Some background
When they're not busy designing pride flags the folx at Microsoft spend their time coding shitty software. Among these is the new Windows Terminal.
Casey Muratori is a programmer who, despite never releasing anything, clearly considers himself to be some kind of genius.
With that out of the way, here's the drama:
ACT 1: THE ISSUE
Frustrated with the slowness of Windows Terminal when printing colors, Casey submits a github issue. He even develops a benchmark application to accurately measure the speed.
After a bit of back and forth Casey starts to becomes frustrated:
Am I missing something? Why is all this stuff with "runs of characters" happening at all? Why would you ever need to separate the background from the foreground for performance reasons? 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.
He receives this legendary response:
I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. I am not aware of the body of work around performant GPU terminal emulation
Casey gets angry:
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.
After which a different Microsoft employee goes in on him:
You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope [what I linked] helps you understand that it's actually really darn hard.
Basically the whole team agrees that what is being asked of them is extremely difficult. While Casey is insistent that it's trivially simple.
So who is right? A team of senior engineers in a trillion dollar company or a reclusive game dev?
ACT 2: A WEEKEND PROJECT
Casey tweets the following:
I take back literally everything I said about Microsoft taking an interest in fixing their terminal.https://t.co/K9ojvy1liX
— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) June 17, 2021
And, over the following weekend, he implements from scratch a terminal that works in the way he proposed. It's ~100x faster than Windows Terminal:
(video timestamped to the part with the pretty colors, although the rest is fun too)
Twitter thread with some juicy questions from the audiance
Then this happens:
Afterward, the same dev [lhecker] also used a fake name to hang out on our groomercord 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.
— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022
ACT 3: MICROSOFT BENDS THE KNEE
Over the following months, there is an embarrassed silence from the Microsoft team. Eventually they release a blogpost basically admitting they were wrong, but don't mention Casey by name. Note that the person making the post is the one who snuck into Casey's groomercord.
Casey tweets:
When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided", being "somewhat combative" and am "impugning the reader". But a year later when they call the exact same thing "trivial", that is just, you know, them writing a blog post:https://t.co/AXrgZjvUPT pic.twitter.com/UTDrD9s0o6
— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022
And finally one of them makes a post on Hacker News seething about the whole thing. Quotes:
We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.-
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.-
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?
Truly a new low for Microsoft.
Want more nerd drama? See the previous post in this series.
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Imagine their share price if they put people like Casey in charge and not these dumbfricks who just want to coast.
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Wtf is ptochus
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windows is for straggots, real men use TempleOS
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Great post, all I can say.
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All this over.... colored text in terminals? Microsoft should've maintained a "white text only" policy, introducing non-white characters to the environment just creates new problems for no real gain
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Even better.
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Fantastic post yet my half-assed "effortposts" get the pin while they absolutely pale in comparison to posts like these.
I know you despise me but I can tell your coding skills and general coding knowledge is out of this world. Also, many of the top coding work places require incredibly contrieved recruitment processes so only certain kinds of codecel can actually pass. I'm too stubborn to believe that Lcrosoft has become like that too but geez, that post gave me a good introduction into this topic. I'll look into it tomorrow.
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Does L stand for learner? I keep seeing it everywhere.
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Nah, it is zoomer slang to indicate you are taking a loss / you're losing.
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I don't despise you at all
I have very little actual coding experience actually, but I appreciate the compliment
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Casey will act like a huge smug butthole and then act like a baby when a Dev claps back.
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carp unpinned it
oh well
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It was pinned for over a day!!!
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Technically it was a stack award
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Oh I just saw the context and it was repinned lol
There you go
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thanks
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but yea people saw it already
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i just read that you are in the closed jai beta, i'm jealous , drop source now, i want to try it out myself
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it's not that hard to get in nowdays. but you didn't hear it from me
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No one will ever use blow's hipster language. He's way over his head and will never get to releasing it.
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I just want Quake mode to work dawg why's this shit still got animation flicker a year and a half later
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Pin it
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ikr
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Shit like this is why I wish I were a codecel.
Every programmer I meet is basically r-slurred.
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Just learn to code
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So true king
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Most programmers are fricking horrendous.
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It's the insecurity inherent to a field that is constantly trying to automate itself out of existence. No one can actually keep up with the latest tech and best practices for more than a sliver of the tools available but you're really supposed to pretend you know what all of the nonsense jargon other programmers are spouting means to not embarrass them and the people in charge of hiring and managing developers can't tell where the software their devs write ends and other software begins. It's like being a scribe in a society where only like 5% of people are literate enough to do anything beyond spell their names.
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Software is the worst fricking field. Yeah, lots of, maybe even most programmers start out studying nonstop, more than 12 hours a day 7 days a week making sure they know the ins and outs of data structures and algorithms and pointers and so on. But inevitably they all reach a point where they're comfortable enough with their knowledge to stop challenging themselves and instead spend all day on groomercord or some online game, but they still think of themselves as that guy who works nonstop honing his craft, and they never spare an opportunity to remind you of it.
Any other industry I've worked in largely discourages this kind of chest puffing but programmers are so coddled (because they all pretend to be neurodivergent) none of them are used to being told to shut up, so this happens.
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In chemistry and pharma the grind never ends
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The key to success in life is admitting you are a dumbass and striving to improve yourself in the quest of not being a dumbass.
Note: You will never not be a dumbass.
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Yeah pretend. I don't doubt that there's a good chunk of programmers who are neurodivergent, but there are just way too many of them that are totally normal in every respect except they're really annoying and poorly socialized.
If you tell me the last handful of people producing quality software are neurodivergent I'll believe you. If you tell me the guy who spends more time sneeding on twitter than he does programming has autism because it says so in his bio I'll only wonder why he's avoiding coding in order to talk to people.
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I know what you mean, I've met these programmers IRL
They were still using "introverted" as a crutch though, not autism.
DAE feel crushing despair picking up the phone? the world is so wrong for me and built by extroverts
not wanting to speak up to the cashier and feeling unfathomable dread at small talk and seething about it later is normal actually. Introvert things.
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Yes. "Introvert" fell out of favor when people realized claiming to have some diagnosable disorder (whether it was actually diagnosed or not) could just compel people to take you seriously under threat of losing their jobs. Plus it lets them commit as many mistakes as they want and still keep their enormous egos intact.
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I've seen a dumb video once where someone in the tech sector describes "masking" at work for aspies and I was bewildered
This person was acting like they had to consciously create a mask (?) as an aspie so they could function at work.
.... and it was literally just "be professional" instead of an butthole egomaniac. They acted like their discovery of intentional professionalism was a unique and amazing thing. Do they think other people aren't trying to actively be professional?
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most programmers are dogshit from day one and dont' push themselves nor have the ability to improve beyond a certain amount anyway.
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Neat, I also made a terminal as a learning project as a teen in a few weekends.
I suppose if they stopped overcomplicating things then a lot of them would be out of jobs, though.
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“we're done” <- never doubt this kings
Because programing started being autist only club + autist ain’t shamed as in the past and have better copes + hardware it’s a downhill for IT world
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tfw devs could fit 70hrs of gameplay on 3x 700mb CD ROMs
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ps1 games were 70 hours of gameplay in 1/10 of a cd rom
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Optimization skills went nowhere, I don’t expect devs to create masterpieces like ff9, ff10,-2 and mgs2-4 but it’s just hilarious that bf1 mogs in a lot parameters bf2041 and new ghotam knights is worse than batman 2015
and such things will be more common since we crossed the line where devs could just ride on stronger hardware and ray tracing ain’t gonna save their lazy asses and art direction now plays stronger role
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As my black brother j cole would say
Stay humble kings
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With performance like that absolutely.
Good. A sperg in his mom's basement beat you, you should be.
It absolutely is, and it's completely acceptable for people to mock you for your initial opinion because without getting the answer from a sperg you would probably still have been creating and implementing shitty code.
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They need to take their Ls like good boys. It really sounds like they've learnt nothing.
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I think they're still using the old implementation by default. Didn't actually bother checking.
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No wonder they're all being replaced by currycels.
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currycels are causing this problem, they're incredibly useless
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False. Currycels being useless is big cope by mediocreautism because if currycels were actually as bad as claimed they wouldn't still be leading the industry 30 years in.
On the other hand I am a jeet and I would avoid giving a boss position to 98% of jeets if I can actively help it. The other 2% are kosher though.
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Currycels per-capita are terrible, but there are enough of them and they work for so little that you can just throw bodies at the problem until you find a mega-autist who figures it out.
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Currycels are somehow even worse and a extremely nepotistic to top it all off. Sometimes you'll get lucky and work with a good one or two but usually you're dealing with incompetence compounded by a pseudo-english that they all seem to have agreed on.
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The funny thing is that management is usually not aware of this and due to stereotypes think that theyre all tech savants.
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There's a cultural trick to understand.
generally give the answer they think you want to hear, not the truth. Makes it difficult to rely on them.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes" (actually "No")
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What? Large company fired all the talent and all the inefficient, 1000 degrees programmer remained?
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On one hand, I want to punch Casey in the face for conflating greenfield hobby development with having to manage a global ecosystem of legacy enterprise code built up over literal decades. On the other hand, I am intimately familiar with the bureaucratic and corporate bullshit that leads to dev teams throwing up their hands in resignation when having to confront structural code issues.
A bit of wisdom to all you RDramatards: there is far more than meets the eye with this shit. However, Casey's frustration with institutional cruft throughout the entire software industry is still rooted in reality.
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This is literally a greenfield project they fricked up from the get go
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It's not greenfield, it's a replacement for Windows Console.
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I've never been in that position personally but the whole point of Windows Terminal is to make something new (while keeping cmd.exe for legacy stuff). Shouldn't they be fighting tooth and nail to use as little legacy code as possible and build something actually good?
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I actually didn't know this was a new product called "Windows Terminal". I thought it was something like a PowerShell product support team. However, it is still built on WinAPI, just as Windows Console was (the program it is replacing). My gut tells me this is was an issue with
virtualizationemulation, which is far more advanced than "lol diversity hires fricked up".Jump in the discussion.
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It's not about virtualization friend
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Casey was complaining about performance of the new terminal.
VirtualizationEmulation is what sits between Win32 and this new terminal.Edit: Nm, I read that it has its own rendering backend so the performance issues probably have to do with that.
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I opened this fully expecting Johnathan Blow's windows lib finder
https://gist.github.com/tonetheman/522b623d00e64cb5feda5d68252fa68a
I would say that I'm shocked that they got totally BTFO by another game dev that barely releases games, but I'm honestly not.
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The trillion dollar companies fear the productivity of the lone autist
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Excellent post thanks frick m$
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I have never seen anything from Microsoft or 90% of currently employed Microsoft engineers that would lead me to believe Casey was wrong about his claims for a second. The amount of simple fricking bugs I've submitted and others I've watched over the years that sit unfixed for some upwards of a decade at this point is embarrassing. Good thing all of our first world governments will be beholden to them for the next century once they've finished porting all our infrastructure over to Azure. Microsoft software maintainers give the Gnome team a run for the stubbornly incorrect autism award.
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Become a bug bounty hunter and get that bag king
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