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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and …

… Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing. I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed. I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication. I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment. And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.

Original discussionMicrosoft offers guide to pirating Harry Potter series for LLM training239 source comments · at import
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MC

You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code? I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick? (I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)

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AN

I agree that, ideally, a non-corporate blogging environment is a desirable thing. But there is a line, and at some point I think you have to be doing some kind of sanity check review process when your employees are actively telling people to go download copyrighted books with links to the pirated material as part of a guide on how to train LLMs with them, or, as with yesterday's morging incident, are plagiarising people's work without credit, on your official corporate platforms.

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BA

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.

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SO

> 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....

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