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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Snapshots:
designing pride flags:
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ghostarchive.org
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github issue:
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legendary response:
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different Microsoft employee:
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ghostarchive.org
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https://t.co/K9ojvy1liX:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
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June 17, 2021:
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ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Twitter thread announcing refterm with lots of juicy questions from the audiance:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
May 6, 2022:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
a blogpost:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://t.co/AXrgZjvUPT:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
pic.twitter.com/UTDrD9s0o6:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
May 6, 2022:
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ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
post on Hacker News:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg:
archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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@carpathianflorist @schizo You best pin this shit if you don't want your mother to die in her sleep tonight. and keep it pinned
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Carp and schizo share the same mother.
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@carpathianflorist @schizo i'm going to sleep now gn.
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lol the HN post was very
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As my black brother j cole would say
Stay humble kings
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Imagine having this person on your team and needing to work with him
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true but this is making the very bold assumption that everyone else on the team isn't exactly like this
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or worse
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Most emotionally regulated MicroSoft employee.
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Excellent post thanks frick m$
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They should hire him and give him money
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He would probably rather die than work there
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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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So true king
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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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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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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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In chemistry and pharma the grind never ends
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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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Just learn to code
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So, the real question is, out of all these soy-based nerds, which one is the nerdiest?
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Solo devs who code for fun will always be better than the lazy hacks who work for a big company and rely on that company's prestige, instead of their own merits, to elevate them.
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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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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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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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Lol. Lmao even.
Codecels are in for a rude awakening when management gets tired of bloatware
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Management doesn't even know what's bloatware anymore. For a regular person there is just too much going on to know which thing does what and it's all obfuscated behind unintelligble process/service names anyways.
As long as their PC can run google chrome and MS office they will be satisfied, never comprehending just how bad things really are.
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What a legend, they should hire the fricker. I'd hate my windows updates a lot less if their software didn't fricking suck
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Real ones use windows 10 ltsc
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fr fr
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Reminder that microsoft recenetly rolled out an update which forces an app called News & Interests into taskbar. The app hogs RAM and often causes a giant memory leak that, as of now, is still not fixed. It has been about 4 months since the update
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nooooo you have to download the updates for security
I would sooner get a virus, those actually run quietly and don’t hog all my performance
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Thankfully you can use debloaters to get rid of all this useless microsoft bullshit
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if i didn’t play games i’d have just thrown windows in the garbage two years ago. my favorite is the five different processes which verify each other in order to make sure you didn’t disable windows update
It is shocking when you boot up an operating system older than 2007 and see how static it is. Nothing gets done unless you want it to, even apps which have auto updaters generally only work at startup
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Win2K was the best windows OS, fight me
Built in tools for fricking everything and ran fine on a cartridge p2 with 128mb of RAM, shame about the gfx drivers but u cant win em all
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(not using pirated LTSC)
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Or you can just not use windows
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It's 90s malware but from MS
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I can't wait for windows cortona toolbars that gets auto installed on all browsers.
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There's an awful lot of this going on in the coding world.
You have individual coders and 3 man teams doing 20x more work, to a higher quality, than multiple full scrum teams at major orgs.
If you work for one of these slackoff orgs, you get very good at sounding smart to people who don't understand your job, but that's the only skill you're developing.
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I'd say that one guy with a deep knowledge of a code base is worth 10 smart but new devs.
Much of the time bugs arise from well-written code which was specced for a different set of parameters than the author was told to account for.
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For us it feels like most our bugs are introduced by people trying to staple on their features to an existing part of the codebase they don’t understand. There’s a few files I own and invariably some r-slur will shuffle shit around to introduce some analytics BS and I have to untangle their mess
Amazing to me that some people feel comfortable mucking with critical shit before they even have a mental model of how the program works
And yes, its mostly sexy Indian dudes
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Carp moment.
@Aevann confirm ^?
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What? Large company fired all the talent and all the inefficient, 1000 degrees programmer remained?
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The trillion dollar companies fear the productivity of the lone autist
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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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programers at the world's leading tech company consider making a UI outside of electron a "doctoral research project"
I am sneeding
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Fantastic stuff. One of the best posts here in months
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Means a lot coming from you
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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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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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ps1 games were 70 hours of gameplay in 1/10 of a cd rom
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