> I didn’t see the original post...

If you or anyone else who sees this wants to see the original post, it's still available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....

I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.

It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.

I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate, but there's plenty of examples of code quality issues coming out of msft these days too.

At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).

If they have the documentation... With Microsoft probably the answer to that is yes, but more often than not documentation is simply absent. And in cases like this not being too aware of where the lines are is probably a great way to advance your career.

Reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code because it's a lower bar than reviewing code.

I have never even heard of a software company that acts otherwise (except IBM, and much of the world of Silicon Valley software engineering is reactionary to IBM's glacial pace).

I'm not saying docs == code for importance is a bad way to be, just that if you can name firms that treat them that way other than IBM (or aerospace), I'd be interested to learn more.

Yea, I have a post up there from a couple decades ago (maybe? I haven't looked, I don't know if they keep stuff up forever) and I guarantee you my code went through more review than that post did.

Agreed. And I think the quality of their talent pool overall these days is the common factor

On the contrary, getting away with breaking the law is most of the innovation in the past decade. Look at Uber and AirBNB.

> unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'

Yes there's an expectation that you put in some minimum amount of effort. The license issue here is not subtle, the Kaggle page says they just downloaded the eBooks and converted them to txt. The author is clearly familiar enough with HP to know that it's not old enough to be public domain, and the Kaggle page makes it pretty clear that they didn't get some kind of special permission.

If you want to get more specific on the legal side then copyright infringement does not require that you _knew_ you were infringing on the copyright, it's still infringement either way and you can be made to pay damages. It's entirely on you to verify the license.

> unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'

Why wouldn't that apply?

Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort in the US. Willful infringement can result in harsher penalties, but being mistaken about the copyright status is not a valid defense.

The article author and the uploader should _BOTH_ be sentient enough to engage brain and not just ignore it because they feel "it's an abstract concept I'd not get in trouble for when not working in the US or EU".

most likely, there seems there are plenty of devs from nearly all major tech companies on HN, they often don't chime in as much anymore when it comes to problems, I've wondered if they get some kind of guidance on not commenting on "problems".

…still faster than they address critical vulnerabilities.

the commit is visible https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...

HTTP Referer

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/HackernewsEffec...

Yes, HN's a pretty popular site :)

I can't believe people with ties to Microsoft visit Hacker News.

That one is gone now, too

Also, I imagine that most of those 10k downloads are probably from AI trainers that are just speed running through Kaggle to obtain absolutely anything to train their AI. There are definitely other, more 'known' ways to obtain these books without finding them as random text files in an AI dataset operation

Why did you think that?

make sure u worded it right or she'll block you

Robot slaves is a funny phrase if you consider that the origin of the word robot literally is a term that meant slave or "forced work". Language doing circles.

Are they an ethical alternative to the human version?

correction, the _threat_ of robot slaves to bring back human slaves

That’s Herbert’s Dune.

The whole fanfic ecosystem is quietly dying now.

Everything new is AI slop, and there seems to be no coming back from it.

It disappeared already

For redundancy in case archive.is is down:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....

Some lawyer at Microsoft probably had a big scare browsing HN today.

Microsoft could have used any dataset for their blog, they could have even chosen to use actual public domain novels. Instead, they opted to use copywritten works that JK hasn't released into the public domain (unless user "Shubham Maindola" is JK's alter ego).

The licence?

If it comes from a site claiming it was under a licence when it was not, the misdeed is done by the person who provided the version carrying the licence.

The licensing: If I steal something and tell you its free and yours for the taking, that feels different than a Fence (knowingly) buying stolen goods. It's obviously semantics and there should have been some better judgemend from MS, but downloading a dataset (stated as public domain) from kaggle feels spiritually different from piracy (e.g.: if someone uploads a less known, copyrighted data set to kaggle/huggingface under an incorrect license, are tutorials that use this data set a 'guide to pirating' this data set? To me, that feels like a wrong use of the term)

The 'artwork' they generated and the text on the blog post?

For some reason I really like this.

Thanks for linking! I've been thinking about trying something like this myself.

...only if you deliberately attempt to extract it by repeatedly prompting it to complete fragments of the book. They had to do quite a bit of work to make this happen.

Github never deletes commits so we just need to find the hash for the latest one before the force push. In the forks you can find ones from before, but they're not up to date. Example: b5c8280d87c501d9ca7f63a6f252ca60ca820a4a for a copy 3 months old Link: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...

The dataset is actually at Kaggle tho, but agree, they shouldn't use it as an example.

> Why is Microsoft endorsing the use of generative AI

ftfy

Probably some kind of cache, but it's taken down, I'm getting 404, while some of my friends are still able to see it

+1, I can still access the page from US.

Intent (should) be what matters. If you want to learn how to train AI and use copyrighted material in your learning - I don’t care in the slightest at all.

In fact if you do this as a nonprofit or at an educational institution in a teaching context it’s explicitly allowed by fair use already.

If you do it individually, idk I’m not a lawyer. But it should be allowed on principle.

But if you then go take your trained AI and deploy it for commercial purposes that’s a different story and should have protections for the original rights holders.