It's a cute nostalgic way to say "the bar was on the floor and you blew it anyway."
No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.
They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
No, it obviously doesn't underlie their criticism ... and that claim is ad hominem.
I think there are numerous reasons why Clippy is a poor choice for a mascot, and your correspondent presented some of those reasons.
I realize they also brought up points about why they thought this was bad. The rest of my comment was spent replying to those points.
> I did make an assumption of why they were arguing against it in such strong terms
Yes, exactly.
"a personal insult"
Maybe learn what the term actually means.
Or dare i say…ad clippynem?
Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.
Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
I didn't care for it, but it was easy to turn off.
May everyone who makes such dialogues be afflicted with severe depression and be forced to ruminate at night about how empty they feel despite their "good" job and high salary.
With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.
This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.
The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.
The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
Louis Rossmann talks about it in his original Clippy talk: the issue isn't going to the good old days[1], but to spook current set of software rulers to do better. Think of it as an Anonymous mask for the Right to Repair.
Louis is great - the right to repair movement is much bigger, though. Louis made the movemoent more widespread, of course with his channel, but right to repair kind of can even be found when GPL was founded. Of course the GPL focused more on software and not on hardware, but to me these are basically almost identical fights / causes. It is the question as to who owns/controls something.
Right to repair (RtR) needs a vocal majority to really move the needle. Politicians hate when people unite around things that they work against. Namely unchecked corps doing whatever they want and donating them money.
When are anti-monopoly judges going to split GOOG and MSFT?
EDIT: It just occurred to me this is why `cargo clippy` is named as such. Crazy that I never questioned that.
It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.
This is a difference of degree, not of kind.
But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.
So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.
It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".
Your comment leaves me unsure: were you actually alive when clippy was a thing, or do you only know about it from stuff you read? Because I was alive at the time and remember clearly that it was disliked even at the time.
And AI taking your data is not the biggest problem. Many sites and devices have been taking your data. LLMs can’t use that much data currently to do anything. Thumbprinting people, business server side data collection, and lack of laws around that is a bigger threat to privacy, but it’s too late. There’s nothing you can do about that.
Want to be an activist? Let people know AI will always be imperfect and support moral and ethical behavior in respect of all perspectives and abilities for the betterment of humanity.
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.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.
That adds clippy and all the other agents to a webpage. There is a PR on the repo that adds an example that hooks clippy up to a local ollama agent: https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs/pull/17
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 refers to a time before the internet.
It looks like you're a communist traitor.
Would you like help?
* Here are the names of my co-conspirators
* Just terminate me nowSure, 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?
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.
This is a mentality I am working extremely hard to get rid of, and I blame HN for indoctrinating me this way.
That said, these days I don't view this place as filled with "product-oriented engineers", but it's become like any other internet forum where naysayers and criticism always rises to the top. You could solve world hunger and the top comment would be someone going "well, actually..."
It's not HN that killed the hackers, it's the Internet snark that put the final nail in the coffin.
It highly depends on your own perspective and goals, but one of the arguments I agree with is that habitually using it will effectively prevent you building any skill or insight into the code you've produced. That in turn leads to unintended consequences as implementation details become opaque and layers of abstraction build up. It's like hyper-accelerating tech-debt for an immediate result, if it's a simple project with no security requirements there would be little reason to not use the tool.
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.
The top comment, a thread you participated in, claims "The entire forced clippy movement is incredibly poorly thought out" after criticism of using clippy as a mascot.
OP is acting as if anyone criticizing this thing must clearly be opposed to their entire world view, accusing them of being paid shills. No. Maybe they just (rightfully) don't like Clippy, and don't want a movement they care about to turn into that.
* My criticism is
> Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative.
You're flooding this thread with your tangent about Clippy, which is diverting focus from the main issue regardless of your intentions.
> I was around when Clippy was introduced.
FWIW, so were many people on this forum and definitely the people behind this movement.
here is the comment posted before your comment that denigrates whole movement with it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090463
> 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.
It would but funnily enough new MS mascot for that, Mico, perfectly encompasses the AI movement with being amorphous, soulless blob
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.
People complain about getting AI shoved down their throats. Clippy was worse in this regard. At least AI doesn't have a dancing animated character that eats up half your processing power with it's silly animations.
To be fair, I kind of liked it. I must have been a target audience, as a kid learning windows it made the computer feel less threatening, dunno.
I don't think we, as kids, were the core audience for Clippy. I think Microsoft just wanted to make home users feel like their computer was some kind of friend, and not a cold machine.
But I agree, using Clippy as a kid was fun and I loved seeing all the animations.
it's perhaps telling of another flaw in this community that I find I need some way to clarify this isn't snark or sarcasm.
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.
You seem to think that people should approve of an advertisement if they approve of the product.
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?
Now SV is all about grift. Everyone knows it. A nobody still has a chance, they just need to accept it needs to be a grift of some soft.
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.
Half the readers here work for the FANGS.
"Don't talk shit about the hand that feeds you" and all that.
Does it really matter if movement is cool or not? I hate corporate bullshit shoving AI down our throats and enshittifying everything it touches, that's why I changed my profile picture to clippy. I, frankly, don't care about character or what's the meaning behind it. But I want for other people to see how many of us are fed up with shit.
>> I've begun to correlate it with people who are more annoying than average
This I don't understand, because in my experience, people with clippy pfp are usually helpful. I usually see them on the top of youtube or reddit comments, giving good advices and answering questions.
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.
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value living beings, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including living beings, into paperclips or machines that manufacture further paperclips.
Universal Paperclips (2017) - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8). Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.
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.
The point is that microsoft got _nothing_ regardless if you were using or not using clippy. So clippy being bad could only be because they sucked at making something good for their users. It was not because they chose maliciously to make the user experience bad for an ulterior motive like collecting and selling user data or pumping up telemetry numbers for a promotion. They genuinely thought clippy would be a net benefit to their users in some way even though they were clearly wrong.
The point Louis is trying to highlight is the difference in intent, not in execution so that is why clippy is being used as the moral backdrop to compare modern software against. Saying clippy itself is "user hostile UX" is besides the point, and either shows a lack of comprehension or intentional feigned ignorance so that you can complain about a badly thought out feature you didn't like that hasn't existed for over 20 years.
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
Yes! It was called Clippit! Why is everybody calling it Clippy these days?
I feel like it's a Mandela Effect [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
It's not a revolution, we can't just go with pichforks to Microsoft offices and demand de-enshittification of Windows.
It's a movement of "we are fed up with this shit".And our only tools are:
making people aware of how awful Windows, Mac and rest of Big Tech world are and to make people switch to Linux, because it's the only platform that is free from this bullshit and gives you some freedom.
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...
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).
For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):
Us: User requests are what computers are for.
Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!
If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.
To me, that's a qualitative difference to the M.O. of big tech today. Google doesn't care whether I want an AI summary or not. In fact, they work hard to remove any option for me to express that I don't want it.
I remember towards the end of his tenure, MS basically acknowledged his unpopularity, by having Gilbert Gottfried voice him.
So while I get the sentiment of "Be like clippy" it just makes me thing that copilot is clippy v2.
Sentiment toward Clippy-as-software (approximate, opinionated comments only)
Clippy hostile |######################......| ~70 %
Clippy not hostile |########....................| ~30 %
>In June 2021, Microsoft applied for a Clippy image trademark.
Familiar with that at all?
The choice of Clippy makes sense if you watch the original video. It's not suggesting that Clippy is something we should strive for again. It's meant to show that while we thought Clippy was horrible and anti-user then, just compare it to what we have now. Clippy wasn't "good", but infinitely more harmless in comparison.
An original mascot like the ASCII Bob with his tank protesting against Google+ on YouTube comments felt a lot more alive and organic, you felt there was a legitimate movement behind Bob. Hell, just using Tux, the GNU or some other open source mascot would have worked better for this.
Also, late 90s Microsoft made the Halloween documents, meaning that Clippy likes monopolies and crushing competition! Clippy also likes to waste system resources and screen space, back when screens were pretty darn small. Horrible mascot choice.
I am all for right to repair - corporations try to enslave us financially, pay for service, but never own something. That's bad.
However had:
"Clippy didn’t sell your data. Clippy didn’t hold your data hostage. Clippy was there to help you."
I also hate Clippy. That thing was NEVER ever useful to me. It would be the best example for modern AI too. Nobody likes Clippy really. That movement tries to make something that was super-annoying, as something less annoying today. I can't go along with that.
Clippy must die. That's my movement.
To me clippy is, and always was, a very corporate icon (literally), that - if they had AI at the time - would be used for that without any hesitation.
So, I am not so sure that they're fully aligned with Clippy movement at whole, which is much more than just "right to repair".
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.
It wasn't a panacea but it was at least positive-value, unlike most current AI.
nobody used clippy, but nobody expressed vitriol. you just easily dismissed it and went on with your business.
But many non-tech-savvy users felt differently, and were accepting of the attempt to provide help.
back in the day people needed to be convinced that they needed a computer and that they'd be able to figure it out.
if you see clippy on a showroom floor or on your friends pc, you might think "oh yeah, i suppose I could use a computer to do that!".
Convincing people they maybe should get a computer worked much better if they saw that it might increase their productivity.
Techy folks all already had one back then, and Clippy was aimed at those still writing their correspondence on a typewriter. I have no doubt that switching to a computer was productive for them, even if it increased Microsoft sales in the process.
the idea is that when your CEO goes on slack or teams or whatever and see 100 clippies they'll be "oh wow, nobody likes how we earn our dollar."
or the very least people who are concerned about surveillance will know who is on their team!
so just do it
I'm serious
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.
There's still good content but i increasingly feel like i need curation for a curated feed. I find myself remembering moments like this more and more and consciously redirecting my attention to other things because it's starting to feel as dumb as social media.
If you want to make a difference, then absolutely refuse to use anything from any big tech company that is mining data and go 100% open source no matter how inconvenient it makes your life. No C levels or stakeholders give a flying fuck that you set your profile picture to a goofy symbol of simpler days.
Real movements involve serious sacrifice. I actually like those goofy clippy pics and would use one if it didn't signal to me that the person using it is likely a hypocritical chump who isn't willing to make any real sacrifices for the change they wish to see.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry right now.
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.