Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.

I think someone should track the ratio of these mistakes/bugs that directly or indirectly benefitted MS vs those that costed them.

How could you implement something like this by accident?

That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.

z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.

LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.

LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing.

Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.

Distributed float math is not deterministic without introducing total operations ordering and destroying performance

It's not usefully deterministic in the way computers usually are. Sensitively identical input can still lead to wildly different outputs even if all randomness is crushed out.

One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored

That’s not implementing it by accident, that’s deliberate. In such a scenario perhaps the deployment was a mistake, but if you don’t write the malware in the first place, it can’t be deployed. (Probably. This is LLM stuff we’re talking about.)

(Yes, this is malware. It’s incontrovertibly adware, and although some will argue that not all adware is malware, this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed malicious.)

It is said, never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.

Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR?

Is that the most charitable way?

That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.

Oh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.

It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.

If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.

Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.

Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.

But it really seems like an own goal if true.

Confirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big

MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.