brb, printing a t-shirt that says "continvoucly morged"
Morge: when an AI agent is attempting to merge slop into your repo.
Do your part to keep GitHub from mutating into SourceMorge.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
That this was ever published shows a supreme lack of care.
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.
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.
I use block option there quite a lot. That cleans up my experience rather well.
Edit: Apparently you didn't.
> 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
Please everyone: spell 'enslopified', with two 'p's - ensloppiified.
Signed, Minority Report Pedant
It took me a few times to see the morged version actually says tiന്ന
$ python -c 'print(list(map(__import__("unicodedata").name, "ന്ന")))'
['MALAYALAM LETTER NA', 'MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA', 'MALAYALAM LETTER NA']
$ pyp 'map(unicodedata.name, "ന്ന")'
MALAYALAM LETTER NA
MALAYALAM SIGN VIRAMA
MALAYALAM LETTER NARef: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r1tphx/microso...
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.
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.
> 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.
They're chasing that sweet cost reduction by making cheap steel without regard for what it'll be used for in the future.
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?
And that's exactly what happened here.
Seems to be perfectly on brand for Microsoft, I don’t see the issue.
so standard Microslop
> 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.
lmao where has the author been?! this has been the quintessential Microsoft experience since windows 7, or maybe even XP...
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.
It wouldn’t happen to be a certain podcast about engineering disasters, now, would it?
A noun describing such piece of slop could be „morgery”.
Seconded!
> 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?
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?
pwndByDeath•1h ago
ChristianJacobs•1h ago
zahlman•24m ago
Please don't say things like this in comments (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I don't think "LLM" and "hallucinated" are accurate; different kinds of AI create images, and I get the impression that they generally don't ascribe semantics to words in the same way that LLMs do, and thus when they draw letter shapes they typically aren't actually modelling the fact that the letters are supposed to spell a particular word that has a particular meaning.
aobdev•1h ago
tra3•1h ago
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