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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

https://nvie.com/posts/15-years-later/
217•cheeaun•1h ago

Comments

pwndByDeath•1h ago
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Morged I got nothing...
ChristianJacobs•1h ago
You apparently did not read the article. "Morged" is a word the LLM that ripped off the article author's diagram hallucinated.
aobdev•1h ago
Check the article, AI interpreted the phrase “continuously merged” as “continvoucly morged”
tra3•1h 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•1h ago
we are also stressed, scared for our jobs and bombarded by constant distraction
jezzamon•1h ago
"continvoucly morged" is such a perfect phrase to describe what happened, it's poetic
alex_suzuki•1h ago
It's the sound of speaking when someone is stuffing AI down your throat.
FeistySkink•1h ago
Part of the VC/CM pipeline.
ChrisArchitect•57m ago
Was reading the word morged thinking it was some new slang I hadn't heard of. Incredible.
adityaathalye•36m 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•19m ago
I propose:

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

Balinares•10m ago
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.

ares623•45m ago
"Babe, wake up. New verb for slop just dropped."

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

nippoo•1h 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•19m 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.

zephen•12m ago
Is it truly possible to make GitFlow look worse than reality?
quietbritishjim•6m 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.
bayindirh•1h 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•1h 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.

ChristianJacobs•1h 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...
ozim•34m 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.

bitwize•1h ago
I love it when the LLM said "it's morgin' time" and proceeded to morg all over the place.
ares623•43m ago
One step closer to the Redditification of HN. And it is entirely because the content out there nowadays.
debugnik•23m 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.

theodric•13m ago
HN is a Serious Place. We're here to make money. Please leave your jokes at home.
bitwize•12m ago
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•8m ago
Well spotted, I guess they're pushing for HN's redditification then.
nxobject•12m ago
Ha, I think a user since 2007’s earned the right to do that once in a while.
Brian_K_White•1h ago
Please let morged become a thing.
ares623•44m ago
Satya yelled "it's morgin' time" and then morged all over the place.
zephen•9m ago
If you've got the tiന്ന, we've got the morge.
alex_suzuki•1h 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•54m 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•30m ago
And 3 'i's?
usefulposter•1h ago
Hey, it's just like the Gas Town diagrams.

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

zkmon•1h 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•15m 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•1h ago
> Till next 'tim'

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

chromehearts•51m ago
Billions must morge
whirlwin•46m 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...

rmunn•43m 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.
zephen•43m 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

marssaxman•41m 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.

anonymous908213•41m 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.

adityaathalye•39m ago
Oldest trick in the book... Shoot the vendor.
tabs_or_spaces•33m ago
An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild
yborg•22m ago
post morgem
thunfischtoast•30m 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•5m 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.

nxobject•16m ago
A postmortem for that but not Copilot in notepad.exe? Priorities…
theolivenbaum•9m 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...
xxr•5m ago
Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?
prmoustache•4m 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?

ezst•35m 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•29m ago
Glorp 5.3 Fast Thinking actually steals this diagram correctly for me locally so I think everyone here is wrong
Balinares•14m ago
I may have a new favorite HN comment.
dotdi•31m ago
I guess this image generation feature should never have been continvoucly morged back into their slop machine
poojagill•27m ago
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
AndroTux•26m 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.

yokoprime•21m 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.
zahlman•6m 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.

isoprophlex•17m 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•15m ago
Morged > Oneshotted
zahlman•11m 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•4m ago
If we are here, lets at least coin it for something relevant!
Animats•11m 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.

nxobject•3m 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?

WesolyKubeczek•3m 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”.

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