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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

nvie.com

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Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#91

Post by anonymous908213 »

aftergibson wrote: post #82

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…

> 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.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#92

Post by amdivia »

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)

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#93

Post by blibble »

yokoprime wrote: post #46

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.

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)

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#94

Post by sznio »

prmoustache wrote: post #68
anonymous908213 wrote: post #32

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 f…

> 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?

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

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#95

Post by kgeist »

>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.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#96

Post by toong »

pointlessone wrote: post #89
prmoustache wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

"Legal reviewed it and did not flag any issues!"

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#97

Post by rzmmm »

nippoo wrote: post #7

They've taken it down now and replaced with an arguably even less helpful diagram, but the original is archived: https://archive.is/twft6

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

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#98

Post by Freak_NL »

clort wrote: post #88
prmoustache wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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..

Just that tiny image on his blog was enough for me to go "oh yeah, I used his diagram to explain this type of git workflow to colleagues a decade ago". Someone should have spotted that right away.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#99

Post by LauraMedia »

aftergibson wrote: post #82

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…

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.

Re: 15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

#100

Post by matthewmacleod »

amdivia wrote: post #92

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 g…

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.

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