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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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!"

This is the same Microsoft that promised to indemnify any of its customers sued over copyright lawsuits as a result of using its AIs. [0] So I'm sure legal reviewed it the same way, saying "Yep, our war chest is still ample".

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-defend-customer...

Weird text was already deemed acceptable by microsoft in their documentation as they machine translated most screenshots instead of recreating them in different locales, leading to the same problems as this image.

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

That expectation is pure covfefe.

Shouldn't "where are we sourcing our content" be part of any publication review process?

The Large Laundering Machine, sorry, I mean the Large Language Model! Provenance? Where's that?

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.

Did the one MSFT employee that “reviewed” it know of this image? If not, it doesn’t matter how many people “on the Internet” recognized this image.

I’ll never understand the implied projection.

(I don’t think this was reviewed closely if at all)

I would hope that the person who reviews their training on gitflow, knows something about gitflow. And if you know something about gitflow, it's not that strange to expect to recognise the most iconic gitflow diagram.

But even if you don't recognise the original, at least you should be able to tell that the generated copy is bullshit.

Again, I don't think this was reviewed. It was an assignment to a vendor 'write document and I'll hit publish'. There's a great chance the MSFT document _owner_ has no experience in the relevant area.

Here is the original: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Here is the slop copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251205141857/https://learn.mic...

The 'Time' axis points the wrong way, and is misspelled, using a non-existent letter - 'Tim' where the m has an extra hump.

It's pretty clear this wasn't reviewed at all.

Yes. This is expected at any serious company as intellectual property violations can have serious consequences.

I don't think the characterization of this being a diagram from "some rando" is accurate or fair.

The original content is highly influential... which should be self-evident by the fact it is being reproduced verbatim ten years later, and was immediately recognized.

> 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?

We aren't talking about just some random image from some random blog. The article we are talking about is about a specific topic, which when searched online one of the first is the article containing the original image (at least for google, bing seems to be really struggling to give me the article but under images it is again the first).

I would cut some slack if this were a really obscure topic almost noone talks about, but it's been a thing talked about in the programmer space for ages.

I would personally expect review to evaluate for correctness. Such a review would have stopped this from being published. This diagram as published is literal nonsense.

Yes? It's a famous diagram, at least in the world of Git workflows, so I would expect a reviewer of Microsoft's Git workflow documentation to be familiar with it.

(But the main issue is that the diagram is slop, not that it's a copy.)

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