> looks like a vendor, and we have a group now doing a post-mortem trying to figure out how it happened. It'll be removed ASAFP
> Understood. Not trying to sweep under rugs, but I also want to point out that everything is moving very fast right now and there’s 300,000 people that work here, so there’s probably be a bunch of dumb stuff happening. There’s also probably a bunch of dumb stuff happening at other companies
> Sometimes it’s a big systemic problem and sometimes it’s just one person who screwed up
This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should. In either case -- no review process, or a failed review process -- the failure is definitionally systemic. If a single person can on their own whim publish not only plagiarised material, but material that is so obviously defective at a single glance that it should never see the light of day, that is in itself a failure of the system.
Then slow down.
With this objective lack or control, sooner or later your LLM experiments in production will drive into a wall instead of hitting a little pothole like this diagram.
Completely with you on this, plus I would add following thoughts:
I don't think the size of the company should automatically be a proxy measure for a certain level of quality. Surely you can have slobs prevailing in a company of any size.
However - this kind of mistake should not be happening in a valuable company. Microsoft is currently still priced as a very valuable company, even with the significant corrections post Satyas crazy CapEx commitments from 2 weeks ago.
However it seems recently the mistakes, errors and "vendors without guidelines" pile up a bit too much for a supposedly 3-4T USD worth company, culminating in this weird random but very educational case. If anything, it's indicator that Microsoft may not really be as valuable as it is currently still perceived.
Ortho and grammar errors should have been corrected, but do you really expect a review process to identify that a diagram is a copy from another one some rando already published on the internet years ago?
Here is the slop copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251205141857/https://learn.mic...
The 'Time' axis points the wrong way, and is misspelled, using a non-existent letter - 'Tim' where the m has an extra hump.
It's pretty clear this wasn't reviewed at all.
Now that's an interesting comment for him to include. The cynic in me could find / can think of lots of reasons from my YouTube feed as to why that might be so. What else is going on at Microsoft that could cause this sense of urgency?
They're chasing that sweet cost reduction by making cheap steel without regard for what it'll be used for in the future.
Vibing won’t help out at all, and years from now we’re gonna have project math on why 10x-LLM-ing mediocre devs on a busted project that’s behind schedule isn’t the play (like how adding more devs to a late project generally makes it more late). But it takes years for those failures to aggregate and spread up the stack.
I believe the vibing is highlighting the missteps from the wave right before which has been cloud-first, cloud-integrated, cloud-upselling that cannibalized MS’s core products, multiplied by the massive MS layoff waves. MS used to have a lot of devs that made a lot of culture who are simply gone. The weakened offerings, breakdown of vision, and platform enshittification have been obvious for a while. And then ChatGPT came.
Stock price reflects how attractive stocks are for stock purchasers on the stock market, not how good something is. MS has been doing great things for their stock price.
LLMs make getting into emacs and Linux and OSS and OCaml easier than ever. SteamOS is maturing. Windows Subsytem for Linux is a mature bridge. It’s a bold time for MS to be betting on brand loyalty and product love, even if their shit worked.
And that's exactly what happened here.
I have been having oodles of headaches dealing with exFAT not being journaled and having to engineer around it. It’s annoying because exFAT is basically the only filesystem used on SD cards since it’s basically the only filesystem that’s compatible with everything.
It feels like everything Microsoft does is like that though; superficially fine until you get into the details of it and it’s actually broken, but you have to put up with it because it’s used everywhere.
I don’t even care about AI or not here. That’s like copying someone’s work, badly, and either not understanding or not giving a shit that it’s wrong? I’m not sure which of those two is worse.
I sometimes ask Claude to read some code and generate a process diagram of it, and it works surprisingly well!
It's not like LinkedIn was great before, but the business-influencer incentives there seem to have really juiced nonsense content that all feels gratingly similar. Probably doesn't help that I work in energy which in this moment has attracted a tremendous number of hangers-on looking for a hit from the data center money funnel.
I use block option there quite a lot. That cleans up my experience rather well.
Except when it was delivered, this one said "hug in a boy" and "with heaetfelt equqikathy" (whatever the hell that means). When we looked up the listing on Amazon it was clear it was actually wrong in the pictures, just well hidden with well placed objects in front of the mistakes. It seems like they ripped off another popular listing that had a similar font/contents/etc.
Luckily my cousin found it hilarious.
There's this. There's that video from Los Alamos discussed yesterday on HN, the one with a fake shot of some AI generated machinery. The image was purchased from Alamy Stock Photo. I recently saw a fake documentary about the famous GG-1 locomotive; the video had AI-generated images that looked wrong, despite GG-1 pictures being widely available. YouTube is creating fake images as thumbnails for videos now, and for industrial subjects they're not even close to the right thing. There's a glut of how-to videos with AI-generated voice giving totally wrong advice.
Then newer LLM training sets will pick up this stuff.
"The memes will continue" - White House press secretary after posting an altered shot of someone crying.
It wouldn’t happen to be a certain podcast about engineering disasters, now, would it?
That this was ever published shows a supreme lack of care.
The model makers attempt to add guardrails to prevent this but it's not perfect. It seems a lot of large AI models basically just copy the training data and add slight modifications
Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your repo.
Do your part to keep GitHub from mutating into SourceMorge.
brb, printing a t-shirt that says "continvoucly morged"
It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says tiന്ന
$ python -c 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "ന്ന")))'
['MALAYALAM LETTER NA', 'MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA', 'MALAYALAM LETTER NA']
$ pyp 'map(unicodedata.name, "ന്ന")'
MALAYALAM LETTER NA
MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA
MALAYALAM LETTER NA> people started tagging me on Bluesky and Hacker News
Never knew tagging was a thing on Hacker News. Is it a special feature for crème de crème users?
It took ~5 months for anyone to notice and fix something that is obviously wrong at a glance.
How many people saw that page, skimmed it, and thought “good enough”? That feels like a pretty honest reflection of the state of knowledge work right now. Everyone is running at a velocity where quality, craft and care are optional luxuries. Authors don’t have time to write properly, reviewers don’t have time to review properly, and readers don’t have time to read properly.
So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads and nobody really owns. The process says “published”, so it’s done.
AI didn’t create this, it just dramatically lowers the cost of producing text and images that look plausible enough to pass a quick skim. If anything it makes the underlying problem worse: more content, less attention, less understanding.
It was already possible to cargo-cult GitFlow by copying the diagram without reading the context. Now we’re cargo-culting diagrams that were generated without understanding in the first place.
If the reality is that we’re too busy to write, review, or read properly, what is the actual function of this documentation beyond being checkbox output?
> So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads
I'd note that the documentation may have been read and noticed as flawed, but some random person noticing that it's flawed is just going to sigh, shake their heads, and move on. I've certainly been frustrated by inadequate documentation before (that describes the majority of all documentation, in my experience), but I don't make a point of raising a fuss about it because I'm busy trying to figure out how to actually accomplish the goal for which I was reading documentation for rather than stopping what I'm doing to make a complaint about how bad the documentation is.
This says nothing to absolve everyone involved in publishing it, of course. The craft of software engineering is indeed in a very sorry state, and this offers just one tiny glimpse into the flimsiness of the house of cards.
LOL, I disagree. It's very on brand for Microslop.
"Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity". I bet someone just typed into ChatGPT/Copilot, "generate a Git flow diagram," and it searched the web, found your image, and decided to recreate it by using as a reference (there's probably something in the reasoning traces like, "I found a relevant image, but the user specifically asked me to generate one, so I'll create my own version now.") The person creating the documentation didn't bother to check...
Or maybe the image was already in the weights.
That pretty much describes Microsoft and all they do. Money can't buy taste.
He was right:
> the diagram was both well-known enough and obviously AI-slop-y enough that it was easy to spot as plagiarism. But we all know there will just be more and more content like this that isn't so well-known or soon will get mutated or disguised in more advanced ways that this plagiarism no longer will be recognizable as such.
Most content will be less known and the ensloppified version more obfuscated... the author is lucky to have such an obvious association. Curious to see if MSFT will react in any meaningful way to this.
Edit: typo
Please everyone: spell 'enslopified', with two 'p's - ensloppiified.
Signed, Minority Report Pedant
Seems to be perfectly on brand for Microsoft, I don’t see the issue.
so standard Microslop
These people distilled the knowledge of AppGet's developer to create the same thing from scratch and "Thank(!)" him for being that naive.
Edit: Yes, after experiencing Microsoft for 20+ odd years, I don't trust them.
EDIT: Worse than I thought! Who in their right mind uses AI to generate technical diagrams? SMDH!
Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r1tphx/microso...
lmao where has the author been?! this has been the quintessential Microsoft experience since windows 7, or maybe even XP...
A noun describing such piece of slop could be „morgery”.
Seconded!
On the other hand, it makes sense for Microsoft to rip this off, as part of the continuing enshittification of, well, everything.
Having been subjected to GitFlow at a previous employer, after having already done git for years and version control for decades, I can say that GitFlow is... not good.
And, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
The author of the Microsoft article most likely failed to credit or link back to his original diagram because they had no idea it existed.
This is just another reminder that powerful global entities are composed of lazy, bored individuals. It’s a wonder we get anything done.
Please don't say things like this in comments (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I don't think "LLM" and "hallucinated" are accurate; different kinds of AI create images, and I get the impression that they generally don't ascribe semantics to words in the same way that LLMs do, and thus when they draw letter shapes they typically aren't actually modelling the fact that the letters are supposed to spell a particular word that has a particular meaning.
> In 2010, I wrote A successful Git branching model and created a diagram to go with it. I designed that diagram in Apple Keynote, at the time obsessing over the colors, the curves, and the layout until it clearly communicated how branches relate to each other over time. I also published the source file so others could build on it.
If you mean that the Microsoft publisher shouldn't be faulted for assuming it would be okay to reproduce the diagram... then said publisher should have actually reproduced the diagram instead of morging it.
what's the bet that the intention here was explicitly to attempt to strip the copyright
so it could be shoved on the corporate website without paying anyone
(the only actual real use of LLMs)
Is it about the haphazardous deployment of AI generated content without revising/proof reading the output?
Or is it about using some graphs without attributing their authors?
if it's the latter (even if partially) then I have to disagree with that angle. A very widespread model isn't owned by anyone surely, I don't have to reference newton everytime I write an article on gravity no? but maybe I'm misunderstanding the angle the author is coming from
(Sidenote: if it was meant in a lightheaded way then I can see it making sense)
not at all about the reuse. it's been done over and over with this diagram. it's about the careless copying that destroyed the quality. nothing was wrong with the original diagram! why run it through the AI at all?
I mean come on – the point literally could not be more clearly expressed.