

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…

I think that Seinfeld already covered this situation https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A6nWTZF08LA

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

#174

Post by alxlaz »

doix wrote: post #42
TrueTom wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you have posted the wrong link because there isn't really an 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…

> What more really needs to be said?

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 and we would like to apologize. We understand we were wrong to do it because . 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 .

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?

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

#175

Post by Ajedi32 »

gjm11 wrote: post #120
Ajedi32 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I think "does credit Casey (just not by name)" is an oxymoron. You aren't crediting someone unless you actually, y'know, give them the credit.

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.

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

#176

Post by andai »

lelandfe wrote: post #28
jeroenhd wrote: post #13

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…

>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]

[0] - https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

[1] - Refterm Lecture Part 1 - Philosophies of Optimization - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoetgxecw8

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

#177

Post by dmitriid »

lelandfe wrote: post #50
10000truths wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#178

Post by eatonphil »

hkt wrote: post #167

I'm charmed and delighted that seemingly multiple microsoft employees are here giving non-apologies. Honestly people, just don't use the product. A putty session to a Linux box still beats anything Microsoft can offer.

I use Windows Terminal to SSH into my dev machines. I prefer it to other options on Windows including putty (which I really couldn't dislike more).

Different strokes for different folks. :)

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

#180

Post by jmspring »

grepfru_it wrote: post #80
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…

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 th…

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.
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