5 ms·

And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.

moffkalast 5y ago
Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.
- lkey 5y ago
  Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right? Ok, sarcasm off. This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers. That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.
    - lkey 5y ago
      Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level. More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Microsoft et all..
      - wtallis 5y ago
        "Abusive" is probably the the best one-word description of the way Microsoft and its software interacts with users. But I thing we'd agree it's a bit of a stretch to apply that to the case of a slightly slow terminal. However, it is absolutely fair to call it abusive when Microsoft tries to deny their problems or lie to their users that those problems are not Microsoft's fault and are something the users must simply put up with. It's also important to keep in mind the vast asymmetry here. When Microsoft deploys problematic software, even a relatively minor problem will be responsible for many man-hours of frustration and wasted time. Far more man-hours than are ruined when a few developers have bad things said about them online. One doesn't excuse the other, but you can't ignore one of the harms simply because it's more diffuse.
        lkey 5y ago
        The person that quit the project (and possibly the internet at large) wasn't a microsoft employee. In my mind, there are two asymmetries. * Microsoft v. Users and * Casey's network v. a 3-4 man open source team within microsoft I don't disagree that the former is abusive. However, it's my contention that this incident is primarily about the latter. Casey, rightly, already had some pent up rage about the former asymmetry as well. But it was a human manager/dev? within that small team, not Microsoft writ large, that got defensive about the software he was responsible for. I believe I'd feel embarrassed and defensive too if something I'd worked on turned out to be flawed in a painfully obvious way. I can understand avoiding the grim truth by denying that the problem has truly been solved by ~700 lines of C. Something else that I'll note here is that the vast majority of "Your software is too slow, Here's how to fix it, I could do it in a weekend, and by the way this whole problem space is actually super simple." tickets do not end up realizing software speedups. Without proper context, they just sounds patronizing, making the argument easier to dismiss.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    That said, there's only so much patience one can have...
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  See also: the blinking cursor in Visual Studio Code. Here's a thread on it with other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 They fixed it, but it was a sign of the times. Everything we've used over the decades had to be re-implemented for the web and stuff like Electron, and the people doing the implementing use such powerful machines that they don't even notice a simple blinking cursor devouring CPU or think about its impact on normal computers.
  - trulyme 5y ago
    This! Developers at MS (edit: and elsewhere) should be forced to use their brainwork on low-end machines at least two days a week. Or not - regardless of what MS employee claimed, Linux terminals performance is more than adequate. Edit: I am speaking of Linux, not WSL, of course.
dqpb 5y ago
condescending: having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority. In this case he also demonstrated his superiority with working code. Better to learn from it than to pout about it.
gnustop 5y ago
Where? He started completely neutral here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  I think the comment below in the github thread sums up the attitude of the developer. It's definitely not a "neutral" attitude. It's somewhat chip-on-shoulder and somewhat aggressive. > Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader. Some folks may be a little put off by your style here. I certainly am, but I am still trying to process exactly why that is. But by any reasonable reading, the guy wasn't "slandered".
  - moritonal 5y ago
    That exact case seem a very appropriate scenario for clarifying? Microsoft kept saying something was difficult, whilst Casey knew that it was not, so really he was being polite by first confirming that there wasn't something he'd overlooked?
    - rovolo 5y ago
      There's a difference between "inherently difficult" and "difficult to update this software package". My reading of this thread is that the MS devs are saying this will take them a lot of effort to implement in this app, not that the new implementation could be simpler than the existing implementation. Asking to rearchitect the application is an involved process which would take a lot of back-and-forth to explain the tradeoffs. The new architecture can be simple, but evaluating a new architecture and moving to it are not. There's a point at which you've moved from "fix this bug" or "evaluate this new component" to "justify the existing design" and "plan a re-architecture".
    - 5y ago

moffkalast 5y ago

Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.

lkey 5y ago
Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right? Ok, sarcasm off. This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
- wtallis 5y ago
  > People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers. That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.
  - lkey 5y ago
    Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level. More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Microsoft et all..
    - wtallis 5y ago
      "Abusive" is probably the the best one-word description of the way Microsoft and its software interacts with users. But I thing we'd agree it's a bit of a stretch to apply that to the case of a slightly slow terminal. However, it is absolutely fair to call it abusive when Microsoft tries to deny their problems or lie to their users that those problems are not Microsoft's fault and are something the users must simply put up with. It's also important to keep in mind the vast asymmetry here. When Microsoft deploys problematic software, even a relatively minor problem will be responsible for many man-hours of frustration and wasted time. Far more man-hours than are ruined when a few developers have bad things said about them online. One doesn't excuse the other, but you can't ignore one of the harms simply because it's more diffuse.
      - lkey 5y ago
        The person that quit the project (and possibly the internet at large) wasn't a microsoft employee. In my mind, there are two asymmetries. * Microsoft v. Users and * Casey's network v. a 3-4 man open source team within microsoft I don't disagree that the former is abusive. However, it's my contention that this incident is primarily about the latter. Casey, rightly, already had some pent up rage about the former asymmetry as well. But it was a human manager/dev? within that small team, not Microsoft writ large, that got defensive about the software he was responsible for. I believe I'd feel embarrassed and defensive too if something I'd worked on turned out to be flawed in a painfully obvious way. I can understand avoiding the grim truth by denying that the problem has truly been solved by ~700 lines of C. Something else that I'll note here is that the vast majority of "Your software is too slow, Here's how to fix it, I could do it in a weekend, and by the way this whole problem space is actually super simple." tickets do not end up realizing software speedups. Without proper context, they just sounds patronizing, making the argument easier to dismiss.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  That said, there's only so much patience one can have...
mkr-hn 5y ago
See also: the blinking cursor in Visual Studio Code. Here's a thread on it with other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014 They fixed it, but it was a sign of the times. Everything we've used over the decades had to be re-implemented for the web and stuff like Electron, and the people doing the implementing use such powerful machines that they don't even notice a simple blinking cursor devouring CPU or think about its impact on normal computers.
- trulyme 5y ago
  This! Developers at MS (edit: and elsewhere) should be forced to use their brainwork on low-end machines at least two days a week. Or not - regardless of what MS employee claimed, Linux terminals performance is more than adequate. Edit: I am speaking of Linux, not WSL, of course.

dqpb 5y ago

condescending: having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority. In this case he also demonstrated his superiority with working code. Better to learn from it than to pout about it.

gnustop 5y ago

Where? He started completely neutral here: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.

crispyambulance 5y ago
I think the comment below in the github thread sums up the attitude of the developer. It's definitely not a "neutral" attitude. It's somewhat chip-on-shoulder and somewhat aggressive. > Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader. Some folks may be a little put off by your style here. I certainly am, but I am still trying to process exactly why that is. But by any reasonable reading, the guy wasn't "slandered".
- moritonal 5y ago
  That exact case seem a very appropriate scenario for clarifying? Microsoft kept saying something was difficult, whilst Casey knew that it was not, so really he was being polite by first confirming that there wasn't something he'd overlooked?
  - rovolo 5y ago
    There's a difference between "inherently difficult" and "difficult to update this software package". My reading of this thread is that the MS devs are saying this will take them a lot of effort to implement in this app, not that the new implementation could be simpler than the existing implementation. Asking to rearchitect the application is an involved process which would take a lot of back-and-forth to explain the tradeoffs. The new architecture can be simple, but evaluating a new architecture and moving to it are not. There's a point at which you've moved from "fix this bug" or "evaluate this new component" to "justify the existing design" and "plan a re-architecture".
  - 5y ago