Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.

What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.

I think it's just an ad. It's a bad kind of one because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when actually it's just promoting itself.

if is paid by and for a 3rd party, is an ad. if not, is a tip.

That's not a good distinction. If I see an advert for Microsoft 365 in the Start menu on Windows they're both from Microsoft but it's still an advert.

six of one, half dozen of the other; it may not be a payed advertisement but it functions as one if it's suggesting products.

It's not like this is organic word of mouth we're dealing with here.

It still would be a self promoting, which is still an ad.

Yep, the fact they're altering repo content with advertising is wholly unacceptable.

PRs aren't part of the repository (if you define repository to mean part of `git`'s internal working. It's part of GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft.

Small nit, but PR description bodies might wind up as part of a commit message verbatim, depending on repo settings and the merger's personal behavior. It's an easy outcome, the merger doesn't need to copy and paste or anything, and I think it might be a default or popular setting for squash-merges.

It’s a spot that will easily be replaced with paid ads, for sure. Not sure why it wouldn’t be better to just inject this sort of message into the UI instead of editing the PR text itself. (Except that the team implementing it probably couldn’t get the UI team to agree.)

It's platform agnostic as long as your Copilot setup can create PRs on the platform your project is hosted on.

Otherwise, it would just be Github with displayed ads and that would hurt the brand, so everyone gets ads.

Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list".

> semantic trick

That's what I wanted to say! Thank you.

>> you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list"

Ugh, this type of thing is the worst. "Click here to remain fat, drunk and stupid!"*

* Animal House, 1978

I was playing Mario Party Jamboree this weekend with my kids, and when you use a key to unlock doors (for anyone not familiar, Mario Party is a family friendly virtual board game with lots of minigames that’s been around since the Nintendo 64) that serve as shortcuts in the game board, the key is alive and says “don’t you want to keep being friends? You wouldn’t use me on a door, would you?” Which is a humorous twist on confirmation shaming inside of the game and gives me a bit of enmity for the imaginary key.

Conversely, on Doom Dark Ages they got rid of the traditional difficulty mode of “I’m too young to die” which had a picture of Doom Guy with a bib and a pacifier, I think there’s some new industry guidance that it’s a no no to poke fun at people picking easy difficulties, or even indicating what difficulty the game was “designed to be played on” which Japanese game devs happily ignore.

I know these aren’t actual equivalents since your money isn’t used on the line and it’s purely a game state, buts it’s still an interesting and noteworthy transition.

I this a similar thing? Apple web signin doesn't let you easily choose SMS 2FA; you have to click "I can't get to my devices right now" first before you can send yourself a text message. I always resent them for making me lie, because although my devices ARE nearby (ish), my phone is always, like RIGHT THERE.

It's an interesting model, makes me wonder if prolific open source contributors do it ("leave a tip if you like this MR" kind of thing).

Microsoft would probably seriously refer to it as 'just the tip'.

You'll never guess what happens next.

(Hint: everyone knows what happens next)

AI clippy?

Leave the poor fellow alone. It's been butchered enough in the late 90s and early 00s, and has been repurposed for a greater good. I'd argue not all Microsoft creates is bad, it just needs someone else to make it better.

Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups, annoyances, etc.

They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.

Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…

* checks notes *

Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.

>Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…

So what was the purpose of all that telemetry they collected then? Because it doesn't seem to have made the OS like what the users want it to be.

To better target ads.

Data Gnomes

1) collect data

2) ???

3) profit

Do you hate the "Ribbon" UI that got forced into everything in Win8+?

That's what telemetry was used for. Every advanced user turned that off when they gave us the option, and now we have every UI on the computer designed for Grandma.

It's because of the way companies align their own behavior. "Listening to feedback" is just a good intention but increasing engagement with copilot is a measurable goal. With apologies to George Orwell, imagine an OKR stamping on a human face--forever.

They literally broke 40yr standard keyboard layouts on laptops by replacing right alt buttons with their bullshit AI button.

Are they going to fix hardware they've already sold? On every OEM?

No need; they could just patch Windows to add the UI to override Win-F26 or whatever their synthetic Fkey was (currently disallowed by their software!).

PowerToys for the rescue!

I almost commented that you can just configure in the settings, but actually the available options don't include Alt. On my Hungarian layout Thinkpad T-14 it replaced the context menu key, not the right-alt, which is luckily the AltGraph key that has a substantial role in Hungarian input method, it cannot be omitted.

Microsoft can show a screen-wide dick enlarger ad instead of everyone's wallpaper and people will still be using windows for decades. They already know it.

> There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.

You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.

OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).

I wanted to say that they are same because they are "copilot-written self promotions", but I get your point.

Also I found this: https://github.com/Laravel-Backpack/medialibrary-uploaders/p... it seems like copilot added an ad on behalf of the user at Nov 2025(see last edit).

> Looks like MS really want to "give tips"

Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...

It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch though, they got some tips back from their users.

It is clearly an ad, no doubt about that.

It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their partnership with other companies is advertising the integration in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising campaigns.

It’s like how Disney Plus “ad free” tier shows you ads for Hulu and Disney Perks. They probably redefine “ad” in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.

Yeah it's just helpful tips and suggestions. It's a feature, you see!

I looked into it at one point, as I was disgusted by the unskippable advertisements when paying for an ad-free tier on one of the myriad streaming platforms. Apparently, they distinguish between "advertisements" for a product or service and "promotions" for themselves. I get why that would be a reasonable internal distinction, as the former would require sign-off from the business paying for the advertisement, while the latter would only need internal approval, but it's a pointless distinction after that.

The distinction is likely a claw back to give themselves just that ability to freely advertise to you after telling you it was ad free. Like what’s the difference advertising a subsidiary like Disney parks to me or a new car? Just that they own the former.

> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.

No, they don't.

> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.

You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?

That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.

> company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals

That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad. Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and "suggestions" in my windows.

They might argue it's not an ad but they don't believe or think it's not an ad. There's a big difference.

Well, at least their PM thinks(or argue ) it's a tip[0]. Also it's pretty obvious I was just being sarcastic about MS's behaviors. I don't know why you are so mean but please don't be. Have a nice day.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

The correct word would be that the PM claims it’s a tip. Now ask yourself whether a PM who realizes he or his team has made a terrible mistake and is doing damage control in public is likely to make only true claims.

Correcting your mistakes is not mean. If you didn’t mean what you wrote, well hey, that’s a good example of the difference between what you think and what you say. See how that works?

Correcting my mistakes isn't mean but...

> In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.

Or

> See how that works?

These are. You can be sarcastic as much as you want to be but I can't?

And again, I really don't understand why are you so mean about this. I read some of your other comments and many of them are unnecessarily mean. Please be nice.

A bit like "suggested apps" in the start menu. It's "suggestions" and certainly not paid ads.

It's gaslighting on a worldwide scale is what it is.

This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane company.

If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot.

Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents.

This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" for the new era. MSVC doesn't compile a secret master-password into your software, just a Copilot ad.

("Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...)

+1000 Everyone in technology should read this.

I wonder if there will come a time where I can pay M$ to sabotage my competition codebase

If they're using Copilot, you're already most of the way there.

You have to get acquired by Microsoft first.

Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.

"at some point"?

Why the assumption it's not already happening?

> Not sure if they already do this.

Of course they already do this.

The ToS (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-indivi...) says explicitly:

> Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data. You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review.

so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks at.

You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they have access to it.

They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of sessions to continue to refine their models, and they already reserved the rights to look at what you send them, so yeah - they're doing it.

(Bonus comedy from the ToS:

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for entertainment purposes only.

Also for some reason that site hijacks your scrolling and tries to "smooth" it, which just makes it feel more unresponsive as most browsers already have smooth scrolling?

Looks like they're using this: https://github.com/gblazex/smoothscroll-for-websites

I know it's a bit off topic but I'm just confused as to why that would be on there...

Web developers just can't help themselves from reinventing browser functionality, badly.

That's the TOS for the broader Microsoft Copilot, not for the GitHub one, which has its own TOSes (depending whether your last renewal was before or after March 5) that don't include the "entertainment" wording.

But one to file away!

This is the core issue. These tools operate with very little transparency about what they're doing under the hood. Even basic stuff like how much of your session resources have been consumed is hidden from you in most tools.

Spent yesterday pruning dependencies in a project. Cut half of them and everything still worked. Makes you wonder how much stuff we pull in without thinking about it. Same thing with AI-generated PRs honestly, one bad suggestion and it ships.

No linter?

Can somebody explain to me why this is legal?

If anybody but Microsoft does this, it's called malware and they'll end up with an FBI visit and prison time.

Why are the judicative so skewed here in their judgements?

They have trillions

> I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this.

I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it here

Maybe check if you are charged for it

If it’s Microsoft related, might be something in your Partner Center.

I haven’t clicked through so all I know about Raycast is, “that’s the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot.”

Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/

They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.

There’s like 100 comments blaming raycast, they should just sue for damages lol.

Had I not seen this thread, I would have assumed they consented to it, and I'd never willingly interact with Raycast or it's team in any way. I still have a somewhat negative opinion, so I think it's safe to say there are damages.

As a data point, I consent to be counted as associating raycast with the Microsoft brand and viewing them negatively as a consequence of using pull requests as an advertising canvas.

They should sue to have the ads removed from the texts they were inserted into, which is a vastly more difficult problem than simply paying some dollars.

I hear you, but honestly it’s kind of funny to think a company would send C&D to stop free advertising for them. I’d be surprising to see if any company ever does that, whatever the people think small brands worth they actually worth way less than that.

Is it free advertising or free brand damage? (people might think that raycast had consented to this)

but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent to this.

It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to genuinely sue for damages

(Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in case)

Well... I didn't know about them until now. Looks like a cool product, actually. Might have to try them out. What's that old saying?

Raycast is like Alfred, but with MORE AI. Which made me go 'ugh' even before this.

Automatic AI ads on it didn't help. But the team member saying they had no involvement in this brought my opinion of Raycast from 'ewwwwww' back to 'ugh'.

Creepy. Looks like they rolled it back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

Collection of my thoughts which don't really get to a point:

- Microsoft owns GitHub, where Raycast is being mentioned thousands of times by their tooling.

- Microsoft is a modern popularizer of the infamous phrase, embrace extend extinguish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

- Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.

> Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior

I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.

One of those people is the CEO though.

The Microsoft that was prosecuted for monopoly behaviour 25 years ago is definitely not the same Microsoft that owns:

- Github

- LinkedIn

- Activision Blizzard

- Xbox

- Azure, Sharepoint and Teams w/Copilot embedded everywhere

- major stake in OpenAI

- a multibillion dollar ad product portfolio (LinkedIn ads, Bing Ads)

After being told to not integrate Internet Explorer into the OS, they changed the name to EDGE and did it anyway? With the added excuse that it now compromises most of the file explorer functionality, too?

No, Edge isn’t Internet Explorer; they coexist if necessary for enterprise and legal reasons :)

> "history .. 25 years ago"

The comment was brief, and added detail is welcome, but corporate mission/culture often extends over time even with changes in leadership. Partly because of what was accepted in the past.

> I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.

That's just a long way of calling Microsoft a bunch of monkeys :-)

https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFiveMonkeys=

Wow this is a beautiful illustration :-) thanks for linking it to me.

True!

I think it is more reasonable to expect that the corporate behavior @ MS would remain in spite of the turn-over, especially if it's valuable / profitable to MS.

See "Tim Cook" at Apple and the preparation (the "we will do things Steve's way" pledge) run-up to him taking over after Steve Jobs's exit from CEO-ship was announced. Apple is still doing many business activities in the same way.

New age clippy no one wants but M$lop

You just text replaced Ad with Tip, it’s still an ad

This does not look like random chance. It's a pattern of behavior.

Their mistake was editing it into the text bodies, rather than making it a separate element of the page. No doubt they were trying to inhibit adblockers but it’s so much worse a problem for them this way, because they’re presenting an ad in the voice and userpic of the account that made the post.