15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

by cheeaun • 5 months ago

1047 393 5 months ago

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Morged I got nothing...

You apparently did not read the article. "Morged" is a word the LLM that ripped off the article author's diagram hallucinated.

aobdev• 5 months ago

Check the article, AI interpreted the phrase “continuously merged” as “continvoucly morged”

tra3• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

we are also stressed, scared for our jobs and bombarded by constant distraction

jezzamon• 5 months ago

"continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what happened, it's poetic

alex_suzuki3• 5 months ago

It's the sound of speaking when someone is stuffing AI down your throat.

FeistySkink• 5 months ago

Part of the VC/CM pipeline.

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Was reading the word morged thinking it was some new slang I hadn't heard of. Incredible.

adityaathalye2• 5 months ago

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"

thebruce87m• 5 months ago

I propose:

Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your repo.

nvader2• 5 months ago

If it wasn't before, it will be now.

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

Missed opportunity: 'morgued'.

ares6233• 5 months ago

"Babe, wake up. New verb for slop just dropped."

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

arduanika5• 5 months ago

Quiet! MSFT's damage control team does not want us to embiggen the incident.

bw86• 5 months ago

I am waiting for Raymond Chen to post a "Microspeak: Morged" blog post.

arduanika5• 5 months ago

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.

jimmaswell3• 5 months ago

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.

zephen7• 5 months ago

I can't believe all the mockery here.

The AI thinks it "convincingly morphed" the original, and instead of coaching it to do better next time, all you people are merciless.

AIs have feelings too, you know!

I, for one, welcome our new overlords, and I would never, ever, ever say or do anything to intimate that they are less than perfect, or that they are not getting even better every day.

crap101• 5 months ago

Xebia slogan should be "Xebia, Morging Tomorrow with AI Today"

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/commit/e0af64352c7fdb...

cap11235• 5 months ago

Cleaned up image

As the commit message. Heh.

CGamesPlay• 5 months ago

Wow, the original was actually the real diagram at a thumbnail-quality resolution, so this was an AI upscaling or something like that.

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f...

nippoo• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

zephen7• 5 months ago

Is it truly possible to make GitFlow look worse than reality?

quietbritishjim3• 5 months ago

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.

shaky-carrousel3• 5 months ago

And that's what they dared to show to the public. I shudder thinking about the state of their code...

heresie-dabord• 5 months ago

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"?

duxup2• 5 months ago

It really is wild / telling how fundamentally AI can screw up what seems like just basics like ... an arrow.

rzmmm• 5 months ago

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

pjc503• 5 months ago

Remember, mass copyright infringement is prosecuted if you're Aaron Schwartz but legal if you're an AI megacorp.

coldpie2• 5 months ago

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.

jimmaswell3• 5 months ago

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.

franktankbank2• 5 months ago

TIMMMAYYY

fooyc• 5 months ago

Apparently the new diagram is now a rip off of another one from Atlassian: https://bsky.app/profile/vurobinut.bsky.social/post/3mf52hmw...

spydr2• 5 months ago

Also found here

https://techhub.saworks.io/docs/intermediate-github-tutorial...

bayindirh• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

ChristianJacobs2• 5 months ago

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...

ozim2• 5 months ago

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.

wiseowise3• 5 months ago

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.

close04• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Of course they aren't. The text to go with those diagrams is also machine generated.

layer83• 5 months ago

The comment you’re replying to already stated that.

kshri242• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

marginalia_nu3• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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

gzread• 5 months ago

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.

epiccoleman• 5 months ago

Minecraft JAVA --------> C++

that one gave me an actual lol.

Andrex3• 5 months ago

LinkedIn and GitHub, hmm. Wonder if there's a common thread...

tveita• 5 months ago

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".

bitwize2• 5 months ago

I love it when the LLM said "it's morgin' time" and proceeded to morg all over the place.

ares6233• 5 months ago

One step closer to the Redditification of HN. And it is entirely because the content out there nowadays.

debugnik2• 5 months ago

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.

nxobject3• 5 months ago

Ha, I think a user since 2007’s earned the right to do that once in a while.

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

Please let morged become a thing.

ares6233• 5 months ago

Satya yelled "it's morgin' time" and then morged all over the place.

zephen7• 5 months ago

If you've got the tiന്ന, we've got the morge.

rossant• 5 months ago

A mix between merged, morphed, and morgue. I love it. Should be nominated as word of 2026.

jjgreen• 5 months ago

Morge it! Morge it and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

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_suzuki3• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Most content will be less known and the enslopified version more obfuscated...

Please everyone: spell 'enslopified', with two 'p's - ensloppiified.

Signed, Minority Report Pedant

tkocmathla• 5 months ago

And 3 'i's?

usefulposter• 5 months ago

Hey, it's just like the Gas Town diagrams.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045

dude250711• 5 months ago

I only now understand it's the other kind of 'gas'.

zkmon• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Indeed. I don't remember all the details of the flow but the aesthetics of the diagram are still stuck in my head.

adzm• 5 months ago

Till next 'tim'

It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says tiന്ന

zahlman4• 5 months ago

For the curious:

  $ python -c 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "ന്ന")))'
  ['MALAYALAM LETTER NA', 'MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA', 'MALAYALAM LETTER NA']

(The "pypyp" package, by Python core dev and mypy maintainer Shantanu Jain, makes this easier:)

  $ pyp 'map(unicodedata.name, "ന്ന")'
  MALAYALAM LETTER NA
  MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA
  MALAYALAM LETTER NA

chromehearts• 5 months ago

Billions must morge

reddalo• 5 months ago

Developors, developors, developors, developors!

whirlwin• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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 MɅPS, for example). Thankfully the storefront allowed me to return it for a refund, I ordered from a different seller on the second try, and this time I received a rug that precisely matched the image on the storefront. But yes, there are unscrupulous merchants who are using AI to sloppily copy other people's work.

fnands• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

coldpie2• 5 months ago

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.

zephen7• 5 months ago

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

marssaxman3• 5 months ago

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.

zahlman4• 5 months ago

Yes, but from OP's perspective this is a distinction without a difference.

marssaxman3• 5 months ago

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.

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

How you commit plagiarism is less important than the fact that you commit plagiarism.

marssaxman3• 5 months ago

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.

anonymous9082134• 5 months ago

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.

adityaathalye2• 5 months ago

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

tabs_or_spaces• 5 months ago

An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild

yborg• 5 months ago

post morgem

thunfischtoast• 5 months ago

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

nhinck2• 5 months ago

It's not just throwing QA out, they are actively striving for lower quality because it saves money.

They're chasing that sweet cost reduction by making cheap steel without regard for what it'll be used for in the future.

bonesss• 5 months ago

Just a thought: the timeline of the vibe techs rolling out and the timeline of increasing product rot, sloppiness, and user-hostile “has anyone ever actually used this shit!?!” coming out of MS overlap.

Vibing won’t help out at all, and years from now we’re gonna have project math on why 10x-LLM-ing mediocre devs on a busted project that’s behind schedule isn’t the play (like how adding more devs to a late project generally makes it more late). But it takes years for those failures to aggregate and spread up the stack.

I believe the vibing is highlighting the missteps from the wave right before which has been cloud-first, cloud-integrated, cloud-upselling that cannibalized MS’s core products, multiplied by the massive MS layoff waves. MS used to have a lot of devs that made a lot of culture who are simply gone. The weakened offerings, breakdown of vision, and platform enshittification have been obvious for a while. And then ChatGPT came.

Stock price reflects how attractive stocks are for stock purchasers on the stock market, not how good something is. MS has been doing great things for their stock price.

LLMs make getting into emacs and Linux and OSS and OCaml easier than ever. SteamOS is maturing. Windows Subsytem for Linux is a mature bridge. It’s a bold time for MS to be betting on brand loyalty and product love, even if their shit worked.

nxobject3• 5 months ago

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

InvisibleUp• 5 months ago

I’d also love a post-mortem on their guide to pirating the entire Harry Potter series for AI use. (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlv...)

I’ve lost trust in anything Microsoft publishes anymore.

theolivenbaum• 5 months ago

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

xxr2• 5 months ago

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

prmoustache• 5 months ago

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

Ortho and grammar errors should have been corrected, but do you really expect a review process to identify that a diagram is a copy from another one some rando already published on the internet years ago?

clort• 5 months ago

plenty of people on the internet recognised it immediately, so sure, he may have been a rando when he created it, but not so much 15 years later..

pointlessone• 5 months ago

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.

logifail• 5 months ago

Shouldn't "where are we sourcing our content" be part of any publication review process?

sznio• 5 months ago

No. I'd expect that "continvouclous morging" gets caught.

michaelt• 5 months ago

Here is the original: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Here is the slop copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251205141857/https://learn.mic...

The 'Time' axis points the wrong way, and is misspelled, using a non-existent letter - 'Tim' where the m has an extra hump.

It's pretty clear this wasn't reviewed at all.

ahoka• 5 months ago

Yes. This is expected at any serious company as intellectual property violations can have serious consequences.

beart• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.)

GrinningFool2• 5 months ago

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_ing6• 5 months ago

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

anonymous9082134• 5 months ago

I suggested that if there is no review process, it is a systemic issue, and that if there is a review process that failed to catch something this egregious, it is a systemic issue. My supposition is that regardless of how the publishing process works, there is a systemic failure here, and I made no claims as to how it actually works, so I'm not sure where the "you're incorrect on how it works" is coming from.

RobotToaster• 5 months ago

I've seen better review processes in hobby projects

scwoodal• 5 months ago

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.

7bit• 5 months ago

Any excuse that tries to play down its own fault by pointing out other companies also have faults, is dishonest.

And that's exactly what happened here.

hansmayer4• 5 months ago

This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should.

Completely with you on this, plus I would add following thoughts:

I don't think the size of the company should automatically be a proxy measure for a certain level of quality. Surely you can have slobs prevailing in a company of any size.

However - this kind of mistake should not be happening in a valuable company. Microsoft is currently still priced as a very valuable company, even with the significant corrections post Satyas crazy CapEx commitments from 2 weeks ago.

However it seems recently the mistakes, errors and "vendors without guidelines" pile up a bit too much for a supposedly 3-4T USD worth company, culminating in this weird random but very educational case. If anything, it's indicator that Microsoft may not really be as valuable as it is currently still perceived.

HelloNurse3• 5 months ago

"everything is moving very fast"

Then slow down.

With this objective lack or control, sooner or later your LLM experiments in production will drive into a wall instead of hitting a little pothole like this diagram.

embedding-shape4• 5 months ago

And at the same time, they have time to quickly brush it off with "looks like a vendor" even though people are still investigating. Yes, we can see it's moving really fast, probably "move fast break things" been infecting Microsoft, users are leaving Microsoft behind because everything is breaking then clueless VPs blame it on moving too fast?

wiseowise3• 5 months ago

Jokes on you, I’ll cash out by then and move to the next gig.

leni5362• 5 months ago

- Put on your seatbelts, man!

- I can't, moving too fast!

tremon4• 5 months ago

"Driving into a wall" is still a positive outcome. It's just as likely to drive into a crowd.

Anon4Now• 5 months ago

everything is moving very fast right now

Now that's an interesting comment for him to include. The cynic in me could find / can think of lots of reasons from my YouTube feed as to why that might be so. What else is going on at Microsoft that could cause this sense of urgency?

mcny• 5 months ago

My guess is there is some communication going out to every "manager", even the M1, that says this is your priority.

For example, I know of an unrelated mandate Microsoft has for its management. Anything security team analysis flags in code that you or your team owns must be fixed or somehow acceptably mitigated within the deadline specified. It doesn't matter if it is Newton soft json being "vulnerable" and the entire system is only built for use by msft employees. If you let this deadline slip, you have to explain yourself and might lose your bonus.

Ok so the remediation for the Newton soft case is easy enough that it is worth doing but the point is I have a conspiracy theory that internally msft has such a memo (yes, beyond what is publicly disclosed) going to all managers saying they must adopt copilot, whatever copilot means.

BearOso• 5 months ago

From the beginning, one of the advertising tricks they have used for AI is FOMO. I presume that is so they can sell you as much of it as they can before you realize its flaws.

Everybody's so worried about getting in on the ground floor of something that they don't even imagine it could be a massive flop.

reisse• 5 months ago

This excuse is hollow to me. In an organization of this size, it takes multiple people screwing up for a failure to reach the public, or at least it should.

Only if this is considered a failure.

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

flurdy• 5 months ago

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

qingcharles• 5 months ago

Scott is definitely one of the good guys.

16bytes• 5 months ago

I thought the same thing. Scott is basically CEO of devrel at Microsoft.

Maybe we're of a different age to remember when Scott was super influential as a blogger / conference speaker, but even now he's not some random VP.

mcv2• 5 months ago

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

ezst2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Glorp 5.3 Fast Thinking actually steals this diagram correctly for me locally so I think everyone here is wrong

Balinares2• 5 months ago

I may have a new favorite HN comment.

Longwelwind• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

It's microsoft's AI though, not even the totally crazed evangelists like that one.

shaky-carrousel3• 5 months ago

You're holding the LLM wrong.

nicbou5• 5 months ago

It's about as easy to hold as an old foam mattress

dotdi• 5 months ago

I guess this image generation feature should never have been continvoucly morged back into their slop machine

AndroTux• 5 months ago

“It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.”

Seems to be perfectly on brand for Microsoft, I don’t see the issue.

blibble2• 5 months ago

LLM infested crap, directly pushed to customers without any pushback

so standard Microslop

yokoprime• 5 months ago

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.

zahlman4• 5 months ago

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.

blibble2• 5 months ago

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)

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.

lmao where has the author been?! this has been the quintessential Microsoft experience since windows 7, or maybe even XP...

jron• 5 months ago

Morged > Oneshotted

zahlman4• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

If we are here, lets at least coin it for something relevant!

Animats• 5 months ago

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.

nxobject3• 5 months ago

recently saw a fake documentary about the famous GG-1 locomotive

It wouldn’t happen to be a certain podcast about engineering disasters, now, would it?

tovej• 5 months ago

Well there's your problem? That one always seemed very well researched to me.

appointment• 5 months ago

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.

pjc503• 5 months ago

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.

oytis• 5 months ago

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.

nancyminusone2• 5 months ago

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.

dh2022• 5 months ago

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.

nkrisc• 5 months ago

Same thing happened to me, a fake Feynman video that seemed really off after only a few seconds.

The more AI shit I see, the more I find myself agreeing with the Luddites and the Amish.

rolymath• 5 months ago

Yep. I had the same experience. Except for me, it was someone I've never heard of read before, so I was none the wiser and assumed it was real. 30 minutes in I go "man this guy is really shit there's no way he should have this much credit" and I check the description and it says the same "based on X".

WesolyKubeczek• 5 months ago

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”.

nvader2• 5 months ago

I read through all the proposals in this discussion and I like yours the best out of them.

Seconded!

xxr2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

At least it wasn't mogged, or morbed...

crossroadsguy• 5 months ago

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 crème de crème users?

OJFord• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

People still try to use @user all the time, even though it doesn't work.

GreenWatermelon2• 5 months ago

The blogpost is most certainly AI-written.

beeflet• 5 months ago

Developer BRUTALLY FRAME-MORGED by Microsoft AI

aftergibson• 5 months ago

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?

anonymous9082134• 5 months ago

readers don’t have time to read properly
So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads

I'd note that the documentation may have been read and noticed as flawed, but some random person noticing that it's flawed is just going to sigh, shake their heads, and move on. I've certainly been frustrated by inadequate documentation before (that describes the majority of all documentation, in my experience), but I don't make a point of raising a fuss about it because I'm busy trying to figure out how to actually accomplish the goal for which I was reading documentation for rather than stopping what I'm doing to make a complaint about how bad the documentation is.

This says nothing to absolve everyone involved in publishing it, of course. The craft of software engineering is indeed in a very sorry state, and this offers just one tiny glimpse into the flimsiness of the house of cards.

LauraMedia2• 5 months ago

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.

LauraMedia2• 5 months ago

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.

AlexeyBelov• 5 months ago

They are not assuming everyone would do that.

mns• 5 months ago

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.

raphman2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Everything you publish now on will be stolen and reused one way or another.

amdivia2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

amdivia2• 5 months ago

I mean he still does say "and ship it as your own" and he mentioned plagiarism too, all of which made me perplexed initially

sixeyes• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

What's dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own.

"Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity". I bet someone just typed into ChatGPT/Copilot, "generate a Git flow diagram," and it searched the web, found your image, and decided to recreate it by using as a reference (there's probably something in the reasoning traces like, "I found a relevant image, but the user specifically asked me to generate one, so I'll create my own version now.") The person creating the documentation didn't bother to check...

Or maybe the image was already in the weights.

kuhaku222• 5 months ago

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.

kshri242• 5 months ago

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!

hansmayer4• 5 months ago

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).

pjc503• 5 months ago

Automatic Soldier Sveijk.

cjs_ac2• 5 months ago

The weakest point in any computer system is the bag of meat operating the thing.

nananana9• 5 months ago

Can we stop calling humans "bags of meat"?

nicbou5• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently.

That pretty much describes Microsoft and all they do. Money can't buy taste.

He was right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdlJlHAAbQ

shaky-carrousel3• 5 months ago

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.

LOL, I disagree. It's very on brand for Microslop.

tombert2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Is there a single thing that Microsoft doesn’t half-ass?

Nope.

TFA writes this: "The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy".

But I disagree: it's classic Microsoft.

I have been having oodles of headaches dealing with exFAT not being journaled and having to engineer around it. It’s annoying because exFAT is basically the only filesystem used on SD cards since it’s basically the only filesystem that’s compatible with everything.

I hear you. exFAT works on Mac, Linux and Windows. I use it too, when forced. Note that bad old vfat also still works everywhere

tombert2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own.

I don’t even care about AI or not here. That’s like copying someone’s work, badly, and either not understanding or not giving a shit that it’s wrong? I’m not sure which of those two is worse.

m12k• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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-shape4• 5 months ago

Whenever you merge something into master, it kind of blocks the next release until its (non-continuous) QA is done.

That's what tags are for, QA tests the tagged release, then that gets released. Master can continue changing up until the next tag, then QA has another thing to test.

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

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.

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

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.

mort963• 5 months ago

What's the difference between what you describe, and continuously merging things into main and cutting releases from a branch called stable?

secretazianman8• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

layer83• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Prod deployments usually have a tag associated

iainmerrick• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

mort963• 5 months ago

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?

whoknowsidont7• 5 months ago

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.

whurley23• 5 months ago

I'm in an environment where the work consist of multiple streams. There are long running tasks, major features that can go for months, require multiple rounds of review and approval, and a sustained amp of back-and-forth. Then there are smaller ones that are typically accomplishable within a typical iteration time period. And then you have hot fixes, security or emergency changes.

These all have separate QA, integration, and release timelines that can -- and often do -- change during the process. As a result, what goes into any given release is sometimes being changed almost right up until we hit the button. Having the ability to roll a release branch from different feature branches and not get miscellaneous work from things that aren't ready is important.

Now, this could also be done with clever use of feature flags, but the platform doesn't play nicely with that concept. Plus, then there would be the work of going back and removing them or leaving in place a mess of conditional statements littered around.

Doing it in version control is architecturally simpler, integrates better with our task and version management tools and is easier to standardize on. There is a cost in how to handle merge conflicts, but that is manageable and can be offset by good task planning and careful work. And the occasional reset

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

bandrami2• 5 months ago

The model works well if you're developing version 3.2 (which is not ready yet) but also non-trivially maintaining 3.1.

tremon4• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

"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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

dec0dedab0de2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

keithnz• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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/

fooker• 5 months ago

What you described works when you have small repo with a few developers.

Unfortunately the trend nowadays is towards giant monorepos with many many people changing random things.

GuB-42• 5 months ago

The only thing that you seem to argue about is the naming of the branches.

If you call the git-flow "develop" branch "master" and the "master" branch "release-tags" it will be exactly as you describe. The names of the branches don't really matter in practice, so much that they could just decide to use "main" instead of "master" by default without much problems.

Maybe what bothers you is that you have a branch for tags, yeah, that's an extra level of indirection, but this lets you separate between user facing information in the master branch commits and developer facing information in the release branches commits.

Having the master (default) branch only contain releases let users who pull the project without knowledge of the process get a release version and not a possibly broken development version, which I think is nice.

Anyways, these are just details, I don't think the "git gods" (Linus) care about how you organize your project. There is only one sacred rule I am aware of: don't destroy other people history. Public branches you pushed that others have pulled is other people history.

creshal• 5 months ago

Maybe what bothers you is that you have a branch for tags, yeah, that's an extra level of indirection, but this lets you separate between user facing information in the master branch commits and developer facing information in the release branches commits.

That's such a marginal niche use case to build your entire organization around… why would you make this the default approach?

db48x• 5 months ago

Many, probably most, projects do exactly that. But if you do want a branch where every commit is a merge between the previous release and the current release then it really doesn’t matter whether you call it master or anything else. The names are irrelevant, as long as everyone understands their purpose.

just69796• 5 months ago

The dev branch can be useful with larger team sizes where there might be lots of overlapping work being done. Or a shop that isn't fully into automated continuous delivery, ie: a human needs to press the button to actually deploy to prod. Not unheard of for high security things or anything where the accountability chain needs to be very explicit. The dev branch allows you to go full CI-CD-automation-everywhere to get changes into dev/sandbox deployment quickly, and then once it's fully and completely vetted there it can be merged to main and deployed to prod.

It can certainly be done without the dev branch, but you usually end up with lots of extra rules around merges and [ab]uses tags like branches in weird way. And it's way harder to revert things if it comes down to that. In short, if you need a semi-waterfall, less devops-ish, release process, the dev branch can assist that. If not, then it's just extra merges to manage and adds a bunch of work on keeping things in sync, especially with any kind of hotfixes in the picture.

bob1029• 5 months ago

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-io2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

Gigachad2• 5 months ago

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.

AlienRobot2• 5 months ago

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?

jll292• 5 months ago

Of course Google has a history of copying articles in whole (cf. Google Cache, eventually abandoned).

nicbou5• 5 months ago

Yes, and it's slowly killing those websites. Mine is among them and the loss in traffic is around 60%.

Andrex3• 5 months ago

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.

ezst2• 5 months ago

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.

zephen7• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Here's the page with the diagram on it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250908220945/https://learn.mic...

eurekin• 5 months ago

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.

jacquesm6• 5 months ago

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.

nicbou5• 5 months ago

Is there even a goal here beyond "generating content"?

This is the part that hurts. It's all so pointless, so perfunctory. A web of incentives run amok. Systems too slick to stop moving. Is this what living inside the paperclip maximizer feels like?

Words we didn't write, thoughts we didn't have, for engagement, for a media presence, for an audience you can peddle yourself to when your bullshit job gets automated. All of that technology, all those resources, and we use it to drown humanity in noise.

floating-io2• 5 months ago

No need to worry, that's what the B Ark is for.

flir• 5 months ago

Acceleranco is looking rather prescient right now.

nicbou5• 5 months ago

Fall or Dodge in Hell too

hansmayer4• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

Continvoucly! Well morged.

ftchd• 5 months ago

is this the HN version of "mogged my frame"?

My_Name• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

See https://archive.is/twft6 for context. The diagram is a bit lower on the page.

QuiCasseRien• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

andai2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

andai2• 5 months ago

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...

hansmayer4• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.

I'd argue that this statement is perfectly true when the word "unworthy" is removed.

munificent• 5 months ago

What's dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone's carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own.

We should start calling this "copyright laundering".

1970-01-01• 5 months ago

Never forget V is for carrot. https://i.redd.it/gj6tf34vkzcg1.png

4ggr0• 5 months ago

It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy.

well, what should i say...

imglorp• 5 months ago

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.

duxup2• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

This isn't a case ... It's the opposite of that. It's taking something that ...

"Its not this its that" is the new em-dash.

alex_suzuki3• 5 months ago

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...

Mixtape• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

andOlga• 5 months ago

Replacing E's with O's is, somehow, also an issue with OCR as old as time. Remember seeing a bootleg Family Guy (?) DVD going around some years back where ovory songlo vowol wos o on tho synopsos on tho bock.

theK• 5 months ago

Interesting how Microsoft came up twice about ai slop documentation today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067759

spydr2• 5 months ago

It actually revered the direction of the time

thisOtterBeGood• 5 months ago

Whats the problem with that diagram? It's fine for me. I've been morging all morning now, so many conflucts in my brinches, but I've managed it with this diagram.

just69796• 5 months ago

I don't think they "ran it through an AI image generator" to scrub it, I think someone asked an LLM for a description of a git branching model with an image to go along with it. Since there is _a lot_ on the web about GitFlow, it makes sense that the model would get connected to those embeddings, and of course the image is going to be connected as well.

I think this just show how plaigarize-y LLMs are. There has been a lot recently about how easy it is to get a model to generate entire books to 98%, and this shows how the same can be done with images. Prompt it the right way, and you can get shitty copies of anything it was trained on. Really shows how little (none?) new content is actually being created, and how much is basically just lossy compression (with really noisy decompression) of the training corpus.

rasz• 5 months ago

I don't think they "ran it through an AI image generator" to scrub it

I mean they do have original in the repo https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/learn/blob/c266367ec0eb1f7f...

GreenWatermelon2• 5 months ago

The first post this guy has written in years and it's LLM/AI Written.

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.

Here we see "not just x" pattern combined with 3-items list. The closing short quip, and an emdash despite the author never having used them in any of his older posts, even the one from 2021. I don't know of he told an LLM to generate a post for the irony effect, or if he just couldn't be bothered to write.

In his (or his LMM's) own words:

obviously AI-slop-y enough

Proper AI slop.

15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

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