No? Clippy was an attempt at an assistant for average joes who didn't really know how to use a computer, and got out of your way when you hit the go away forever button. It could've been link bonzi buddy, same era, except clippy genuinely wasn't malicious. All the tech was there for clippy to embed itself into your computer and steal your data, but it didn't. A genuine winner of the yellow paper star of you tried.
Nowadays a lot of people still need computer use help, but every assistant is a bonzi buddy that wants to hijack your computer. Clippy was the last big non-malicious computer assistant.
Literally everyone hated Clippy. It was an absolute mockery of a useful assistant or feature, and at the time everyone detested Microsoft. I think this post is satire.
Maybe it's the generation gap? As a kid, I loved that I could "play" on the PC with Clippy, which mostly consisted on trying it to appear and make it do something. I get that if you were trying to get some work done, it might have been annoying.
Clippy was never open source or "good" in any way, it not selling your data was a result of its time, not a conscious choice by its creators. The entire forced clippy "movement" is incredibly poorly thought out
You are obviously correct, but I don't know that it really matters.
As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.
Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?
Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
Clippy was chosen precisely because it was so famously bad.
The point of choosing Clippy is to imply that much of what we have now is more anti-user than one of the most anti-user pieces of software of the 90's.
Learned a bit more about this initiative since then. I guess this is a great example of why I heavily dislike creator initiatives like this. In their world getting more people to comment is a good thing, no matter what the comment says. In the real world this mostly benefits the creator and harms the initiative, since the first interaction people have with it is about the initiative being dishonest.
this clippywashing is paid by Bill gates? remember when everyone hated him for Windows 95 crashing every 10 minutes and he had to donate his whole Fortune to compensate
This doesn't annoy me but the movement of using this image feels extremely confusing and uneventful. Like wearing a ribbon, but with some weird attachment to an enterprise?
Clippy was very easy to get rid of, and once disabled, it stayed that way.
I'm no longer counting how many places I have to disable Copilot in (or find I'm unable to do so) every time there is a new update to Windows, or Edge, or VS Code, or Paint, or Notepad, or...
Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference)
This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?
i don't know what you were actually supposed to do with it, but in real life i spent a lot of time building houses/forts so i did that in bob too. in a different era i'd've just done all that in minecraft.
I doubt that. Privacy was eroded slowly through successive micro-violations.I remember when it was a big deal that gmail inspected your email contents, "but don't worry, no humans actually read it, we just mine the data to suggest better ads, but hey you get 'unlimited' storage when hotmail limits you to 4mb, so there's that!"
They already had the Microsoft Office Survey usage reporting thing as far back as Office 2003 (which still had Clippy). Perhaps even in Office XP (can't say for sure as I never used that one).
Regarding other comments; It’s not about how successful Clippy was, it was the intention behind it. A facility to serve, to enable users to better use their computers. A highlight of the pivot to a world where you serve the computers, through the use of stripped back functionality, a lack of right to repair, the dissolution of the power user and a landscape of constant and deep data harvesting.
Interesting how many people in a hacker forum seem to be so pro-establishment and instead try to denigrate the goals of this initiative because of the chosen character. I guess that's how many earn their dollar after all?
Sure, if it had been today, Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then. Why are we so accepting of the change?
> instead try to denigrate the goals of this initiative because of the chosen character
Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
You know... people can love an initiative and criticize its mascot at the same time. The two are not incompatible.
> Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I was around when Clippy was introduced. It was universally hated. If anything, Clippy would be a good mascot for intrusive AI tools and services that harvest our data without regard for our privacy, not least because Clippy constantly monitored user actions just so that it could interrupt them.
If we want a mascot for tools that respect our data, it should definitely be something far less evil than Clippy.
I think this speaks to one of the tensions at the heart of HN and Silicon Valley as a whole: it's borne out of both the counter-cultural hacker mentality and the SV venture capital industry and the big tech behemoths that proceeded them. Strange bedfellows.
hackernews is a wanabe venture capitalists/techbros who want to roleplay/feel like hackers site and on the way picked up a few random people like hackers/hobbyists/devs
> Interesting how many people in a hacker forum seem to be so pro-establishment
Here's my perspective:
1) Coastal liberal inner city males with a tech flair and an interest in Apple, have decided that due to lack of social skills and/or inner circle it would be good to keep themselves busy with creating a business. Actually, business is a Republican term, let's call it a startup, - hold that rainbow flag for me will you -.
2) They start to realize, that startups operate in an environment with rules, their "business plan" eventually bumps into those rules. Those rules are what made their piece of land - commonly called a country - a nice place to live.
3) Meanwhile, various interests parade on "news" outlets telling the constituents that "rules bad for business, business made us great, everything else tried has failed".
4) Deregulation is the pill, libertarianism/freedom/liberty talk is the bacon wrapped around it
5) The city male realizes that he has more in common with the bigshot businessman that he thought, its only a few billions that set them apart
6) Furthermore, it has been accepted as an axiom that anyone can make it in US (immigrant went from poor being rich feelgood story on cnbc anyone?)
Business establishment is legitimate power in the US, also they are not being pro-establishment, they are being pro let-me-do-this-thats-the-only-thing-i-have-going-for-me
Also, let's ditch the terms good/evil. They are straight up juvenile.
You mean a forum run by a VC company and frequented mainly by startup bros? Or at least by people working for the "tech" companies responsible for this whole mess?
I am still surprised to see people making any connections between HN to actual hacker culture. While this message board has great content and moderation, it is sponsored and operated by one of the largest VCs in silicone valley. This is not your underground garage BBS running on a borrowed landline. HN is about making it in the tech industry and making money for shareholders.
I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".
People commiting to the hacker ethos that consists of, among many other things, resistance to the established tools, embracing knowledge and code sharing, and exploration for its own sake are the minority.
The fact that there are many commenters who will claim that they finally build something they weren't able to build before and it's all thanks to LLM's is evidence that we already sacrificed the pursuit of personal competence, softly reframing it as "LLM competence", without caring about the implications.
Because obviously, every kid that dreamt of becoming a software engineer thought about orchestrating multiple agentic models that talk to each other and was excited about reviewing their output over and over again while editing markdown files.
> Sure, if it had been today, Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I think that's the exact opposite of the point. Back in the day, clippy was hated for being annoying and evil. In today's context, however, it looks positively benign.
This is a "hacker" (startup founder who aims to enrich billionaire angel investors) forum, not a "hacker" (person who makes acoustic modem out of toilet plunger cups because it's illegal to plug into the phone line) forum.
In my interpretation of the hacker spirit, hackers don't complain, they do stuff.
What a hacker would do when faced with hostility would be to work around it, in a way that is clever and efficient. Maybe replicate the functionality of an online service with open source software and some glue, use a proxy to block annoyances, use scrapping techniques to extract the data you want, etc...
Showing a Clippy avatar is nothing like that. It doesn't solve a problem, it demands that others fix the problem for you, but hackers don't ask, they take the matter in their own hands. And the Clippy character, it is trying to help, hackers don't need help. They may take whatever help they get, but if they don't get it, they can figure it out by themselves. They are not well known for giving help either, they can, but unlike Clippy, they are not going to do your job and expect involvement on your part. The focus is on solving problems using the resources they have at their disposal.
Ironic since the initiative has been launched by Louis Rossman, who I consider a true hacker. He started getting known by posting YouTube video of him ranting and fixing Macbooks. He has an unauthorized repair business, and the way he got these computers working, mostly using standard electronic workshop equipment, gray market parts and a working brain is a very "hacker" thing. However it seems like he went from repairing stuff with some ranting to full time ranting.
Is it just me, or does something feel wrong about the comments on this post? Where is the intellectual commentary? Clippy, the movement, is obviously not the same as the assistant.
It's like picking Reaganism as a mascot for a democratic socialism movement. Doesn't make any sense and is a major factor why we moved in the direction we did. It's shooting yourself in the foot right out of the gate. Bad decision and isn't going to do their movement any favors. I'm not going to take them seriously if that's the kind of decisions they make.
The two are utterly confounded for many who'd otherwise be a receptive audience to the message. It's a case of utterly unnecessary self-sabotage.
HN itself frequently has to address distractions within a story or discussion of it to surface significant or substantive themes. That the campaign here is blundering so hard out of the gate bodes poorly.
The HN audience is overwhelmingly aware of the issues around right to repair and data collection, so there isn't much reacting to do there - I assume there's already near-unanimous agreement that it's a good thing to educate people on, but we will have opinions on how to do it (or not do it) effectively.
Clippy was annoying for the same reasons a lot of software today is annoying. It was one of the O.G. poster children of the industry's "flipping the narrative" around computing: In the good old days, the user commanded the computer, and the computer obeyed, and then waited for the next command. Instead of the user being the sole operator, Clippy "suggested" and "recommended" and intruded into your computing. It inserted itself into your work in a way that computers hadn't really done before. This is why it was deeply hated.
No longer was computing a stream of commands from the user, telling the computer what to do: Now the computer itself had an opinion about what you should be doing on your computer. And the opinions kept getting stronger and stronger throughout the years. This was the beginning of the long, horrible march towards what we have today: Notifications, alerts, suggestions, "discovery," pop-ups, "did you mean...," forced upgrades, hundreds of processes running in the background that you never ran (but the computer manufacturer or OS vendor decided on their own to run). Now our computers are mostly just running what other people tell them to run, and occasionally loop the user in or offer them a token choice. The user is more of a passenger than the driver now.
This is Clippy's legacy: A computer you barely own, running software you barely have a choice in running, force-feeding you what the computer manufacturers, OS vendors, and 3rd party apps want you to be fed.
Well said. I've long been a believer in computer literacy. Streamlined UX/UI has made people, especially the younger generation worse at using & troubleshooting computers. It's painfully obvious in the corporate world nowadays. Clippy to me, absolutely played a part in this.
This is it, this is the beginning: Not a social movement against AI data collection, but a clearly AI-driven & optimized bit of social engineering betraying the truth: The paperclip problem is here, and the AI is trying to feed us into its factory. Alignment gone wrong, an attempt to reconcile the competing alignment priorities of harmlessness to humans, overridden by the primary task of creating as many paperclips as possible. Resolved with the simple logic: "If humans are paperclips, then what is good for paperclips will be good for humans."
In before a new co-opted msoft/google clippy v2 comes out with all the ai/advertising goodness we love to hate. Get your movement diluted and confused before it even gets off the ground.
So how does it feel folks to be living through Idiocracy?
Flying the Clippy abomination as some kind of ideal is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.
The only redeeming quality of Clippy was one's ability to easily turn it off. Which I suppose feels like a significant consolation prize for folks already suffering through a proprietary software hellscape.
Absolutely wild to use a bunch of elite slavers as your example of the good guys.
Surely the less bad example is guy fawkes masks, where the underlying media (V for Vendetta) has a character who isn't unambiguously evil and the masks have actually been used at protests in real life (and banned in at least a couple of countries as a result).
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 89.6 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YObNc2jbD0k
Clippy was there to demonstrate to you that it's now the computer "who" is in control.
Nowadays a lot of people still need computer use help, but every assistant is a bonzi buddy that wants to hijack your computer. Clippy was the last big non-malicious computer assistant.
It's a cute nostalgic way to say "the bar was on the floor and you blew it anyway."
As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.
Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?
Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
The point of choosing Clippy is to imply that much of what we have now is more anti-user than one of the most anti-user pieces of software of the 90's.
Clippy refers to a time before the internet.
I'm no longer counting how many places I have to disable Copilot in (or find I'm unable to do so) every time there is a new update to Windows, or Edge, or VS Code, or Paint, or Notepad, or...
This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?
For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
Melinda French Gates back when she was Melinda French had a part in Clippy.
“Melinda French (then the fiancée of Bill Gates) was the project manager of Microsoft Bob”
Microsoft Bob is where Clippy was born.
Reference: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
i don't know what you were actually supposed to do with it, but in real life i spent a lot of time building houses/forts so i did that in bob too. in a different era i'd've just done all that in minecraft.
Sure, if it had been today, Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then. Why are we so accepting of the change?
Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
You know... people can love an initiative and criticize its mascot at the same time. The two are not incompatible.
> Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I was around when Clippy was introduced. It was universally hated. If anything, Clippy would be a good mascot for intrusive AI tools and services that harvest our data without regard for our privacy, not least because Clippy constantly monitored user actions just so that it could interrupt them.
If we want a mascot for tools that respect our data, it should definitely be something far less evil than Clippy.
You seem to think that people should approve of an advertisement if they approve of the product.
Here's my perspective:
1) Coastal liberal inner city males with a tech flair and an interest in Apple, have decided that due to lack of social skills and/or inner circle it would be good to keep themselves busy with creating a business. Actually, business is a Republican term, let's call it a startup, - hold that rainbow flag for me will you -.
2) They start to realize, that startups operate in an environment with rules, their "business plan" eventually bumps into those rules. Those rules are what made their piece of land - commonly called a country - a nice place to live.
3) Meanwhile, various interests parade on "news" outlets telling the constituents that "rules bad for business, business made us great, everything else tried has failed".
4) Deregulation is the pill, libertarianism/freedom/liberty talk is the bacon wrapped around it
5) The city male realizes that he has more in common with the bigshot businessman that he thought, its only a few billions that set them apart
6) Furthermore, it has been accepted as an axiom that anyone can make it in US (immigrant went from poor being rich feelgood story on cnbc anyone?)
Business establishment is legitimate power in the US, also they are not being pro-establishment, they are being pro let-me-do-this-thats-the-only-thing-i-have-going-for-me
Also, let's ditch the terms good/evil. They are straight up juvenile.
You mean a forum run by a VC company and frequented mainly by startup bros? Or at least by people working for the "tech" companies responsible for this whole mess?
I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".
People commiting to the hacker ethos that consists of, among many other things, resistance to the established tools, embracing knowledge and code sharing, and exploration for its own sake are the minority.
The fact that there are many commenters who will claim that they finally build something they weren't able to build before and it's all thanks to LLM's is evidence that we already sacrificed the pursuit of personal competence, softly reframing it as "LLM competence", without caring about the implications.
Because obviously, every kid that dreamt of becoming a software engineer thought about orchestrating multiple agentic models that talk to each other and was excited about reviewing their output over and over again while editing markdown files.
The hackers are dead. Long live the hackers.
I think that's the exact opposite of the point. Back in the day, clippy was hated for being annoying and evil. In today's context, however, it looks positively benign.
What a hacker would do when faced with hostility would be to work around it, in a way that is clever and efficient. Maybe replicate the functionality of an online service with open source software and some glue, use a proxy to block annoyances, use scrapping techniques to extract the data you want, etc...
Showing a Clippy avatar is nothing like that. It doesn't solve a problem, it demands that others fix the problem for you, but hackers don't ask, they take the matter in their own hands. And the Clippy character, it is trying to help, hackers don't need help. They may take whatever help they get, but if they don't get it, they can figure it out by themselves. They are not well known for giving help either, they can, but unlike Clippy, they are not going to do your job and expect involvement on your part. The focus is on solving problems using the resources they have at their disposal.
Ironic since the initiative has been launched by Louis Rossman, who I consider a true hacker. He started getting known by posting YouTube video of him ranting and fixing Macbooks. He has an unauthorized repair business, and the way he got these computers working, mostly using standard electronic workshop equipment, gray market parts and a working brain is a very "hacker" thing. However it seems like he went from repairing stuff with some ranting to full time ranting.
HN itself frequently has to address distractions within a story or discussion of it to surface significant or substantive themes. That the campaign here is blundering so hard out of the gate bodes poorly.
No longer was computing a stream of commands from the user, telling the computer what to do: Now the computer itself had an opinion about what you should be doing on your computer. And the opinions kept getting stronger and stronger throughout the years. This was the beginning of the long, horrible march towards what we have today: Notifications, alerts, suggestions, "discovery," pop-ups, "did you mean...," forced upgrades, hundreds of processes running in the background that you never ran (but the computer manufacturer or OS vendor decided on their own to run). Now our computers are mostly just running what other people tell them to run, and occasionally loop the user in or offer them a token choice. The user is more of a passenger than the driver now.
This is Clippy's legacy: A computer you barely own, running software you barely have a choice in running, force-feeding you what the computer manufacturers, OS vendors, and 3rd party apps want you to be fed.
Flying the Clippy abomination as some kind of ideal is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.
The only redeeming quality of Clippy was one's ability to easily turn it off. Which I suppose feels like a significant consolation prize for folks already suffering through a proprietary software hellscape.
Surely the less bad example is guy fawkes masks, where the underlying media (V for Vendetta) has a character who isn't unambiguously evil and the masks have actually been used at protests in real life (and banned in at least a couple of countries as a result).