8 ms·

Microsoft employee (VP of something or other, for whatever Microsoft uses "VP" to mean) doing damage control on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/scott.hanselma

Microsoft 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 ago
Oldest trick in the book... Shoot the vendor.
tabs_or_spaces 8mo ago
An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild
- yborg 8mo ago
  post morgem
  - batisteo 8mo ago
    Right to morgue
  - Etheryte 8mo ago
    It's post morgem time. [0] [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-morbin-time https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-morbin-time
    - zuminator 8mo ago
      *post morgem ti൬.
  - patapong 8mo ago
    Morgem? I barely know 'em!
  - Andrex 8mo ago
    You could say the original author has enjoyed some post-morgem clarity.
thunfischtoast 8mo ago
Microsoft seems to have thrown quality assurance overboard completely. Vibe generate everything, throw it at a wall, see what sticks. Tech bros are so afraid of regulation they even drop regulation inside their own companies. (just kidding)
- nhinck2 8mo ago
  It's not just throwing QA out, they are actively striving for lower quality because it saves money. They're chasing that sweet cost reduction by making cheap steel without regard for what it'll be used for in the future.
- bonesss 8mo ago
  Just a thought: the timeline of the vibe techs rolling out and the timeline of increasing product rot, sloppiness, and user-hostile “has anyone ever actually used this shit!?!” coming out of MS overlap. 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.
nxobject 8mo ago
A postmortem for that but not Copilot in notepad.exe? Priorities…
- InvisibleUp 8mo ago
  I’d also love a post-mortem on their guide to pirating the entire Harry Potter series for AI use. (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlvectorstore-example/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlv...) I’ve lost trust in anything Microsoft publishes anymore.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
theolivenbaum 8mo ago
Seems like this is going to be the year of AI slop being released everywhere by Microsoft. Just wish they'd put as much effort into a post morten for this one as they're doing for a diagram on a blog post https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/issues/27263#issuecomment-3891040820 https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/issues/27263#issuec...
xxr 8mo ago
Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?
prmoustache 8mo ago
> In either case -- no review process, or a failed review process -- the failure is definitionally systemic. 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?
- clort 8mo ago
  plenty of people on the internet recognised it immediately, so sure, he may have been a rando when he created it, but not so much 15 years later..
  - Freak_NL 8mo ago
    Just that tiny image on his blog was enough for me to go "oh yeah, I used his diagram to explain this type of git workflow to colleagues a decade ago". Someone should have spotted that right away.
  - p_ing 8mo ago
    Did the one MSFT employee that “reviewed” it know of this image? If not, it doesn’t matter how many people “on the Internet” recognized this image. I’ll never understand the implied projection. (I don’t think this was reviewed closely if at all)
    - mcv 8mo ago
      I would hope that the person who reviews their training on gitflow, knows something about gitflow. And if you know something about gitflow, it's not that strange to expect to recognise the most iconic gitflow diagram. But even if you don't recognise the original, at least you should be able to tell that the generated copy is bullshit.
      - p_ing 8mo ago
        Again, I don't think this was reviewed. It was an assignment to a vendor 'write document and I'll hit publish'. There's a great chance the MSFT document _owner_ has no experience in the relevant area.
p_ing 8mo ago
You’re incorrect on how the publishing process works. If a vendor wrote the document, it has a single repo owner (all those docs are in github) that would need to sign off on a PR. There isn’t multiple layers or really any friction to get content on learn.msft.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  I suggested that if there is no review process, it is a systemic issue, and that if there is a review process that failed to catch something this egregious, it is a systemic issue. My supposition is that regardless of how the publishing process works, there is a systemic failure here, and I made no claims as to how it actually works, so I'm not sure where the "you're incorrect on how it works" is coming from.
  - p_ing 8mo ago
    You said it takes multiple people screwing up, implying that publishing content had multiple gates/reviewers. It doesn’t.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - AlienRobot 8mo ago
      But if there are no gates, doesn't that mean the people who should have put the gates in there screwed up?
      - p_ing 8mo ago
        There is no singular publishing org at MSFT. Each product publishes its own docs, generally following a style guide. But the doc process is up to the doc owner(s).
        dxdm 8mo ago
        I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
7bit 8mo ago
Any excuse that tries to play down its own fault by pointing out other companies also have faults, is dishonest. And that's exactly what happened here.
hansmayer 8mo ago
> 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. 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.
HelloNurse 8mo ago
> "everything is moving very fast" 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.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  And at the same time, they have time to quickly brush it off with "looks like a vendor" even though people are still investigating. Yes, we can see it's moving really fast, probably "move fast break things" been infecting Microsoft, users are leaving Microsoft behind because everything is breaking then clueless VPs blame it on moving too fast?
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Jokes on you, I’ll cash out by then and move to the next gig.
- leni536 8mo ago
  - Put on your seatbelts, man! - I can't, moving too fast!
- tremon 8mo ago
  "Driving into a wall" is still a positive outcome. It's just as likely to drive into a crowd.
  - HelloNurse 8mo ago
    Serious loss of life is a plausible LLM outcome, particularly for Microsoft who does both operating systems (incidents can be much worse than the Crowdstrike bricking) and chatbot assistants that can offer lethal advice. Catastrophic property damage is hopefully more likely.
Anon4Now 8mo ago
> everything is moving very fast right now 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?
- mcny 8mo ago
  My guess is there is some communication going out to every "manager", even the M1, that says this is your priority. For example, I know of an unrelated mandate Microsoft has for its management. Anything security team analysis flags in code that you or your team owns must be fixed or somehow acceptably mitigated within the deadline specified. It doesn't matter if it is Newton soft json being "vulnerable" and the entire system is only built for use by msft employees. If you let this deadline slip, you have to explain yourself and might lose your bonus. Ok so the remediation for the Newton soft case is easy enough that it is worth doing but the point is I have a conspiracy theory that internally msft has such a memo (yes, beyond what is publicly disclosed) going to all managers saying they must adopt copilot, whatever copilot means.
- BearOso 8mo ago
  From the beginning, one of the advertising tricks they have used for AI is FOMO. I presume that is so they can sell you as much of it as they can before you realize its flaws. Everybody's so worried about getting in on the ground floor of something that they don't even imagine it could be a massive flop.
reisse 8mo ago
> 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. Only if this is considered a failure. Native English speakers may not know, but for a very long time (since before automatic translation tools became adequate) pretty much all MSFT docs were machine translated to the user agent language by default. Initially they were as useless as they were hilarious - a true slop before the term was invented.
flurdy 8mo ago
LOL, calling Scott Hanselman a 'VP of something' is funny. Been listening to his stuff for years, even when I despised MS. Always seems genuinely nice. Probably one of the main reasons I these days have a more positive image of Microsoft.
- qingcharles 8mo ago
  Scott is definitely one of the good guys.
  - 12_throw_away 8mo ago
    I don't this person, but immediately trying to foist blame for a really embarrassing screwup onto a "vendor" does not really sound like "good guy" behavior to me?
- 16bytes 8mo ago
  I thought the same thing. Scott is basically CEO of devrel at Microsoft. Maybe we're of a different age to remember when Scott was super influential as a blogger / conference speaker, but even now he's not some random VP.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
mcv 8mo ago
The VP blames a vendor of course, but didn't Microsoft recently announce they were going to vibe code everything? Because this image looks like it comes from the kind of company that thinks it can vibe code everything.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

adityaathalye 8mo ago

Oldest trick in the book... Shoot the vendor.

tabs_or_spaces 8mo ago

An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild

yborg 8mo ago
post morgem
- batisteo 8mo ago
  Right to morgue
- Etheryte 8mo ago
  It's post morgem time. [0] [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-morbin-time https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-morbin-time
  - zuminator 8mo ago
    *post morgem ti൬.
- patapong 8mo ago
  Morgem? I barely know 'em!
- Andrex 8mo ago
  You could say the original author has enjoyed some post-morgem clarity.

thunfischtoast 8mo ago

Microsoft seems to have thrown quality assurance overboard completely. Vibe generate everything, throw it at a wall, see what sticks. Tech bros are so afraid of regulation they even drop regulation inside their own companies. (just kidding)

nhinck2 8mo ago
It's not just throwing QA out, they are actively striving for lower quality because it saves money. They're chasing that sweet cost reduction by making cheap steel without regard for what it'll be used for in the future.
bonesss 8mo ago
Just a thought: the timeline of the vibe techs rolling out and the timeline of increasing product rot, sloppiness, and user-hostile “has anyone ever actually used this shit!?!” coming out of MS overlap. 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.

nxobject 8mo ago

A postmortem for that but not Copilot in notepad.exe? Priorities…

InvisibleUp 8mo ago
I’d also love a post-mortem on their guide to pirating the entire Harry Potter series for AI use. (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlvectorstore-example/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlv...) I’ve lost trust in anything Microsoft publishes anymore.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

theolivenbaum 8mo ago

Seems like this is going to be the year of AI slop being released everywhere by Microsoft. Just wish they'd put as much effort into a post morten for this one as they're doing for a diagram on a blog post https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/issues/27263#issuecomment-3891040820 https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/issues/27263#issuec...

xxr 8mo ago

Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?

prmoustache 8mo ago

> In either case -- no review process, or a failed review process -- the failure is definitionally systemic. 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?

clort 8mo ago
plenty of people on the internet recognised it immediately, so sure, he may have been a rando when he created it, but not so much 15 years later..
- Freak_NL 8mo ago
  Just that tiny image on his blog was enough for me to go "oh yeah, I used his diagram to explain this type of git workflow to colleagues a decade ago". Someone should have spotted that right away.
- p_ing 8mo ago
  Did the one MSFT employee that “reviewed” it know of this image? If not, it doesn’t matter how many people “on the Internet” recognized this image. I’ll never understand the implied projection. (I don’t think this was reviewed closely if at all)
  - mcv 8mo ago
    I would hope that the person who reviews their training on gitflow, knows something about gitflow. And if you know something about gitflow, it's not that strange to expect to recognise the most iconic gitflow diagram. But even if you don't recognise the original, at least you should be able to tell that the generated copy is bullshit.
    - p_ing 8mo ago
      Again, I don't think this was reviewed. It was an assignment to a vendor 'write document and I'll hit publish'. There's a great chance the MSFT document _owner_ has no experience in the relevant area.

p_ing 8mo ago

You’re incorrect on how the publishing process works. If a vendor wrote the document, it has a single repo owner (all those docs are in github) that would need to sign off on a PR. There isn’t multiple layers or really any friction to get content on learn.msft.

anonymous908213 8mo ago
I suggested that if there is no review process, it is a systemic issue, and that if there is a review process that failed to catch something this egregious, it is a systemic issue. My supposition is that regardless of how the publishing process works, there is a systemic failure here, and I made no claims as to how it actually works, so I'm not sure where the "you're incorrect on how it works" is coming from.
- p_ing 8mo ago
  You said it takes multiple people screwing up, implying that publishing content had multiple gates/reviewers. It doesn’t.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - AlienRobot 8mo ago
    But if there are no gates, doesn't that mean the people who should have put the gates in there screwed up?
    - p_ing 8mo ago
      There is no singular publishing org at MSFT. Each product publishes its own docs, generally following a style guide. But the doc process is up to the doc owner(s).
      - dxdm 8mo ago
        I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.

7bit 8mo ago

Any excuse that tries to play down its own fault by pointing out other companies also have faults, is dishonest. And that's exactly what happened here.

hansmayer 8mo ago

> 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. 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.

HelloNurse 8mo ago

> "everything is moving very fast" 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.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
And at the same time, they have time to quickly brush it off with "looks like a vendor" even though people are still investigating. Yes, we can see it's moving really fast, probably "move fast break things" been infecting Microsoft, users are leaving Microsoft behind because everything is breaking then clueless VPs blame it on moving too fast?
wiseowise 8mo ago
Jokes on you, I’ll cash out by then and move to the next gig.
leni536 8mo ago
- Put on your seatbelts, man! - I can't, moving too fast!
tremon 8mo ago
"Driving into a wall" is still a positive outcome. It's just as likely to drive into a crowd.
- HelloNurse 8mo ago
  Serious loss of life is a plausible LLM outcome, particularly for Microsoft who does both operating systems (incidents can be much worse than the Crowdstrike bricking) and chatbot assistants that can offer lethal advice. Catastrophic property damage is hopefully more likely.

Anon4Now 8mo ago

> everything is moving very fast right now 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?

mcny 8mo ago
My guess is there is some communication going out to every "manager", even the M1, that says this is your priority. For example, I know of an unrelated mandate Microsoft has for its management. Anything security team analysis flags in code that you or your team owns must be fixed or somehow acceptably mitigated within the deadline specified. It doesn't matter if it is Newton soft json being "vulnerable" and the entire system is only built for use by msft employees. If you let this deadline slip, you have to explain yourself and might lose your bonus. Ok so the remediation for the Newton soft case is easy enough that it is worth doing but the point is I have a conspiracy theory that internally msft has such a memo (yes, beyond what is publicly disclosed) going to all managers saying they must adopt copilot, whatever copilot means.
BearOso 8mo ago
From the beginning, one of the advertising tricks they have used for AI is FOMO. I presume that is so they can sell you as much of it as they can before you realize its flaws. Everybody's so worried about getting in on the ground floor of something that they don't even imagine it could be a massive flop.

reisse 8mo ago

> 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. Only if this is considered a failure. Native English speakers may not know, but for a very long time (since before automatic translation tools became adequate) pretty much all MSFT docs were machine translated to the user agent language by default. Initially they were as useless as they were hilarious - a true slop before the term was invented.

flurdy 8mo ago

LOL, calling Scott Hanselman a 'VP of something' is funny. Been listening to his stuff for years, even when I despised MS. Always seems genuinely nice. Probably one of the main reasons I these days have a more positive image of Microsoft.

qingcharles 8mo ago
Scott is definitely one of the good guys.
- 12_throw_away 8mo ago
  I don't this person, but immediately trying to foist blame for a really embarrassing screwup onto a "vendor" does not really sound like "good guy" behavior to me?
16bytes 8mo ago
I thought the same thing. Scott is basically CEO of devrel at Microsoft. Maybe we're of a different age to remember when Scott was super influential as a blogger / conference speaker, but even now he's not some random VP.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

mcv 8mo ago

The VP blames a vendor of course, but didn't Microsoft recently announce they were going to vibe code everything? Because this image looks like it comes from the kind of company that thinks it can vibe code everything.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]