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.

> "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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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

An entire post mortem for a morged diagram is wild

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

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

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.

> 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?

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...

> 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.

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)

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.