[styanax]

On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community.

It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa edits.

[dannersy]

I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.

[embedding-shape]

Never understood that either. If someone was wrong and bad, and now they're trying to do right and good, we need to celebrate that. Not just because that's awesome in itself, but also to give the opportunity and incentives for others in the future to do better.

If everyone is always bad regardless if they're trying to change, what incentives would they have from changing at all? It doesn't make any sense.

[Yizahi]

Well, it's not like it's a simple black and white situation, universally applicable to every debate in human history. Sometimes it is relatively better to be open-minded and able to change own opinion. Sometimes it is relatively better to keep pushing a point if it is rational and/or morally correct.

The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.

PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.

[acessoproibido]

Its a thing with (online) culture - no matter what you do you're going to ruffle some feathers.

If no one hates what you are doing chances are you're not doing anything really

[eviks]

There was no mind change, just a change in published words from a true expression of his mind into a more bland corporate speak

[giancarlostoro]

For me it depends heavily on context.

[jimbokun]

Some would say if you always stick to your guns and double down, you might wind up President.

[pessimizer]

> I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind.

Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that people have. When people become leaders because they are assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is always a certain segment that says that they're even more worthy to be a leader because they have the ability to change. They yell at the people who were always right that they are dogmatic and ask "why should people change their minds if they will be treated like this?"

If one can't see what's wrong with this toy scenario that I've strawmanned here, that's a problem. The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything. Now, we are expected to be proud of them because they are right, and make sure that they don't lose any status or position for admitting that. This becomes a new reason for the people who were previously attacking the people who were right to continue to attack the people who were right, who are also now officially dogmatic puritans whose problem is that they weren't being right correctly.

This is a social phenomenon, not a personality flaw in these leaders. People can be wrong and then right. People can not care either way and latch onto a trend for attention or profit, and follow it where it goes. I don't think either of these things are in and of themselves morally problematic. The problem is that there are people who are simply following individual personalities and repeating what they say, change their minds when that personality changes their mind, and whose primary aim is to attack anyone who is criticizing that personality. They don't really care about the issue in question (and usually don't know much about it), they're simply protecting that personality like a family member.

This, again, doesn't matter when the subject is stupid, like some aesthetic or consumer thing He used to hate the new Batman movies but now he says that he misunderstood them; who cares. But when the subject is a real life or death thing, or involves serious damage to people's lives and careers, it's poisonous when a vocal minority becomes dedicated to this personality worship.

It's so common that there now seems to be a pipeline of born-agains in front of everything, giving their opinion. Sir, you were a satanist until three years ago.

[oaiey]

Came here to write that. Let us recognize that he accepted our feedback and improved. This is good.

[aidenn0]

I think it's because when people do a 180 due to public pressure, it's hard to know to what degree they changed their mind and to what degree they are just lying about what is on their mind.

[kragen]

As I see it, someone who "listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride" would include a note at the end of the post about the edits. Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.

(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)

[bccdee]

> Admitting you were wrong requires not erasing the evidence of what you said.

I don't think there's really an obligation to announce to newcomers, "hey, an earlier version of this post was overly inflammatory." But you should be forthright about your mistake to people who confront you about it, which is what's happening in the forum thread you linked. I think this is all fine.

[raxxorraxor]

Perhaps you should frame it differently if you speak for a company and provide criticism on a public platform, but mean tweets are often far less insulting that some business decisions customers and developers are subjected to.

I think developers here are probably perfectly innocent about these changes. The product mangers have to push for this integration or get replaced. This has been a theme at Microsoft for quite a while.

[dandellion]

I don't see the need for a note in this case because what was there wasn't wrong, there's plenty of evidence that supports it. It's just that the tone they used that was inadequate and very rude for no reason, so they edited it to be more polite, it doesn't seem a correction or retraction.

[watwut]

No evidence was erased as the evidence exists.

[voxl]

The reality is he wasn't wrong, he just didn't care to deal with the tone policing concern trolls of HN and elsewhere.

[rzwitserloot]

There is utility in indicating how surprised / concerned you are at a certain process or event. We can flatten out all communication and boil everything down to an extremely neutral "up", "down", and "nailed it to exacting precision".

I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down

I find torture and mass murder: down

Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.

Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.

The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.

There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!

And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.

In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!

Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.

(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).

[ethin]

If I could upvote you, I would. I have never liked the mob of people that think we should all be super diplomatic corpospeakers who hedge everything and who think that not doing so is "offensive" or "unprofessional". I definitely didn't think anything was wrong with the original sentences or word usage, because it wasn't aimed at any specific individual with the deliberate intent of being offensive, but was aimed at Microsoft itself. And even if the intent was to be offensive, well, on the internet your always going to offend someone. You could be super nice and say all the right words and someone would still find a way to be offended by it. And were these circumstances ordinary, I would call out the word usage as well, because it would be uncalled for. But given all the evidence that the original points at, it's rather hard to say that GitHub didn't deserve it. And it is also rather difficult for me to see how this wasn't the time or place for such language. Sometimes the only way to get your point across is to be "unprofessional" (whatever that means these days).

[chongli]

Thanks for pointing this out! I looked at the edit history and without looking at the timestamps assumed it was in reverse chronological order. Seeing that I was wrong brought a smile to my face.

I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are really passionate about their project, their goals, and the ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That they’re listening to feedback and trying to take the high road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction industry is taking) should be commended.

[CyberDildonics]

Zig is the language that was intentionally made to fail and error out on windows carriage returns instead of parsing them like every language ever made. They made a version for windows and then made it not work with every windows text editor. Their answer was to 'get better text editors' or 'make a preprocessing program to strip out carriage returns' or 'don't use windows' (they had a windows executable).

This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.

[crystal_revenge]

In all seriousness, this comment really makes me want to try out Zig!

[blibble]

that's amateur level anti-windows user

much better to put a colon in a filename, or call part of your toolchain "aux.exe"

https://help.interfaceware.com/v6/windows-reserved-file-name...

works like a treat

[thrwaway3243]

At least, this change will make source files not portable, which is obviously bad.

[mistercheph]

Use a real operating system and problem solved?

[latexr]

> It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits.

Indeed. The article even links to it.

https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...

[coldtea]

>It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits

They sugarcoated the truth to a friendlier but less accurate soundbite is what they did.

[lenkite]

I did prefer that honest line about bloated, buggy Javascript framework. Otherwise might as well ask an LLM to spit out a sanitized apology text for your change in provider. Just like ten thousand identical others copied from a playbook. Allow your eyes to comfortably glaze over with zero retention.

Have people already forgotten that the ReactJS port made github slow ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

The revised, politically-correct, sanitized re-framing that you apparently insist on does not convey this very important point of information.

We have freedom of speech for a reason - blunt honesty conveys important information. Passive language does not.

[photochemsyn]

Perhaps the final edit should have included the complaint about 'buggy bloated Javascript' as that's a very substantive issue - and now I don't know if they changed that as 'tone' or because they decided that technical criticism wasn't correct, and there are other issues?

[lunias]

I wish they edited it to be more extreme. Go full Torvalds like the good 'ol days before every opinion was "political".

[PunchyHamster]

Well, no, they still acted based on the original ego/pride, they just changed blogpost to look different.

I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to excuse their actions

[shevy-java]

Yep, agreed. I think this would have been the better reason too, but anyway - I also don't think it is so important either way.

The big problem still remains: corporations control WAY too much in general.

[inferiorhuman]

   It just seems like someone got upset about something they can't articulate

Dunno, they don't play well to the HN crowd I thought it was pretty clear what their pain points with GitHub were.

[lawn]

Eh, it looks like they want to hide that they call people monkeys and losers.

If they would own up to it and say sorry, then your point stands. But that's not what happened here.

[styanax]

> I completely agree with this. I performed really poorly on this axis. I’m sorry to the Zig community for that. I’ll take my L and get back to working on std.Io and the rest of the roadmap. [1]

[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...