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Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS. If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they mad
by post_below 8mo ago
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
- altairprime 8mo agoThat’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
- Andrex 8mo agoOh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
- chrismorgan 8mo agoHow could you implement something like this by accident?
- bigyabai 8mo agoLLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
- mathieudombrock 8mo agoLLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing. Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
- kortilla 8mo agoDistributed float math is not deterministic without introducing total operations ordering and destroying performance
- jdiff 8mo agoIt's not usefully deterministic in the way computers usually are. Sensitively identical input can still lead to wildly different outputs even if all randomness is crushed out.
- sheept 8mo agoOne feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
- chrismorgan 8mo agoThat’s not implementing it by accident, that’s deliberate. In such a scenario perhaps the deployment was a mistake, but if you don’t write the malware in the first place, it can’t be deployed. (Probably. This is LLM stuff we’re talking about.) (Yes, this is malware. It’s incontrovertibly adware, and although some will argue that not all adware is malware, this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed malicious.) It is said, never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.
- rhet0rica 8mo agoThat's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually. z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
- eCa 8mo agoVibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR? Is that the most charitable way?
- goodusername 8mo agoYeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well. But it really seems like an own goal if true.
- boredpudding 8mo agoConfirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+copilot+coding+tasks%22&type=pullrequests https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
- tossandthrow 8mo agoIt is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional. If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ccppurcell 8mo agoNot a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.
- kdheiwns 8mo agoWhenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.
- devsda 8mo agoI think someone should track the ratio of these mistakes/bugs that directly or indirectly benefitted MS vs those that costed them.
- padjo 8mo agoMS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoM$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big