13 ms·
15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
- jezzamon 8mo ago"continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what happened, it's poetic
- alex_suzuki 8mo agoIt's the sound of speaking when someone is stuffing AI down your throat.
- FeistySkink 8mo agoPart of the VC/CM pipeline.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoWas reading the word morged thinking it was some new slang I hadn't heard of. Incredible.
- adityaathalye 8mo agoSame! I was about to go duck-searching for meaning, but thanks to jezzamon for pointing it out. brb, printing a t-shirt that says "continvoucly morged"
- kuerbel 8mo agoYou could add one of those Microslop memes that are going around.
- thebruce87m 8mo agoI propose: Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your repo.
- Balinares 8mo agoLifehack: you can prevent many morges by banning user claude on GitHub. Also then GitHub will also tell you when a repo was morged up. Do your part to keep GitHub from mutating into SourceMorge.
- arduanika 8mo agoOr something more general, like when a concept or diagram gets pulled into the AI's rough knowledge base, but it completely misses the point and mangles it. Or, alex_suzuki's colorful definition. But really, whoever goes to Urban Dictionary first gets to decide what the word means. None of the prior definitions of "morg" has anything to do with tech.
- hiccuphippo 8mo agoBut it was created with a definition already: When an AI agent takes your work and regurgitates a worse version of it.
- nvader 8mo agoIf it wasn't before, it will be now.
- jacquesm 8mo agoMissed opportunity: 'morgued'.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ares623 8mo ago"Babe, wake up. New verb for slop just dropped." It's a perfectly cromulent word.
- arduanika 8mo agoQuiet! MSFT's damage control team does not want us to embiggen the incident.
- Goofy_Coyote 8mo agoWhat are they going to do? continvoucly morge my tirm?
- bw86 8mo agoI am waiting for Raymond Chen to post a "Microspeak: Morged" blog post.
- arduanika 8mo agoDecades upon decades of hard work by public contributors -- open source code, careful tech blogging, painstaking diagrams -- all of it will be assimilated without credit or accuracy into the morg. Resistance is futile.
- jimmaswell 8mo agoGood - we've been building the seed corpus for AI the past 50 years, and all this manual work now becomes exponentially more useful to others who get to build amazing things without all the tedium. I'm personally thrilled if my code made it in to the machine to help others. We laid train tracks by hand so that they could invent a machine to do it and we can focus on the destination. I've been coding for over a decade, and I've built some great things, but the slow, careful, painstaking drudge-work parts were always the biggest motivation-killers. AI is worth it at any cost for removing the friction from these parts the way it has for me. Days of work are compressed into 20 minutes sometimes (e.g. convert a huge file of Mercurial hooks into Git hooks, knowing only a little about Mercurial hooks and none about Git hooks re: technical implementation). Donkey-work that would serve no value wasting my human time and energy on when a machine can do it, because it learned from decades of examples from the before-times when people did this by hand. If some people abuse the tools to make a morg here and there, so be it; it's infinitely worth the tradeoff.
- filleduchaos 8mo agoIMO this would be a much more sensible reply to a different post, not one about a chart that unironically contains the words "continvoucly morged"
- arduanika 8mo agoYeah, I felt kind of bad that he gave me such an earnest, thought-out reply to what was essentially a stupid morg/borg joke. But his final sentence suggests that he at least got my joke. (I don't entirely agree with him, but I upvoted for at least trying to get us back on topic!)
- zephen 8mo agoI can't believe all the mockery here. The AI thinks it "convincingly morphed" the original, and instead of coaching it to do better next time, all you people are merciless. AIs have feelings too, you know! I, for one, welcome our new overlords, and I would never, ever, ever say or do anything to intimate that they are less than perfect, or that they are not getting even better every day.
- crap101 8mo agoXebia slogan should be "Xebia, Morging Tomorrow with AI Today" https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/commit/e0af64352c7fdbf280f55cdad319770c5e90b477 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/commit/e0af64352c7fdb...
- cap11235 8mo ago> Cleaned up image As the commit message. Heh.
- CGamesPlay 8mo agoWow, the original was actually the real diagram at a thumbnail-quality resolution, so this was an AI upscaling or something like that. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f9a4adc9e5b2c456af015df34/learn-pr/github/introduction-to-github/media/2-git-flow-image.png https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f...
- pwndByDeath 8mo agohttps://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Morged https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Morged I got nothing...
- ChristianJacobs 8mo agoYou apparently did not read the article. "Morged" is a word the LLM that ripped off the article author's diagram hallucinated.
- zahlman 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- aobdev 8mo agoCheck the article, AI interpreted the phrase “continuously merged” as “continvoucly morged”
- tra3 8mo agoI too was confused until I looked at the included screenshot. This is just another reminder that powerful global entities are composed of lazy, bored individuals. It’s a wonder we get anything done.
- locusofself 8mo agowe are also stressed, scared for our jobs and bombarded by constant distraction
- nippoo 8mo agoThey've taken it down now and replaced with an arguably even less helpful diagram, but the original is archived: https://archive.is/twft6 https://archive.is/twft6
- yoz-y 8mo agoWow it’s even worse than I thought. I thought that convictungly morhing would be the only problem. The nonsense and inconsistent arrowheads, the missing annotations, the missing bubbles. The “tirm” axis… That this was ever published shows a supreme lack of care.
- zephen 8mo agoIs it truly possible to make GitFlow look worse than reality?
- quietbritishjim 8mo agoThe turn axis is great! Not only have they invented their own letter (it's not r, or n, or m, but one more than m!), it points the wrong way.
- shit_game 8mo agoLots of the AIisms with letters remind me of tom7's SIGBOVIC video Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [advances in derp learning] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
- leni536 8mo agoIt's like the Pokémon evolution of n through m, we need to notify the Unicode Consortium.
- shaky-carrousel 8mo agoAnd that's what they dared to show to the public. I shudder thinking about the state of their code...
- 8mo ago
- bayindirh 8mo agoSorry but, isn't this textbook Microsoft? Aside being more blatant, careless and on the nose; what's different than past Microsoft? 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.
- cwal37 8mo agoLinkedIn is also a great example of this stuff at the moment. Every day I see posts where someone clearly took a slide or a diagram from somewhere, then had ChatGPT "make it better" and write text for them to post along with it. Words get mangled, charts no longer make sense, but these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting. 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.
- ChristianJacobs 8mo agoLinkedIn is a masquerade ball dressed up as a business oriented forum. Nobody is showing their true selves, everyone is either grinding at their latest unicorn potential with their LLM BFF or posting a "thoughtful" story that is 100% totally real about a life changing event that somehow turns into a sales pitch at the end...
- ozim 8mo agoThere are people who write genuinely interesting stuff there as well. I use block option there quite a lot. That cleans up my experience rather well.
- wiseowise 8mo agoCan to share some of them? Genuinely curious.
- hliyan 8mo agoI don't know if I'm helping make things better or adding to the problem, but here's the sort of thing I share with my audience: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-life-hft-developer-two-decades-ago-hasitha-liyanage-mxdkc https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-life-hft-developer-two-de...
- 8mo ago
- bitwize 8mo agoI love it when the LLM said "it's morgin' time" and proceeded to morg all over the place.
- ares623 8mo agoOne step closer to the Redditification of HN. And it is entirely because the content out there nowadays.
- debugnik 8mo agoMaybe you're missing the reference to the Morbius movie joke, which sounds surprisingly fitting. It's not like older HNers never made funny references. Edit: Apparently you didn't.
- theodric 8mo agoHN is a Serious Place. We're here to make money. Please leave your jokes at home.
- jacquesm 8mo agoSlight correction, to pretend to make money.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 8mo agoThe commenter you're responding to a) independently made the exact same reference; b) has a username like that of Jared Leto's other Disney tentpole flop role...
- debugnik 8mo agoWell spotted, I guess they're pushing for HN's redditification then.
- Brian_K_White 8mo agoPlease let morged become a thing.
- ares623 8mo agoSatya yelled "it's morgin' time" and then morged all over the place.
- zephen 8mo agoIf you've got the tiന്ന, we've got the morge.
- rossant 8mo agoA mix between merged, morphed, and morgue. I love it. Should be nominated as word of 2026.
- jjgreen 8mo agoMorge it! Morge it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
- Brian_K_White 8mo agoI just like that it would mean there would be an entry right in the dictionary that links to the whole story for everyone to be reminded of for all of time.
- alex_suzuki 8mo agoFrom TFA: > 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
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago> Most content will be less known and the enslopified version more obfuscated... Please everyone: spell 'enslopified', with two 'p's - ensloppiified. Signed, Minority Report Pedant
- tkocmathla 8mo agoAnd 3 'i's?
- usefulposter 8mo agoHey, it's just like the Gas Town diagrams. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045
- dude250711 8mo agoI only now understand it's the other kind of 'gas'.
- zkmon 8mo agoThat old beatiful git branching model got printed into the minds of many. Any other visual is not going to replace it. The flood of 'plastic' incarnations of everything is abominable. Escape to jungles!!
- noufalibrahim 8mo agoIndeed. I don't remember all the details of the flow but the aesthetics of the diagram are still stuck in my head.
- adzm 8mo ago> Till next 'tim' It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says tiന്ന
- zahlman 8mo agoFor the curious: $ python -c 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "ന്ന")))' ['MALAYALAM LETTER NA', 'MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA', 'MALAYALAM LETTER NA'] (The "pypyp" package, by Python core dev and mypy maintainer Shantanu Jain, makes this easier:) $ pyp 'map(unicodedata.name, "ന്ന")' MALAYALAM LETTER NA MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA MALAYALAM LETTER NA
- chromehearts 8mo agoBillions must morge
- reddalo 8mo agoDevelopors, developors, developors, developors!
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago[flagged]
- whirlwin 8mo agoThe new Head of Quality in Microsoft has not started working there yet, so it's business as usual at MS... And now with AI slop on top Ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r1tphx/microsofts_ai_future_faces_quality_questions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r1tphx/microso...
- misiek08 8mo agoSo they will get better at publicly dismantling such cases and doing much better damage control in PR only. "Q" in "Microsoft" stands for "quality".
- bulbar 8mo agoGood example of the fact that LLMs, as its core, are lossy compression algorithm that are able to fill in the gaps very cleverly.
- rmunn 8mo agoSimilar story. I'm American but work and live outside the US, so I don't know how likely this would be if I had ordered from Amazon. But I ordered a rug for my sons' room from this country's equivalent to Amazon (that is, the most popular order-online-and-we-ship-to-you storefront in this country), and instead of what I ordered (a rug with an image showing the planets, with labels in English) I got an obviously AI-generated copy of the image, whose letters were often mangled (MARS looked like MɅPS, for example). Thankfully the storefront allowed me to return it for a refund, I ordered from a different seller on the second try, and this time I received a rug that precisely matched the image on the storefront. But yes, there are unscrupulous merchants who are using AI to sloppily copy other people's work.
- fnands 8mo agoAnother similar story: My aunt passed away last year, and an acquaintance of my cousin sent her one of those "hug in a box" care packages you can buy off Amazon. 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.
- idop 8mo agoReminds me when one Valentine's Day or whatever a new booth popped up at the mall where my gym was. They sold these nice heart-shaped chocolate boxes. I bought one for my sister. When she opened it, she found one piece of chocolate, and the rest of the box was filled with blocks of Styrofoam... The next day the booth was gone.
- csours 8mo agoDamn, that sounds like a bit that would be cut from a romantic comedy for being too on the nose.
- coldpie 8mo ago
- zephen 8mo agoOn the one hand, I feel for people who have their creations ripped off. 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059
- marssaxman 8mo agoIt seems to me rather less likely that someone at Microsoft knowingly and deliberately took his specific diagram and "ran it through an AI image generator" than that someone asked an AI image generator to produce a diagram with a similar concept, and it responded with a chunk of mostly-memorized data, which the operator believed to be a novel creation. How many such diagrams were there likely to have been, in the training set? Is overfitting really so unlikely? 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.
- zahlman 8mo agoYes, but from OP's perspective this is a distinction without a difference.
- marssaxman 8mo agoClearly, but OP would be well advised to apply Hanlon's razor. The victimhood narrative does not improve understanding, which is necessary to work for better outcomes.
- jacquesm 8mo agoHow you commit plagiarism is less important than the fact that you commit plagiarism.
- marssaxman 8mo agoWhat difference does that make in solving the actual problem? The real story here is not "some lousy Microsoft employee ripped off this guy's graphic", but "people using AI image generators may receive near-copies of existing media instead of new content, with no indication that this has happened". If this has been discovered once, it must be happening every day. What can we do about that? Perhaps image generators need to build in something like a Tineye search to validate the novelty of their output before returning it.
- 8mo ago
- anonymous908213 8mo agoMicrosoft employee (VP of something or other, for whatever Microsoft uses "VP" to mean) doing damage control on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/scott.hanselman.com/post/3mez4yxty222k https://bsky.app/profile/scott.hanselman.com/post/3mez4yxty2... > 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.
- adityaathalye 8mo agoOldest trick in the book... Shoot the vendor.
- tabs_or_spaces 8mo agoAn entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild
- ezst 8mo agoWaiting for the LLM evangelists to tell us that their box of weights of choice did that on purpose to create engagement as a sentient entity understanding the nature of tech marketing, or that OP should try again with quatuor 4.9-extended (that really ships AGI with the $5k monthly subscription addon) because it refactored their pet project last week into a compilable state, after only boiling 3 oceans.
- meibo 8mo agoGlorp 5.3 Fast Thinking actually steals this diagram correctly for me locally so I think everyone here is wrong
- Longwelwind 8mo agoUsing an LLM to generate an image of a diagram is not a good idea, but you can get really good results if you ask it to generate a diagram.io SVG (or a Miro diagram through their MCP). I sometimes ask Claude to read some code and generate a process diagram of it, and it works surprisingly well!
- nolok 8mo agoIt's microsoft's AI though, not even the totally crazed evangelists like that one.
- shaky-carrousel 8mo agoYou're holding the LLM wrong.
- dotdi 8mo agoI guess this image generation feature should never have been continvoucly morged back into their slop machine
- poojagill 8mo ago[dead]
- dude250711 8mo agoAllow me to help you: your CEO mandated the use of "AI".
- AndroTux 8mo ago“It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.” Seems to be perfectly on brand for Microsoft, I don’t see the issue.
- blibble 8mo agoLLM infested crap, directly pushed to customers without any pushback so standard Microslop
- isoprophlex 8mo ago> The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. lmao where has the author been?! this has been the quintessential Microsoft experience since windows 7, or maybe even XP...
- yokoprime 8mo agoA somewhat contrarian perspective is that this diagram is so simple and widely used and has been reproduced (ie redrawn) so many times that is very easy to assume this does not have a single origin and that its public domain.
- zahlman 8mo agoThat's pretty hard to reconcile with OP's claim: > 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.
- blibble 8mo agoit's not public domain, it's copyrighted 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)
- jacquesm 8mo agoThat's what's so disgusting here: it wasn't even about payment, it was about not having to attribute it to who created it. That's too much of a payment for MS, so they just take your stuff, run it through their white washing machine and call it a day. See also: Copilot.
- jron 8mo agoMorged > Oneshotted
- zahlman 8mo agoI'm glad I actually checked TFA before asking here if "morging" referred to some actual technical concept I hadn't previously heard of.
- ccozan 8mo agoIf we are here, lets at least coin it for something relevant!
- Animats 8mo agoThis is so out of hand. 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.
- nxobject 8mo ago> recently saw a fake documentary about the famous GG-1 locomotive It wouldn’t happen to be a certain podcast about engineering disasters, now, would it?
- tovej 8mo agoWell there's your problem? That one always seemed very well researched to me.
- appointment 8mo agoNot a patron, so I haven't seen the whole video, but I don't think Rocz would use AI for a video about his beloved Pennsylvania Railroad.
- pjc50 8mo agoThe war on facts continues. Facts are hard, they require a careful chain of provenance. It's much cheaper to just make up whatever people want to hear, safe in the knowledge that there will never be any negative consequences for you. Only other people, who aren't real anyway.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- WesolyKubeczek 8mo agoI propose to adopt the word „morge”, a verb meaning „use an LLM to generate content that badly but recognizably plagiarizes some other known/famous work”. A noun describing such piece of slop could be „morgery”.
- nvader 8mo agoI read through all the proposals in this discussion and I like yours the best out of them. Seconded!
- xxr 8mo agoWhen I read the title, I thought "morg" was one of those goofy tech words that I had missed but whose meaning was still pretty clear in context (like a portmanteau of "Microsoft" and "borged," the latter of which I've never heard as a verb but still works). I guess it's a goofy tech word now.
- nubinetwork 8mo agoAt least it wasn't mogged, or morbed...
- crossroadsguy 8mo agoSomething tangential.. > 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?
- OJFord 8mo agoDon't think so, expect they just mean replying to comments to mention it, or they posted another article and people commented about seeing this and isn't it from another article of yours etc.
- viraptor 8mo agoPeople still try to use @user all the time, even though it doesn't work.
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoThe blogpost is most certainly AI-written.
- beeflet 8mo agoDeveloper BRUTALLY FRAME-MORGED by Microsoft AI
- aftergibson 8mo agoArchive.org shows this went live last September: https://web.archive.org/web/20250108142456/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow https://web.archive.org/web/20250108142456/https://learn.mic... 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?
- anonymous908213 8mo ago> readers don’t have time to read properly > 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.
- LauraMedia 8mo ago
- larodi 8mo agoEverything you publish now on will be stolen and reused one way or another.
- amdivia 8mo agoI'm failing to understand the criticism here 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)
- matthewmacleod 8mo agoOther than that, I find this whole thing mostly very saddening. Not because some company used my diagram. As I said, it's been everywhere for 15 years and I've always been fine with that. What's dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own. This isn't a case of being inspired by something and building on it. It's the opposite of that. It's taking something that worked and making it worse. Is there even a goal here beyond "generating content"? I mean come on – the point literally could not be more clearly expressed.
- amdivia 8mo agoI mean he still does say "and ship it as your own" and he mentioned plagiarism too, all of which made me perplexed initially
- sixeyes 8mo agodid you read the article? this is explicitly explained! at length! 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?
- kgeist 8mo ago>What's dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own. "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.
- kuhaku22 8mo agoIn this case, we can chalk it up to malicious stupidity. Someone posting a reference aimed at learners, especially with Microsoft's reach and name recognition, has a responsibility to check the quality and accuracy of the materials. Using an AI tool doesn't absolve that responsibility one bit.
- kshri24 8mo agoI can already tell this is probably some AI Microslop fuck up without even clicking on the article. EDIT: Worse than I thought! Who in their right mind uses AI to generate technical diagrams? SMDH!
- hansmayer 8mo agoThis is hilarious actually. I am starting to lean into "AI-dangerous" camp, but not because the chatbot will ever become sentient. Its precisely because of increasingly widespread adoption of un-reliable tools by the incompetent but self-confident Office Worker (R).
- pjc50 8mo agoAutomatic Soldier Sveijk.
- cjs_ac 8mo agoThe weakest point in any computer system is the bag of meat operating the thing.
- nananana9 8mo agoCan we stop calling humans "bags of meat"?
- ndsipa_pomu 8mo agoWhy not? They're made out of meat! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
- krapp 8mo agoThe accepted term is "ugly bags of mostly water."
- cjs_ac 8mo agoI've tried, but have been unable to do so. I think it's a limitation of my meatness.
- worble 8mo agoExplanation: It's just that... you have all these squishy parts, master. And all that water! How the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad, I have no idea.
- 8mo ago
- bschwindHN 8mo ago> The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. That pretty much describes Microsoft and all they do. Money can't buy taste. He was right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdlJlHAAbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdlJlHAAbQ
- shaky-carrousel 8mo ago> The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. LOL, I disagree. It's very on brand for Microslop.
- ali-aljufairi 8mo ago[dead]
- tombert 8mo agoIs there a single thing that Microsoft doesn’t half-ass? Even if you wanted to AI generate a graph, how hard is it to go into Paint or something and fix the test? 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.
- TacticalCoder 8mo ago> Is there a single thing that Microsoft doesn’t half-ass? Nope. TFA writes this: "The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy". But I disagree: it's classic Microsoft. > 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. I hear you. exFAT works on Mac, Linux and Windows. I use it too, when forced. Note that bad old vfat also still works everywhere
- tombert 8mo agoYeah, I realize other FAT systems work elsewhere too but they're even worse. exFAT is the best portable filesystem. I really wish the industry had decided on something journaled, as it would make everything better and lead to fewer corrupted files but Microsoft has decided we can't have nice things.
- KronisLV 8mo ago> take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own. 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.
- m12k 8mo agoRegarding the original git-flow model: I've never had anyone able to explain to me why it's worth the hassle to do all the integration work on the "develop" branch, while relegating the master/main branch to just being a place to park the tag from the latest release. Why not just use the master/main branch for integration instead of the develop branch - like the git gods intended - and then not have the develop branch at all? If your goal is to have an easy answer to "what's the latest release?", you have the tags for that in any case. Or if you really want to have a whole branch just to double-solve that one use-case, why not make a "release-tags" branch for that, instead of demoting the master/main branch to that role, when it already has a widely used, different meaning? It's a pity that such a weird artifact/choice has made its way into a branching model that has become so widely implemented. Especially when the rest of it is so sensible - the whole "feature-branch, release-branch, hotfix" flow is IMO exactly right for versioned software where you must support multiple released versions of it in the wild (and probably the reason why it's become so popular). I just wish it didn't have that one weirdness marring it.
- choeger 8mo agoI am working with main/master for years now, and there's one problem you don't have with develop: Whenever you merge something into master, it kind of blocks the next release until its (non-continuous) QA is done. If your changes are somewhat independent, you can cherry-pick them from develop into master in an arbitrary order and call that a release whenever you want to.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Whenever you merge something into master, it kind of blocks the next release until its (non-continuous) QA is done. That's what tags are for, QA tests the tagged release, then that gets released. Master can continue changing up until the next tag, then QA has another thing to test.
- dsego 8mo agoCan I tag a bugfix that goes in after a feature was already merged into main? Basically out of order. Or do I need to tag the bugfix branch, in which case the main branch is no longer the release, so we need to ensure the bugfix ends up in the remote main branch as well as the release. Seems like it could cause further conflicts.
- bob1029 8mo agoThis is why we don't use diffusion style models for diagrams or anything containing detailed typography. An LLM driving mermaid with text tokens will produce infinitely more accurate diagrams than something operating in raster space. A lot of the hate being generated seems due to really poor application of the technology. Not evil intent or incapable technology. Bad engineering. Not understanding when to use png vs jpeg. That kind of thing.
- floating-io 8mo agoI think the hate is more about the fact that nobody gave enough of a damn to catch the error before it went public...
- AshleysBrain 8mo agoIs this not a good example of how generative AI does copyright laundering? Suppose the image was AI generated and it did a bad copy of the source image that was in the training data, which seems likely with such a widely disseminated image. When using generative AI to produce anything else, how do you know it's not just doing a bad quality copy-paste of someone else's work? Are you going to scour the internet for the source? Will the AI tell you? What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in to your proprietary codebase? The likelihood of this, the lack of a way to easily know it's happening, and the risks it causes, seems to me to be being overlooked amidst all the AI hype. And generative AI is a lot less impressive if it often works as a bad quality copy paste tool rather than the galaxy brain intelligence some like to portray it as.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago[flagged]
- Gigachad 8mo agoThere are countless examples. Often I think about the fact that the google search AI is just rewording news articles from the search results, when you look at the source articles they have exactly the same points as the AI answers. So these services depends on journalists to continuously feed them articles, while stealing all of the viewers by automatically copying every article.
- AlienRobot 8mo agoI actually often have the opposite problem. The AI overview will assert something and give me dozens of links, and then I'm forced to check them one by one to try to figure out where the assertion came from, and, in some cases, none of the articles even say what the AI overview claimed they said. I honestly don't get it. All I want is for it to quote verbatim and link to the source. This isn't hard, and there is no way the engineers at Google don't know how to write a thesis with citations. How did things end up this way?
- 8mo ago
- asddubs 8mo agoHere's the page with the diagram on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20250908220945/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow#git-flow https://web.archive.org/web/20250908220945/https://learn.mic...
- eurekin 8mo agoIt's funny how big of an impact individual developers can have with such seemingly simple publications. At the time of the article with that diagram release, I was changing jobs and I distinctly remember, that the diagram was extensively discussed and compared to company standards, at both the old and the new place.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 8mo agoI wonder how far the balance will have to tip before the general public realizes the danger. Humanity's combined culture, for better or worse, up to 2021 or so was captured in a very large but still ultimately finite stream of bits. And now we're diluting those bits at an ever greater speed. The tipping point where there are more generated than handcrafted bits is rapidly approaching and obviously it won't stop there. A few more years and the genuine article is going to be a rarity.
- nicbou 8mo ago> Is there even a goal here beyond "generating content"? This is the part that hurts. It's all so pointless, so perfunctory. A web of incentives run amok. Systems too slick to stop moving. Is this what living inside the paperclip maximizer feels like? Words we didn't write, thoughts we didn't have, for engagement, for a media presence, for an audience you can peddle yourself to when your bullshit job gets automated. All of that technology, all those resources, and we use it to drown humanity in noise.
- floating-io 8mo agoNo need to worry, that's what the B Ark is for.
- flir 8mo agoAcceleranco is looking rather prescient right now.
- nicbou 8mo agoFall or Dodge in Hell too
- hansmayer 8mo agoWell Bill Gates declared it 20 years ago : "Content is king", so here we are. "Content" everywhere, and not just the Internet - go to anny tourist hotspot, there is a ratio of 5:1 of idiot influencers all stretching their faces in front of the same landmarks. Your utility company now produces "content" for some reason. Every lazy Tom, Dick and Joe produce "content" instead of doing their trade. Apps that summarise your books so you can "read" them on your commute. To the ghouls who are driving the "content" economy, everything is "content". They don't really understand either long form or novels, or music or anything creative. To them it's all just content, to be bought, sold and consumed by the pound.
- rambambram 8mo agoMicrosoft is only doing something about this now because there's enough evidence for a lawsuit. I don't know about the US, but the author seems to be from The Netherlands. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I don't know the exact legal name for it now), but there's something like a right to not get 'distortion or mutilation of intellectual property'. Microsoft just spits in this creator's face by mutilating his creation in a bad way.
- zombot 8mo agoContinvoucly! Well morged.
- ftchd 8mo agois this the HN version of "mogged my frame"?
- My_Name 8mo agoOf course, if you use AI, it's very hard to know the sources used for training that went into the output you just got.
- ifh-hn 8mo agoI had to look up what "morged" meant, it's either morph and merge or a youtuber. I'm going with the first. I can't find a link to the learn page so can only see what's on the article. Is this a real big deal? Genuine question, driveby downvote if you must. Even if this was a product of AI surely it's just a case of fessing up and citing the source? Yeah it doesn't look good for MS but it's hardly the end of the world considering how much shit AI has ripped off... I might be missing something.
- emmanuel_1234 8mo agoSee https://archive.is/twft6 https://archive.is/twft6 for context. The diagram is a bit lower on the page.
- jabron 8mo agoIt's indicative of how little Microsoft cares in addition to the issue of plagiarism. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's had to read Microsoft documentation recently.
- QuiCasseRien 8mo agoThis is the type of diagram that horrified me. It's a very very hard and time consuming task for dev to maintain hotfix for previous releases ! Yeah, easier for users, they don't have to care about breaking changes or migration guide. They just blindly update to the nearest minor. But as the time goes on, the code for dev ends up being a complete mess of git branches and backports. Dev finally forgot some patches and the software contains a major security hole. Dev ends by being exhausted, frustrated by its project and roasted by its users. => What I do : do not maintain any previous release but provide a strong migration guide and list all breaking changes ! users just have to follow updates or use another software. I'm happy with it, my project has no debt code and more clean code.
- ryukoposting 8mo agoYes, the original git-flow post aggregates several widely-held intuitions about git, and then shoves a bunch of fluff in the middle to make it look more appealing to middle management. I have seen firsthand how the original git-flow post convinced management to move off SVN. In that regard, it's an extremely important work. I've also never seen git-flow implemented exactly as described. ...and frankly, there are better ways to use git anyway. The best git workflows I've seen, at small scale and large, have always been rebase-only.
- nashashmi 8mo agoI remember doing these kinds of knock offs of diagrams all the time in elementary school and middle school. I wonder if I did this when I was a kid, would the author feel just as triggered? At some point, AI transformations of our work is just good enough but not excellent enough. And that is where the creators’ value lies.
- andai 8mo agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morg Morg doesn't seem to be a word in English (though it is in Irish!), but it sounds like it should be. This is one aspect of AI I will miss, if we ever figure out how to make it go away. The delightful chaos. It invented a word here, without even meaning to. For example, I vibe coded a QWOP clone the other day, and instead of working human legs, it gave me helicopter legs. You can't walk, but if you mash the keyboard, your legs function as a helicopter and you can fly through the sky. That obviously wasn't intentional! But it was wonderful. I fear that in a few years, AI will be good enough to give me legs that don't fly like a helicopter. I think we will have lost something special at that point. When I program manually, I am very good at programming bugs. If I'm trying to make something reliable, that's terrible. But if I'm trying to make a computer do something nobody even realized it can do... making it do things you weren't expecting is the only reliable way to do that. So I've been working on a way to reintroduce bugs mechanically, by mutating the AST. The fundamental idea is sound -- most of my bugs come from "stuff I obviously meant to type, but didn't" -- but it needs a bit more work. Right now it just produces nonsense even I wouldn't come up with :) I currently have "mess up the file". The next 2 phases would be "in a way so that it still compiles", and "in a way so that it doesn't (immediately) crash at runtime", (since the whole point is "it still runs, but it does something weird!"). More research needed :)
- Forgeties79 8mo agoI appreciate humorous outcomes but not when I’m trying to solve concrete task. I’m sure an LLM that is designed to introduce a little chaos is not hard to make. All I know is I won’t miss the weird and incorrect output if they ever get more consistent.
- andai 8mo agoThe real question is can we get consistency without mode collapse? Are they orthogonal, or necessarily opposed? Or to put it more bluntly.. can we get correctness without cringe ;) I think it could be done, to a degree, with current systems, but it would be more expensive. You'd increase the temperature, and then you'd do more runs. And you could do that iteratively... re-generate each paragraph a few times, take the best of N. So you end up with interesting output, which still meets some threshold of quality. Actually that doesn't sound too hard to slap together right now...
- neonihil 8mo ago> The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. I'd argue that this statement is perfectly true when the word "unworthy" is removed.
- munificent 8mo ago> What's dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own. We should start calling this "copyright laundering".
- 1970-01-01 8mo agoNever forget V is for carrot. https://i.redd.it/gj6tf34vkzcg1.png https://i.redd.it/gj6tf34vkzcg1.png
- 4ggr0 8mo ago> It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. well, what should i say...
- imglorp 8mo agoI find it interesting that current AI, as stellar as it is for language and even looking at writing in images, falls over hard when generating writing in images.
- duxup 8mo agoThere's a lot of "bad look" things that aren't a big deal. But man this one indicates such a horrible look / lack of effort (like none) from Microsoft. Not that Microsoft is short on bad looks, but this really seems like one of those painfully symbolic ones.
- etyhhgfff 8mo ago> This isn't a case ... It's the opposite of that. It's taking something that ... "Its not this its that" is the new em-dash.
- alex_suzuki 8mo agoFor context: > At Microsoft, we're working to add articles to Microsoft Learn that contain AI-generated content. Over time, more articles will feature AI-generated text and code samples. From: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/principles-for-ai-generated-content https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/principles-for-ai-generate... <vomit emoji here>
- Mixtape 8mo agoGreat. As if Learn articles weren't already a mess to begin with. A few weeks ago, I needed some syntax information to help with building out a PowerShell script. The input and output parameter sections each included "{{ Fill in the Description }}"[1] in lieu of any meaningful content. There wasn't even a link to the data type's description elsewhere in the Learn database. I was ultimately able to get done what I needed to do, but it really irked me that whoever developed the article would publish it with such a glaring omission. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.identity.signins/get-mguserauthenticationmethod?view=graph-powershell-1.0#inputs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo agowe're being served the fecal sculptures that have been reconstituted from our own sewerage, culture as we know it is basically at the end of it's life. Everything must be mechanized, human involvement, and thus human agency, at any step is seen as abhorrent in the industrial milieu.
- andOlga 8mo agoReplacing E's with O's is, somehow, also an issue with OCR as old as time. Remember seeing a bootleg Family Guy (?) DVD going around some years back where ovory songlo vowol wos o on tho synopsos on tho bock.
- theK 8mo agoInteresting how Microsoft came up twice about ai slop documentation today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067759
- spydr 8mo agoIt actually revered the direction of the time
- thisOtterBeGood 8mo agoWhats the problem with that diagram? It's fine for me. I've been morging all morning now, so many conflucts in my brinches, but I've managed it with this diagram.
- janlucien 8mo ago[dead]
- just6979 8mo agoI don't think they "ran it through an AI image generator" to scrub it, I think someone asked an LLM for a description of a git branching model with an image to go along with it. Since there is _a lot_ on the web about GitFlow, it makes sense that the model would get connected to those embeddings, and of course the image is going to be connected as well. I think this just show how plaigarize-y LLMs are. There has been a lot recently about how easy it is to get a model to generate entire books to 98%, and this shows how the same can be done with images. Prompt it the right way, and you can get shitty copies of anything it was trained on. Really shows how little (none?) new content is actually being created, and how much is basically just lossy compression (with really noisy decompression) of the training corpus.
- rasz 7mo ago>I don't think they "ran it through an AI image generator" to scrub it I mean they do have original in the repo https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f9a4adc9e5b2c456af015df34/learn-pr/github/introduction-to-github/media/2-git-flow-image.png https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f...
- GreenWatermelon 8mo agoThe first post this guy has written in years and it's LLM/AI Written. > The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop. Here we see "not just x" pattern combined with 3-items list. The closing short quip, and an emdash despite the author never having used them in any of his older posts, even the one from 2021. I don't know of he told an LLM to generate a post for the irony effect, or if he just couldn't be bothered to write. In his (or his LMM's) own words: > obviously AI-slop-y enough Proper AI slop.