[HN Gopher] 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
Author : cheeaun
Score : 937 points
Date : 2026-02-18 06:20 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nvie.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nvie.com)
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Morged I got
| nothing...
| ChristianJacobs wrote:
| You apparently did not read the article. "Morged" is a word the
| LLM that ripped off the article author's diagram hallucinated.
| aobdev wrote:
| Check the article, AI interpreted the phrase "continuously
| merged" as "continvoucly morged"
| tra3 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| we are also stressed, scared for our jobs and bombarded by
| constant distraction
| jezzamon wrote:
| "continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what
| happened, it's poetic
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| It's the sound of speaking when someone is stuffing AI down
| your throat.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Part of the VC/CM pipeline.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Was reading the word _morged_ thinking it was some new slang I
| hadn 't heard of. Incredible.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Same! 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 wrote:
| You could add one of those Microslop memes that are going
| around.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I propose:
|
| Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your
| repo.
| Balinares wrote:
| Lifehack: 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 wrote:
| Or 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 wrote:
| But it was created with a definition already: When an AI
| agent takes your work and regurgitates a worse version of
| it.
| nvader wrote:
| If it wasn't before, it will be now.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Missed opportunity: 'morgued'.
| ares623 wrote:
| "Babe, wake up. New verb for slop just dropped."
|
| It's a perfectly cromulent word.
| arduanika wrote:
| Quiet! MSFT's damage control team does not want us to
| embiggen the incident.
| Goofy_Coyote wrote:
| What are they going to do? continvoucly morge my tirm?
| bw86 wrote:
| I am waiting for Raymond Chen to post a "Microspeak: Morged"
| blog post.
| arduanika wrote:
| Decades 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 wrote:
| Good - 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 wrote:
| IMO 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 wrote:
| Yeah, 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!)
| nippoo wrote:
| They've taken it down now and replaced with an arguably even less
| helpful diagram, but the original is archived:
| https://archive.is/twft6
| yoz-y wrote:
| Wow 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 wrote:
| Is it truly possible to make GitFlow look worse than reality?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Lots 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
| leni536 wrote:
| It's like the Pokemon evolution of n through m, we need to
| notify the Unicode Consortium.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| And that's what they dared to show to the public. I shudder
| thinking about the state of their code...
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| This passage from the post by the original creator of the
| diagramme summarises our Bruh New World:
|
| "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"?
| duxup wrote:
| It really is wild / telling how fundamentally AI can screw up
| what seems like just basics like ... an arrow.
| rzmmm wrote:
| It looks like typical "memorization" in image generation
| models. The author likely just prompted the image.
|
| 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
| pjc50 wrote:
| Remember, mass copyright infringement is prosecuted if you're
| Aaron Schwartz but legal if you're an AI megacorp.
| coldpie wrote:
| > It seems a lot of large AI models basically just copy the
| training data and add slight modifications
|
| Copyright laundering is the fundamental purpose of LLMs, yes.
| It's why all the big companies are pushing it so much: they
| can finally freely ignore copyright law by laundering it
| through an AI.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > It seems a lot of large AI models basically just copy the
| training data and add slight modifications
|
| This happens even to human artists who aren't trying to
| plagiarize - for example, guitarists often come up with a
| riff that turns out to be very close to one they heard years
| ago, even if it feels original to them in the moment.
| franktankbank wrote:
| TIMMMAYYY
| fooyc wrote:
| Apparently the new diagram is now a rip off of another one from
| Atlassian:
| https://bsky.app/profile/vurobinut.bsky.social/post/3mf52hmw...
| bayindirh wrote:
| Sorry 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 wrote:
| LinkedIn 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 wrote:
| LinkedIn 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Can to share some of them? Genuinely curious.
| hliyan wrote:
| I 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-de...
| ozim wrote:
| I guess people one would follow on other platforms, plus
| bunch others posting in my native language.
|
| Daniel Stenberg Jason Fried David Heinemeier Hansson Nick
| Chapsas Laurie Kirk Brian Krebs
| wiseowise wrote:
| LinkedIn is a fucking asylum populate by the most unhinged
| "people" and bots. I don't know a single serious technical
| person active on LinkedIn.
| dherikb wrote:
| I like Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladmihalcea
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I short the stock of companies whose leadership is wasting
| time posting to LinkedIn instead of... y'know... _leading_
| their org. The more they post the more I short. Similarly,
| the less-attached-to-reality the post is the more I short.
|
| I wish I could say I'm making bank off this strategy - but
| pretty-much all the slopposters (and the most insufferable
| of the AI boosters) are all working for nonpublic firms, oh
| well.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Maybe not a winning strategy because a lot of public
| companies have a comms team that manages the CEO's
| LinkedIn. Thereby saving the valuable time of the CEO
| themselves.
| riskable wrote:
| There's a whole community devoted to pointing out LinkedIn
| Lunatics!
|
| https://sh.itjust.works/c/linkedinlunatics
| close04 wrote:
| > LinkedIn is a masquerade ball dressed up as a business
| oriented forum. Nobody is showing their true selves
|
| That's the main trait of almost all social media. A parade of
| falsity, putting on the show for everyone else, being what
| you wish you were and what everyone else dreams of being or
| envies.
|
| LinkedIn is about boasting and boosting the professional
| life, other social media is for the personal life. More or
| less equally fake.
| varjag wrote:
| Of course they aren't. The text to go with those diagrams is
| also machine generated.
| layer8 wrote:
| The comment you're replying to already stated that.
| kshri24 wrote:
| Yep! Quit LinkedIn when it went downhill. Has only gotten worse
| since then. Most social media is filled with AI slop. For
| someone who grew up in the 90s-2000s BBS/IRC era this sucks!
| sshagent wrote:
| totally. I'm really getting behind the slight replacement of
| TL;DR to AI;DR If you can't be bothered to read your own AI
| slop, then I'm not reading it either.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > these people clearly aren't reading anything they're posting
|
| I'm surprised they are able to care so little. Somebody
| actually published this and didn't care enough to even skim
| through it.
| co_king_5 wrote:
| Illiteracy is very, very common and exists at a range of
| different severities.
|
| The people who got Cs in your English class are functionally
| illiterate.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I've been collecting some of the weirdest ones I've seen
| floating by. It's really the only thing that has me visiting
| linkedin.
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/linked/games.jpeg
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/linked/json.png
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/linked/syntax.png
|
| (and before anyone tells me to charge my phone, I have one of
| those construction worker phones with 2 weeks battery. 14% is
| like good for a couple of days)
| girvo wrote:
| Those are so funny that I was forgetting to breathe as I was
| laughing so hard, man that's excellent haha. Thanks for
| sharing them, even if we are cooked as a society...
| g947o wrote:
| Care to explain the last one? The presentation is weird and
| stupid, but I don't see any obvious (technical) issue other
| than the missing bracket on the left, unlike the first two
| donkey_brains wrote:
| No "for" loop in the example purportedly showing an
| iterative approach.
|
| Not mentioning the pain of debugging the streaming solution
| is also a little disingenuous.
| carlob wrote:
| The 'long' code for checking apples is shorter, but it's
| missing the external for loop. So I guess you could say
| it's not (ahem) an apples to apples comparison.
| raphman wrote:
| I'm not OP but:
|
| - missing ")" on the left side
|
| - extra "}" on the right side
|
| - the apples example on the right side ("Short code") ist
| significantly longer than the equivalent "Long code"
| example on the left side (which might also be because that
| code example omits the necessary for loop).
|
| - The headings don't provide structure. "Checking Each
| Apple" and "Only Red Apples!" sounds like opposites, but
| the code does more or less the same in both cases.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Iterative example doesn't iterate, mismatches parentheses
| and brackets. Because of this, the iterative example is
| shorter and simpler than the "short & simple" lambda
| example.
|
| Lambda example is to the best of my parsing ability this:
| apples.stream() .filter(a -l a.isRed()); // <--
| note semicolon .forEach(giveApple);
|
| Should be apples.stream() .filter(a
| -> a.isRed()) // or Apple::isRed .forEach(a ->
| giveApple(a)); // or this::giveApple
|
| It's also somewhat implied that lambdas are faster, when
| they're generally about twice as slow as the same code
| written without lambdas.
| OskarS wrote:
| It's interesting to see how LLMs make mistakes sometimes:
| replacing `->` with `-l` because arrow sort-of has the
| same meaning as lambdas in lambda calculus. It's like an
| LLM brain fart replacing something semantically similar
| but nonsensical in context.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Probably morphed > into l because they're similar shapes,
| and lambda was in the prompt. Image models are often
| prone to that sort of hallucination.
| gzread wrote:
| The red apple streams one is good. It shows how developers
| chase shiny new stuff with no respect for fundamentals. They
| will say it's less code, and then show you more code.
| BalinKing wrote:
| The apples one is LLM nonsense: the left example doesn't
| include any code for the loop, whereas the streams version
| actually is iterating over a collection.
|
| Regardless, FP-style code isn't "shiny new stuff"--it's
| been around for decades in languages like Lisp or Haskell.
| Functional programming is just as theoretically
| "fundamental" as imperative programming. (Not to mention
| that, these days, not even C corresponds that closely to
| what's actually going on in hardware.)
| ckcheng wrote:
| >> apples.stream()
|
| >> .filter (a -} ajsRed());
|
| >> .forEach(giveApple); [sic]
|
| > The red apple streams one is good. It shows how
| developers chase shiny new stuff with no respect for
| fundamentals.
|
| The problem isn't streams, it's slop.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Minecraft JAVA --------> C++
|
| that one gave me an actual lol.
| Andrex wrote:
| LinkedIn and GitHub, hmm. Wonder if there's a common thread...
| tveita wrote:
| And LinkedIn is Microsoft as well...
|
| IMO Microsoft is right at the nexus of opportunity for solving
| some of the the large _problems_ that AI introduces.
|
| Employers and job seekers both need a way to verify that they
| are talking to real identified people that are willing to put
| in some effort beyond spamming AI or wasting your time on AI
| run filters. LinkedIn could help them.
|
| Programmers need access to real human-verified code and
| projects they can trust, not low-effort slop that could be
| backdoored at any moment by people with unclear motives and
| provenance. Github could help.
|
| etc. etc. for Office, Outlook ...
|
| But instead they've decided to ride the slop waves, throw QA to
| the wind, and call every bird and stone "copilot".
| bitwize wrote:
| I love it when the LLM said "it's morgin' time" and proceeded to
| morg all over the place.
| ares623 wrote:
| One step closer to the Redditification of HN. And it is
| entirely because the content out there nowadays.
| debugnik wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| HN is a Serious Place. We're here to make money. Please
| leave your jokes at home.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Slight correction, to _pretend_ to make money.
| bitwize wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Well spotted, I guess they're pushing for HN's
| redditification then.
| nxobject wrote:
| Ha, I think a user since 2007's earned the right to do that
| once in a while.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Please let morged become a thing.
| ares623 wrote:
| Satya yelled "it's morgin' time" and then morged all over the
| place.
| zephen wrote:
| If you've got the tinn, we've got the morge.
| rossant wrote:
| A mix between merged, morphed, and morgue. I love it. Should be
| nominated as word of 2026.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Morge it! Morge it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| From 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| And 3 'i's?
| usefulposter wrote:
| Hey, it's just like the Gas Town diagrams.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045
| dude250711 wrote:
| I only now understand it's the other kind of 'gas'.
| zkmon wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| Indeed. I don't remember all the details of the flow but the
| aesthetics of the diagram are still stuck in my head.
| adzm wrote:
| > Till next 'tim'
|
| It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says
| tinn
| zahlman wrote:
| For the curious: $ python -c
| 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "nn")))'
| ['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, "nn")' MALAYALAM LETTER NA
| MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA MALAYALAM LETTER NA
| chromehearts wrote:
| Billions must morge
| reddalo wrote:
| Developors, developors, developors, developors!
| whirlwin wrote:
| The 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/microso...
| misiek08 wrote:
| So they will get better at publicly dismantling such cases and
| doing much better damage control in PR only. "Q" in "Microsoft"
| stands for "quality".
| rmunn wrote:
| Similar 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 M^PS, 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 wrote:
| Another 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 wrote:
| Reminds 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 wrote:
| Damn, that sounds like a bit that would be cut from a
| romantic comedy for being too on the nose.
| coldpie wrote:
| I've gone back to shopping pretty much exclusively offline.
| Shifting through the garbage was too much work even before the
| AI slop flood. I'd rather pay a little extra to a local
| retailer so I know what I'm actually buying because it's right
| there on the shelf in front of me.
| zephen wrote:
| On 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
| marssaxman wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Yes, but from OP's perspective this is a distinction without a
| difference.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Clearly, 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 wrote:
| How you commit plagiarism is less important than the fact
| _that_ you commit plagiarism.
| marssaxman wrote:
| What 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.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| 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/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 wrote:
| Oldest trick in the book... Shoot the vendor.
| tabs_or_spaces wrote:
| An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild
| yborg wrote:
| post morgem
| batisteo wrote:
| Right to morgue
| Etheryte wrote:
| It's post morgem time. [0]
|
| [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-morbin-time
| zuminator wrote:
| *post morgem ti6.
| patapong wrote:
| Morgem? I barely know 'em!
| Andrex wrote:
| You could say the original author has enjoyed some post-
| morgem clarity.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A postmortem for _that_ but not Copilot in notepad.exe?
| Priorities...
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| 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-
| sqlv...)
|
| I've lost trust in anything Microsoft publishes anymore.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| Amazing.
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| 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#issuec...
| xxr wrote:
| Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much
| slower at a bigco" than at a startup?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pointlessone wrote:
| It's not just a copy. It's a caricature of a copy with a
| plenty of nonsense in it: typos and weird "text", broken
| arrows, etc. Even a cursory look gives a feeling that
| something's fishy.
| toong wrote:
| "Legal reviewed it and did not flag any issues!"
| kuhaku22 wrote:
| This is the same Microsoft that promised to indemnify any
| of its customers sued over copyright lawsuits as a result
| of using its AIs. [0] So I'm sure legal reviewed it the
| same way, saying "Yep, our war chest is still ample".
|
| [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-defend-
| customer...
| tharos47 wrote:
| Weird text was already deemed acceptable by microsoft in
| their documentation as they machine translated most
| screenshots instead of recreating them in different
| locales, leading to the same problems as this image.
| logifail wrote:
| Shouldn't "where are we sourcing our content" be part of any
| publication review process?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| The Large Laundering Machine, sorry, I mean the Large
| Language Model! _Provenance?_ Where 's that?
| sznio wrote:
| No. I'd expect that "continvouclous morging" gets caught.
| michaelt wrote:
| Here is the original: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-
| git-branching-model/
|
| Here is the slop copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2025120514
| 1857/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.
| ahoka wrote:
| Yes. This is expected at any serious company as intellectual
| property violations can have serious consequences.
| beart wrote:
| I don't think the characterization of this being a diagram
| from "some rando" is accurate or fair.
|
| The original content is highly influential... which should be
| self-evident by the fact it is being reproduced verbatim ten
| years later, and was immediately recognized.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| > 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?
|
| We aren't talking about just some random image from some
| random blog. The article we are talking about is about a
| specific topic, which when searched online one of the first
| is the article containing the original image (at least for
| google, bing seems to be really struggling to give me the
| article but under images it is again the first).
|
| I would cut some slack if this were a really obscure topic
| almost noone talks about, but it's been a thing talked about
| in the programmer space for ages.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Yes? It's a famous diagram, at least in the world of Git
| workflows, so I would expect a reviewer of Microsoft's Git
| workflow documentation to be familiar with it.
|
| (But the main issue is that the diagram is slop, not that
| it's a copy.)
| GrinningFool wrote:
| I would personally expect review to evaluate for correctness.
| Such a review would have stopped this from being published.
| This diagram as published is literal nonsense.
| p_ing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You said it takes multiple people screwing up, implying
| that publishing content had multiple gates/reviewers.
|
| It doesn't.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| But if there are no gates, doesn't that mean the people
| who should have put the gates in there screwed up?
| p_ing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
| p_ing wrote:
| What?
|
| This is how it works. There are too many people here like
| the op that make assumptions on what the process
| is/should be.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| There is no such thing as "making an assumption" on what
| a process "should be". I am _asserting_ what it should
| be. A multi-trillion dollar company should absolutely
| have a robust review process in place. If one single
| person can submit plagiarised and defective material onto
| an official platform that implicates the company as a
| whole in copyright infringement, management has failed,
| ergo multiple people have failed, ergo the failure is
| systemic.
|
| It is _extremely well-known_ that individual humans make
| mistakes. Therefore, any well-functioning system has
| guards in place to catch mistakes, such that it takes
| multiple people making mistakes for an individual mistake
| to cascade to system failure. A system that does not have
| these guards in place at all, and allows one individual
| 's failure to immediately become a system failure, is a
| bad system, and management staff who implement bad
| systems are as responsible for their failure as the
| individual who made the mistake. Let us be grateful that
| you do not work in an engineering or aviation capacity,
| given the great lengths you are going to defend the
| "correctness" of a bad system.
| dxdm wrote:
| My dog does this thing where she picks a stick and gets
| you to pull on it, and she will pull on her end, too. She
| gets very focused on it. Pulling on the stick is the most
| important thing to her in that moment, when in fact it's
| just a stick she chose to turn into this tug of war.
|
| That's not entirely unlike what you're doing here. You
| latched onto a misunderstanding of OP's intent, and by
| making a thing out of it got people to pull back, and now
| you also keep tugging on your end.
|
| Except she does it on purpose and enjoys it, while I
| think you did it inadvertently and you do not seem that
| happy. But then, you're not a dog, of course.
|
| You could stop pulling on the stick. I do enjoy these
| doggy similes, though. :)
| arduanika wrote:
| This is a perfect description. I've probably been the dog
| at some point.
|
| p_ing, see my nearby comment about what we mean by
| "multiple". Does that comment make any false
| "assumptions"? Or, is it you who are mistaken,
| persistently failing to understand what your
| interlocutors are saying?
| dxdm wrote:
| It can be hard to resist.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| That seems to further make the case that it's a systemic
| problem.
|
| The organization would have more guardrails in place if
| it prioritized "don't break things" over "move fast".
| ryandrake wrote:
| There have been no Gates at Microsoft for a long time.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I've seen better review processes in hobby projects
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Neither deadlines nor cheap work for hire help any sort of
| review process, while an hobby project is normally done by
| someone who cares.
| scwoodal wrote:
| This is correct. It just takes one person to review it and
| you're good to go.
|
| There's also a service that rates your grammar/clarity and
| you have to be above a certain score.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I'll quote the relevant part of the parent post:
|
| > _that is in itself a failure of the system_
|
| ... and add some Beer flavor: POSIWID _(the purpose of a
| system is what it does)_
| 7bit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Jokes on you, I'll cash out by then and move to the next gig.
| leni536 wrote:
| - Put on your seatbelts, man!
|
| - I can't, moving too fast!
| tremon wrote:
| "Driving into a wall" is still a positive outcome. It's just
| as likely to drive into a crowd.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Scott is definitely one of the good guys.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| 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.
| ezst wrote:
| Waiting 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 wrote:
| Glorp 5.3 Fast Thinking actually steals this diagram correctly
| for me locally so I think everyone here is wrong
| Balinares wrote:
| I may have a new favorite HN comment.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=Balinares says
| you don't
| Longwelwind wrote:
| Using 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 wrote:
| It's microsoft's AI though, not even the totally crazed
| evangelists like that one.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| You're holding the LLM wrong.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's about as easy to hold as an old foam mattress
| dotdi wrote:
| I guess this image generation feature should never have been
| continvoucly morged back into their slop machine
| AndroTux wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| LLM infested crap, directly pushed to customers without any
| pushback
|
| so standard Microslop
| yokoprime wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| it'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 wrote:
| That'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.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > 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...
| jron wrote:
| Morged > Oneshotted
| zahlman wrote:
| I'm glad I actually checked TFA before asking here if "morging"
| referred to some actual technical concept I hadn't previously
| heard of.
| ccozan wrote:
| If we are here, lets at least coin it for something relevant!
| Animats wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Well there's your problem? That one always seemed very well
| researched to me.
| appointment wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| the other people are real until they say something i don't
| like
| Andrex wrote:
| The other people aren't real unless I'm forced to
| acknowledge their existence, often through violent but
| avoidable means.
| oytis wrote:
| Youtube has recently recommended me a video of Feynman
| allegedly explaining why we couldn't go to Mars and back. I am
| normally on Youtube for something specific and don't follow
| recommendations, but hey, it's Feynman and I haven't seen it
| before, so I had to watch. After a few seconds it has become
| very clear that the video is totally fake. Then I started
| digging, and it turned out that both voice and the text it says
| are fake too. According to the "authors" it was "based on
| Feynman's work", which is his whole physics course.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| YouTube must be absolutely flooded with this stuff.
|
| I clicked on one about Henry the 8th, which is a story Ive
| heard heard 100 times but whatever. It started out normal
| enough, then claimed he started carrying around a staff with
| a human skull on the top near the end. Made up artifacts and
| paintings.
|
| The most egregious has to be the "World War II mechanic fixes
| entire allied plane arsenal with piece of wire" category.
| I've come across a couple dozen of these. Completely
| fabricated events and people that never seem to have existed.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > YouTube must be absolutely flooded with this stuff.
|
| I don't know what the current upload rate to YT is, but
| this seems unlikely. Despite the reckless and insane energy
| consumption associated with generative visual and audio art
| forms, there's no way there's enough power available for
| generative stuff to overwhelm the "actually recorded
| digital video" uploads.
|
| Are there some niches on YT where this is true? Seems
| possible. YT overall? Nah.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| If my toilet overflows and starts leaking raw sewage into
| my bathroom, I don't tend to then go "well, at least the
| rest of my house is fine proportionally".
|
| Most of these kind of videos aren't fully SORA level AI
| anyway, they just use ChatGPT to make up a fake story and
| script they would otherwise have to make up themselves,
| which is much faster, and increases the chances one of
| them gets picked up by the algorithm and generates a few
| bucks in ad revenue.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > If my toilet overflows and starts leaking raw sewage
| into my bathroom, I don't tend to then go "well, at least
| the rest of my house is fine proportionally".
|
| Sure. But if you live in a multi-apartment complex and
| someone's toilet on the far side of the complex is
| overflowing, you don't say "my apartment is flowing with
| raw sewage".
|
| Maybe _your_ part of the complex (YT) is drowning in raw
| sewage, _mine_ is not, and I 'm vaguely confident that
| the complex (YT) is large enough that at this point in
| time, most parts of it are still functioning "as
| intended".
| anon7000 wrote:
| I think YT Shorts IS overwhelmed with complete garbage.
| There are lots of great channels I watch that don't have
| issue.
|
| But YT shorts is the one place on YT that tries to
| frequently show you new uploads and stuff outside of your
| normal algorithm, and there is so much AI on there.
| dh2022 wrote:
| One of these videos was referencing a problem with one of the
| Mars landers. Feynman died in 1988, long before the landers
| were even on the drawing board.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I read through all the proposals in this discussion and I like
| yours the best out of them.
|
| Seconded!
| xxr wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| At least it wasn't mogged, or morbed...
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Something 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 creme de creme users?
| OJFord wrote:
| Don'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 wrote:
| People still try to use @user all the time, even though it
| doesn't work.
| beeflet wrote:
| Developer BRUTALLY FRAME-MORGED by Microsoft AI
| aftergibson wrote:
| Archive.org shows this went live last September:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I usually would post it in our dev slack chat and rant for a
| message or two how many hours were lost "reverse-engineering"
| bad documentation. But I probably wouldn't post about it on
| here/BlueSky.
| LauraMedia wrote:
| You are assuming: A) That everyone who saw this would go as far
| as post publicly about it (and not just chuckle / send it their
| peers privately) and B) Any post about this would reach you/HN
| and not potentially be lost in the sea of new content.
| mns wrote:
| If you work in a medium to large company, you know most of the
| documentation is there for compliance reasons or for showing
| others that you did something at one point. You can probably
| just put slop at the end of documents, while you still keep
| headlines relevant and no one will ever read it or notice it.
| raphman wrote:
| Huh, I thought that the MS tutorial was older. The blurry
| screenshot in it is from 2023.
|
| And there ist another website with the same content (including
| the sloppy diagram). I had assumed that they just plagiarized
| the MS tutorials. Maybe the vendor who did the MS tutorial just
| plagiarized (or re-published) this one?:
|
| https://techhub.saworks.io/docs/intermediate-github-tutorial...
| larodi wrote:
| Everything you publish now on will be stolen and reused one way
| or another.
| amdivia wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| _Other 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.
| sixeyes wrote:
| did 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Automatic Soldier Sveijk.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| The weakest point in any computer system is the bag of meat
| operating the thing.
| nananana9 wrote:
| Can we stop calling humans "bags of meat"?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Why not? They're made out of meat!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
| krapp wrote:
| The accepted term is "ugly bags of mostly water."
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I've tried, but have been unable to do so. I think it's a
| limitation of my meatness.
| worble wrote:
| Explanation: 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| I don't think it's a matter of competence or confidence. It's
| more about indifference. AI supercharged the bullshit jobs ot
| should have displaced.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| When over half the population have bullshit jobs putting them
| all out of work seems inadvisable. Doubly so given the
| current political powder-keg we currently exist in.
| bulbar wrote:
| Good example of the fact that LLMs, as its core, are lossy
| compression algorithm that are able to fill in the gaps very
| cleverly.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| > 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
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yeah, 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Regarding 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Can 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean, what does "tag a bugfix",
| "tag the bugfix branch" or "ensure the bugfix ends up in
| the remote main branch as well as the release" even mean?
|
| What are you trying to achieve here, or what's the crux?
| I'm not 100% sure, but it seems you're asking about how
| to apply a bug fix while QA is testing a tag, that you'd
| like to be a part of the eventual release, but not on top
| of other features? Or is about something else?
|
| I think one misconception I can see already, is that tags
| don't belong to branches, they're on commits. If you have
| branch A and branch B, with branch B having one extra
| commit and that commit has tag A, once you merge branch B
| into branch A, the tag is still pointing to the same
| commit, and the tag has nothing to do with branches at
| all. Not that you'd use this workflow for QA/releases,
| but should at least get the point across.
| franktankbank wrote:
| It means you need a bugfix on your release and you don't
| want to carry in any other features that have been
| applied to master in the meantime.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Usually what I've seen is one of two solutions, the
| former (usually) being slightly favored: A) hide any new
| feature behind feature flags, separate "what's in the
| code" from "how the application works" essentially or B)
| have two branches, one for development (master) and one
| for production. The production branch is what QA and
| releasers work with, master is what developers work with,
| cherry-picking stuff and backporting becomes relatively
| trivial.
| Izkata wrote:
| With (B) you've just reconstructed the part of git-flow
| that was questioned at the start of this thread. Just
| switch the two branches from master/production to
| develop/master.
| antonvs wrote:
| B is basically Gitflow with different branch names - "one
| for development" is called develop, "one for production"
| is called main.
| dsego wrote:
| We've been using feature flags but mostly for controlling
| when things get released. But feature flags carry their
| own issues, they complicate the code, introduce parallel
| code paths, and if not maintained properly it gets
| difficult to introduce new features and have everything
| working together seamlessly. Usually you want to remove
| the flag soon after release, otherwise it festers. The
| production branch is also ok, but committing out of order
| can break references if commits are not in the same order
| as master, and patching something directly to prod can
| cause issues with promoting changes from master to prod,
| it requires some foresight to not break builds.
| tlamponi wrote:
| In that case one can just branch off a stable-x.y branch
| from the respective X.Y release tag as needed.
|
| It really depends on the whole development workflow, but
| in my experience it was always easier and less hassle to
| develop on the main/master branch and create stable
| release or fix branch as needed. With that one also
| prioritizes on fixing on master first and cherry-pick
| that fix then directly to the stable branch with
| potential adaptions relevant for the potential older code
| state there.
|
| With branching of stable branches as needed the git
| history gets less messy and stays more linear, making it
| easier to follow and feels more like a "only pay for what
| you actually use" model.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| git doesn't care what order or from which branch you tag
| things in. If you need to hotfix a previous release you
| branch from that previous release's tag, make your bugfix
| and tag that bugfix then merge the whole thing back to
| main.
|
| Presumably you are maintaining the ordering of these
| releases with your naming scheme for tags. For instance,
| using semver tags with your main release being v1.2.0 and
| your hotfix tag being v1.2.1, even while you've got
| features in flight for v1.3.0 or v1.4.0 or v2.0.0.
| Keeping track of the order of versions is part of
| semver's job.
|
| Perhaps the distinction is that v1.2.0 and v1.2.1 are
| still separate _releases_. A bug fix is a different
| binary output (for compiled languages) and should have
| its own release tag. Even if you aren 't using a compiled
| language but are using a lot of manual QA, different
| releases have different QA steps and tracking that with
| different version numbers is helpful there, too.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I worked at a place that had Gitlab review apps set up. Where
| the QA people could just click a button and it would create
| an instance of the app with just that PR on it. Then they
| could test, approve, and kill the instance.
|
| Then you can merge to master and it's immediately ready to
| go.
| ncphillips wrote:
| Yeah same. The idea that you'd be merging code to `main`
| that isn't ready to deploy is crazy to me, but that doesn't
| mean you need a `develop` and `prod` branch. The main +
| 1-layer of branches has generally been totally sufficient.
| We either deploy to branch-preview environment or we just
| test it locally.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yes, you have to include QA in the continuous integration
| process for it to work. That means at any time you can just
| tag the top of the master branch to cut a release, or do
| continuous delivery if it makes sense (so no tags at all).
|
| It sounds like you are doing a monorepo type thing. Git does
| work best and was designed for multiple/independent repos.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Even in a monorepo you can tag releases independently in
| git. git doesn't proscribe any particular version tag
| naming scheme and stores tags similarly to refs in a folder
| structure that many (but not all) UIs pay attention to. You
| can tag `project-a/v1.2.0` and `project-b/v1.2.0` as
| different commits at different points in the repo as each
| project is independently versioned.
|
| It makes using `git describe` a little bit more
| complicated, but not that much more complicated. You just
| need to `--match project-a/` or `--match project-b/` when
| you want `git describe` for a specific project.
| mort96 wrote:
| What's the difference between what you describe, and
| continuously merging things into main and cutting releases
| from a branch called stable?
| estimator7292 wrote:
| They're the same strategy with different branch names.
| secretazianman8 wrote:
| Are you using feature flags in your workflow pattern? These
| can be used to gate releases into your production environment
| while still allowing development work to be continuously
| integrated to trunk without blocking.
|
| This also means that the release to prod happens post-
| integration by means of turning the feature flag on. Which is
| arguably a higher quality code review than pre-integration.
| Aerolfos wrote:
| It's useful if your integration work takes some time - easy to
| run into with open source.
|
| Imagine you have multiple contributors with multiple new
| features, and you want to do a big release with all of them.
| You sit down a weekend and merge in your own feature branch,
| and then tell everyone else to do so too - but it's a hobby
| project, the other guys aren't consistently available, maybe
| they need two weekends to integrate and test when they're
| merging their work with everyone else's, and they don't have
| time during the weekdays.
|
| So, the dev branch sits there for 2-3 weeks gradually acquiring
| features (and people testing integration too, hopefully, with
| any fixes that emerge from that). But then you discover a bug
| in the currently live version, either from people using it or
| even from the integration work, and you want that fix live
| during the week (specific example: there's a rare but
| consistent CTD in a game mod, you do not want to leave that in
| for several weeks). Well, if you have a branch reflecting the
| live status you can put your hotfix there, do a release, and
| merge the hotfix into dev right away.
|
| Speaking of game mods, that also gives you a situation where
| you have a hard dependency on another project - if _they_ do a
| release in between your mods releases, you might need to drop a
| compat hotfix ASAP, and you want a reflection of the live code
| where you can do that, knowing you will always have a branch
| that works with the latest version of the game. If your main
| branch has multiple people 's work on it, in progress, that
| differs from what's actually released, you're going to get a
| mess.
|
| And sure you could do just feature branches and merge feature
| branches one by one into each other, and then into main so you
| never have code-under-integration in a centralized place but...
| why not just designate a branch to be the place to do
| integration work?
|
| You could also merge features one by one into main branch but
| again, imagine the mod case, if the main code needs X update
| for compatibility with a game update, why do that update for
| every feature branch, and expect every contributor to do that
| work? Much better to merge a feature in when the feature is
| done, and if you're waiting on other features centralize the
| work to keep in step with main (and the dependency) in one
| place. Especially relevant if your feature contributors are
| volunteers who probably wouldn't have the time to keep up with
| changes if it takes a few weeks before they can merge in their
| code.
| layer8 wrote:
| It can be beneficial if there is no mechanism that ensures that
| develop is always in a working state, but there is one that
| ensures that master is. The immediate benefit is that a new
| feature branch can always be started off master from a known-
| good state.
|
| Of course, there are ways to enforce a known-good state on
| master without a dedicated develop branch, but it can be easier
| when having the two branches.
|
| (I just dislike the name "develop", because branch names should
| be nouns.)
| simianwords wrote:
| Prod deployments usually have a tag associated
| layer8 wrote:
| Prod deployment isn't the same as known-good. The latter
| can be "passes all automated quality controls"; that
| doesn't automatically mean that it'll be deployed.
| Release/deploy cadences can be much slower than merge-into-
| master, and usually depend on actual feature (set)
| completion.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| You're right. I think what you're describing is "trunk based
| development" and it's much better.
|
| Maybe I'm overly cynical but I think git-flow was popular
| largely because of the catchy name and catchy diagram. When you
| point out that it has some redundant or counter-productive
| parts, people push back: "it's a successful model! It's
| standard! What makes you think you can do better?"
|
| There's a nice write-up of the trunk-based style at
| https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/ that you can point to as
| something better.
| disruptiveink wrote:
| Correct. If you can always either fix it forwards or roll
| back, which you should be able to unless you're building
| software that needs to go out in releases with versions
| tracked separately that need to keep getting fixes, trunk-
| based development simplifies everyone's lives greatly.
|
| I've never seen an organisation that insists on release
| branches and complicated git merge flows to release their
| web-based software gain any actual benefit from it that isn't
| dwarfed by the amount of tooling you need to put around it to
| make it workable to the dev team, and even then, people will
| routinely screw it up and need to reach out to the 5% of the
| team that actually understands the system so they can go back
| to doing work.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I've done branchy development to good effect for user-
| installable software, where we committed to maintain e.g.
| 3.2.x for a certain time period, so we had to keep release
| branches around for a long while.
|
| But for continuously deployed SaaS or webapps, there's no
| point.
| dcrazy wrote:
| Until you have a customer that must stay on v.previous
| for extra time for some reason.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Well in that case it sounds like you're shipping multiple
| versioned instances of your software for different
| clients, which is much closer to shrink-wrapped software
| than it is to e.g. gmail.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| I've worked on software where we had multiple maintained
| release branches and we always just worked off master and
| then cut long-lived release branches from master at some
| point. Once a branch was cut we'd never merge master into
| it again and instead backport just specific fixes, which
| is quite different from git-flow.
| mort96 wrote:
| If what they described is "trunk based development", then
| "git flow" is just "trunk based development where the trunk
| is called develop and there's a branch which always has the
| latest release". Is that it?
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Nope. Gitflow is not trunk based development.
| mort96 wrote:
| Then what's different other than the names of the
| branches?
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| > but I think git-flow was popular largely because of the
| catchy name and catchy diagram.
|
| It was because Git showed up in the era of SVN / CVS where
| those branching models were created because of the uh...
| let's just call it technical mishaps of those source control
| systems.
|
| Git did not have the hang ups of SVN / CVS / etc but people
| stuck with what was familiar.
| zamalek wrote:
| Yup, there would have been much less Git buy-in if it
| weren't for git flow; people grow incredibly attached to
| their beloved taxonomies.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > Yup, there would have been much less Git buy-in if it
| weren't for git flow
|
| I don't buy this. I've never used git-flow in life. No
| team I've worked for has ever used git-flow. Yet all of
| us have been using Git for ages. Git has been hugely
| successfully independently and different teams follow
| different Git workflows. Its success has got very little
| to do with git-flow.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >I don't buy this.
|
| It's not really debatable. Git flow came about because of
| SVN / CVS practices and was the first and for many still
| is THE branching model they use.
|
| >Yet all of us have been using Git for ages
|
| You say "all of us" but then you completely ignore the
| primary branching model the vast, vast majority of people
| use on Git.
|
| Just for the record, this isn't being stated in support
| of git-flow it's just a historical fact that's not really
| debatable.
| ncphillips wrote:
| > the primary branching model the vast, vast majority of
| people use on Git.
|
| > it's just a historical fact that's not really
| debatable.
|
| Over my last 15 years of software dev, I have _never_
| heard of anyone actually using Gitflow in their codebase.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong. My experience is anecdotal.
| But I don't know why you say it's a "fact". Was there
| surveys or anything?
| zamalek wrote:
| I'm not questioning your experience, but how "enterprise"
| is that experience? Gitflow was no small part of my
| convincing my company to move off TFVC. I doubt they
| still use, but it was shallow waters for scared folk.
|
| I strongly doubt that my story, just as much as yours, is
| unique.
| throwaway150 wrote:
| > It's not really debatable.
|
| Very weird for you to start a reply like this when we are
| _literally_ debating it.
|
| > You say "all of us"
|
| Yes, I mean those of who don't use git-flow. That's what
| I meant by "all of us".
|
| > ignore the primary branching model the vast, vast
| majority of people use on Git.
|
| Do you live in a git-flow bubble or what? I've been using
| VCS since the dark ages of CVS. Moved to SVN. Mercurial.
| Git. Never worked in a team using git-flow. Never used
| git-flow myself. Never met anyone IRL who uses git-flow.
| I only read about these things on HN and blogs.
|
| What kind of stats do you have to claim that this is the
| primary branching model. If I go by my experience, it's a
| minority branching model that only people living within
| the bubble care about.
|
| > it's just a historical fact that's not really
| debatable.
|
| What is a historical fact? That people use git-flow.
| Nobody is contesting that. What I am contesting is that
| the success of Git is not connected to git-flow like the
| grand-grand-parent comment said.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yeah, I actually think that diagram and "git-flow" has caused a
| lot of harm. It shows a complete misunderstanding of both
| continuous integration and what tags are for. I've successfully
| purged git-flow and dragged developers, kicking and screaming,
| to a simple master branch, tags and maintenance branch model a
| few times now.
| abustamam wrote:
| When I first got started programming, the "git flow" method
| was the one that popped up and was referred to most when I
| googled how does git work. And so I thought that git flow was
| the canonical way to use git.
|
| I tried adhering to it at my first job but I guess I didn't
| understand git flow well enough because people just thought I
| was making random branches for fun.
| bandrami wrote:
| The model works well if you're developing version 3.2 (which is
| not ready yet) but also non-trivially maintaining 3.1.
| tremon wrote:
| Exactly. As soon as you're working with multiple active
| releases, the branching model becomes a distinction without a
| difference. You will always be working with multiple (tagged)
| release branches, a default branch on which developers base
| their new work, and an integration branch where development
| work is gathered and tested to cut the next release. Whether
| the default and integration branch are identical or separate
| is mostly immaterial to the developer workflow.
|
| The only meaningfully different model is when you have a
| continuously-releasable trunk and never do fixes on older
| releases (quite common for internal tools).
| jeffwask wrote:
| This, the only times I have used this were to patch over
| other bad decisions like maintaining 3-4 active releases of a
| SAAS product simultaneously or other decisions that forced us
| into a complex branching scheme. If you fix the downstream
| and upstream issues, you can usually simplify down to an
| easier branching model but if you are managing hotfixes and
| releases across many versions this works and keeps it sanish.
| bombcar wrote:
| "git-flow" makes a lot more sense when you realize the
| "develop" branch doesn't have to be a branch "on the git
| server" and instead is _your_ master branch you 're fuddling
| with.
| taeric wrote:
| The difference here will almost certainly come down to how you
| release your work? For product based teams that have a very
| specific place to plant the tag of what was released,
| development branches reflect their ability to know exactly what
| has been shipped to customers.
|
| And this is more than just knowing the exact commit. Which,
| fair, that that is all that you truly need.
|
| Having it on a branch, though, reflects that hot fixes and
| similar can still be applied, and though the tag will remain at
| what was released, the branch will be what it currently looks
| like.
| pragma_x wrote:
| I can't say that I've used gitflow in hate. That said, I always
| saw the full complexity of the approach to address tracking
| multiple concurrent releases of a product. It's extremely
| uncommon in our increasingly SaaS world, but I imagine having
| so many branches with commits moving laterally between them to
| be invaluable for backporting security fixes and the like.
|
| For the rest of us, trunk-based development with feature/fix
| branches is more than enough.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| having a main branch allows a casual observer(management) to
| browse your project in the gui and see what is currently live.
|
| I like the opportunity to force a second set of testing, and
| code review. Especially if the team is big enough that you can
| have different people doing code review for each branch.
|
| You can also have your CI/CD do longer more thorough testing
| while merging to main vs development.
|
| If it's a project with a single deployment, version tagging is
| kind of pointless, it's much easier to just use a branch to
| reflect what is live, and roll back to a merge commit if you
| have to. Then you can still merge directly to main in the event
| of a hotfix.
| nazcan wrote:
| > having a main branch allows a casual observer(management)
| to browse your project in the gui and see what is currently
| live.
|
| I never found this very compelling. What is main in that
| world is not the source of truth, and it's rare to have a
| system atomically in one state or the other - but normally
| there are progressive rollouts. And if you ever need to
| rollback in production, I assume no one is changing where
| main is.
|
| > I like the opportunity to force a second set of testing,
| and code review. Especially if the team is big enough that
| you can have different people doing code review for each
| branch.
|
| To be explicit for code review, do you mean there is (1)
| main, (1) development, and then a bunch feature branches -
| and that there is review when merging into development and
| main? Having a two-tiered review process seems extremely
| difficult to do - versus just having more reviewers on the
| first merge - especially dealing with merge conflicts and
| needing to merge again into development.
|
| > You can also have your CI/CD do longer more thorough
| testing while merging to main vs development.
|
| I think it's fair to do more testing later. I think the
| equivalent I'm used to (which is pretty close, so not a huge
| difference), is only building releases from the commit that
| passed the bigger/slower tests.
|
| But also, assuming there are multiple deployments coming from
| one repo, if you block merging into main, that means you'd be
| blocking on all tests passing - while release branches for a
| given product can select a subset of tests when deciding on
| release candidates.
|
| > If it's a project with a single deployment, version tagging
| is kind of pointless, it's much easier to just use a branch
| to reflect what is live, and roll back to a merge commit if
| you have to. Then you can still merge directly to main in the
| event of a hotfix.
|
| I think it's worth maintaining the flexibility of how many
| releases come from a repo. Needing to fork repos just because
| you want another deployable release in the future seems
| painful to me.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _I never found this very compelling. What is main in that
| world is not the source of truth, and it 's rare to have a
| system atomically in one state or the other - but normally
| there are progressive rollouts. And if you ever need to
| rollback in production, I assume no one is changing where
| main is._
|
| In the scenarios I am thinking of, the _only_ way to
| rollback production is to update the main branch and
| redeploy.
|
| But still, it's just the niceness of having the default
| branch match production or the current release. Even if
| you're not going through the extra code review or testing,
| and all you did was automatically point main to the same
| commit as the latest release tag, it's still nice. Of
| course, you could have a production branch or whatever, set
| that as your default, and leave main for development, but
| the point is the same.
|
| _To be explicit for code review, do you mean there is (1)
| main, (1) development, and then a bunch feature branches -
| and that there is review when merging into development and
| main? Having a two-tiered review process seems extremely
| difficult to do - versus just having more reviewers on the
| first merge - especially dealing with merge conflicts and
| needing to merge again into development._
|
| Yes, but merge conflicts are not an issue at all if you
| don't squash commits on merge, atleast not between
| development and main. The way we used to do it, was each
| part of the project had owners with one required to review
| all changes before merging to development, then any other
| senior developer could review the merge to main. Though, we
| would encourage the whole team to review every PR if they
| had time.
|
| In practice, this was really just a chance to see all the
| changes going in on this next release.
|
| _I think it 's worth maintaining the flexibility of how
| many releases come from a repo. Needing to fork repos just
| because you want another deployable release in the future
| seems painful to me._
|
| When the development team is also the operations team it's
| easier to keep them together and just update the deployment
| to go to multiple places, which would effectively still be
| a single deployment.
|
| If they're separate teams, then I would be inclined to give
| operations it's own repo where they can manage their
| specific things. With a pipeline that pulls down the
| artifacts from the development team.
| keithnz wrote:
| The branching strategy we use is features are branched off
| master, as features are finished we then pick what ones we want
| to bundle into a release, create a release branch from master,
| merge features into it, we go through QA, when that release is
| ready, we merge to master. Meanwhile new features are still
| being worked on based off master. This works really well as it
| gives you a lot of control over when things get released and
| manage testing impact / user impact. This also makes it really
| easy to back out of a feature without it polluting a "develop"
| branch that other features have branched off. All features are
| based on code that is actually deployed.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| nvie said as much in 2020 and stuck a big disclaimer at the top
| of the post https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-
| model/
| bob1029 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I think the hate is more about the fact that nobody gave enough
| of a damn to catch the error before it went public...
| AshleysBrain wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| If you actually care about having that sort of discussion I'd
| suggest a framing that doesn't paint anyone that doesn't agree
| with you as succumbing to AI hype and believing it has "galaxy
| brain intelligence". Please ditch this false dichotomy. At this
| point, in 2026, it's tiring.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| jll29 wrote:
| ChatGPT was a research prototype thrown at end users as a
| "product".
|
| It is not a carefully designed product; ask yourself "What
| is it FOR?".
|
| But the identification of reliable sources isn't as easy as
| you may think, either. A chat-based interaction really
| makes most sense if you can rely on every answer, otherwise
| the user is misled and user and conversation may go in a
| wrong direction. The previous search paradigm ("ten
| snippets + links") did not project the confidence that
| turns out is not grounded in truth that the chat paradigm
| does.
| zephen wrote:
| I have to say, I suffer from _both_ problems, just not
| simultaneously.
|
| Depending on what I am searching for, and how important it
| is to me to verify the accuracy and provenance of the
| result, I might stop at the AI, or might find, as you have,
| that there is no there there.
|
| But, no matter what, the AI is essentially reducing the
| ability of primary sources to monetize their work. In the
| case where the search stops at the AI, obviously no traffic
| (except for incessant LLM polling) goes to the primary
| source.
|
| And in the case you describe, identical traffic (your
| search) is routed to _multiple_ sources, so if one of them
| actually was the source of something you were interested
| in, they effectively wind up sharing revenue with other
| sources, because the value of every one of your clicks is
| reduced by how often you click.
| jll29 wrote:
| Of course Google has a history of copying articles in whole
| (cf. Google Cache, eventually abandoned).
| nicbou wrote:
| Yes, and it's slowly killing those websites. Mine is among
| them and the loss in traffic is around 60%.
| Andrex wrote:
| Snippets were already getting Google in legal hot water (with
| Yelp in the US and news agencies in Australia in particular
| IIRC) long before LLMs and AI scraping. It's a debatable gray
| area of Fair Use growing out of early rulings on DMCA related
| cases, and also Google's win over the Author's Guild at
| SCOTUS.
| ezst wrote:
| > What if code generation is copy-pasting GPL-licensed code in
| to your proprietary codebase?
|
| This is obviously a big, unanswered, issue. It's pretty clear
| to me that we are collectively incentivised to pollute the
| well, and that it happens for long-enough for everything to
| become "compromised". That's essentially abandoning opensource
| and IP licensing at large, taking us to an unchartered era
| where intellectual works become the protected property of
| nobody.
|
| I see chatbots having less an impact on our societies than the
| above, and interestingly it has little to do with technology.
| zephen wrote:
| > we are collectively incentivised to pollute the well
|
| Honestly, there are two diametrically opposed incentives
| occurring right now. The one you describe may not even be
| paramount -- how hard is it to prove infringement, shepherd a
| case through court, and win a token amount. Is it worthwhile
| just to enrich a few lawyers, and get more AI-regurgitated
| slop to open up?
|
| The second incentive is to not publish source code that might
| be vacuumed up by a completely amoral automaton. We may be
| seeing the second golden age of proprietary software.
| asddubs wrote:
| Here's the page with the diagram on it:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250908220945/https://learn.mic...
| eurekin wrote:
| It'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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| No need to worry, that's what the B Ark is for.
| flir wrote:
| Acceleranco is looking rather prescient right now.
| nicbou wrote:
| Fall or Dodge in Hell too
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well 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 wrote:
| Microsoft 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 wrote:
| Continvoucly! Well morged.
| ftchd wrote:
| is this the HN version of "mogged my frame"?
| My_Name wrote:
| Of 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| jabron wrote:
| It'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.
| emmanuel_1234 wrote:
| See https://archive.is/twft6 for context. The diagram is a bit
| lower on the page.
| QuiCasseRien wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The 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...
| hansmayer wrote:
| Nothing delightful of funny here mate. Imagine being a junior
| just starting out reading that shitty piece of content, trying
| to make sense of it all?
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Morg doesn't seem to be a word in English (though it is in
| Irish!), but it sounds like it should be.
|
| Maybe because English also has 'morgue'.
| neonihil wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| Never forget V is for carrot. https://i.redd.it/gj6tf34vkzcg1.png
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any
| ambition, to put it gently. _Microsoft unworthy_.
|
| well, what should i say...
| imglorp wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| For 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-
| generate...
|
| <vomit emoji here>
| Mixtape wrote:
| Great. 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/microsof...
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| we'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.
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