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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, DHowett's and LHeckler's responses were kind of dickish, but Casey's own words, tone, and attitude aren't doing him any favors either.

Casey happens to be right on the technical issue in this case and people are just glossing over all the ways in which he was also wrong.

Now, personally, I believe it was the WT Team's responsibility to let it go as they're representatives of a larger organization and as such how they interact with people reflects back on the organization they work for.

But yeah, no heroes in this story.

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"Happens to be right" is kind of misleading here. It's not like he "happened" to call tails on a coin flip or something.

Microsoft has a history of writing unreasonably shitty software, abstracting it to all fuck with ten thousand layers of manufactured complexity, and then claiming the problem itself is hard. Casey was like, no, the problem is actually trivial, and if you just write code in a straightforward way without pessimizing your own code, you can easily get something 100x faster than Windows Terminal. He even wrote refterm to prove it: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm

No one wants to be told that something they're working super hard on is actually trivial, and that all of their problems are basically self-created. There's no nice way to say that. It's basically saying, "stop doing 90% of the crap you're doing, and the problem solves itself." But it's true and it should be said.

I've read this github issue fully

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

and casey seemed very reasonable to me, possibly except maybe the last message. Apart from that, i don't really see an issue with the tone or attitude tbh.

The salt was primarily reserved for a series of followup videos he made, and twitter. You're right that his conduct on the issue itself was mostly fine.

Maybe Casey is an antihero?

Or a handmade hero?

How was Casey wrong?

Coming from someone who really likes the guy;

Casey's code game and logic game, quite strong.

His tact game and empathy game, not as strong.

Not trying to denigrate, just observing.

He was wrong in how he approached the team. Everyone lacks tact in this exchange.

Just because you don't think he was polite to some arbitrary standard does not make him wrong.

If people are this sensitive to "tone" and "tact" about technical matters, then we (as a community I guess) have much deeper issues then the technical matters themselves.

If you are looking for someone to do something for you, it's best to approach them in a way that won't make them upset with you. He didn't do that. His approach was obviously wrong as evidenced by the dust cloud it kicked up.

And your criticism of people who are "this sensitive to "tone" and "tact"" are equally applicable to Casey. He apparently didn't like the way the WT team talked to him. And it seems a lot of people in this very thread don't like the way the WT team is talking to everyone.

But you're not chastising Casey or everyone in this thread for being sensitive to tone and tact.

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