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
Clippy was definitely hostile. It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us. Wasted CPU cycles and our time when CPUs weren't very fast. Clippy was hated by everyone. It was not just useless. It was intrusive, wasteful, and hostile. I can't believe my eyes that anyone could think that Clippy is an appropriate mascot for anything good. If anything, Clippy would be a perfect mascot for the trillion dollar companies that exploit our data.
You’re both making similar points I think. It was “bad” - for all the reasons you mention, but back then it was done seemingly to try to add functionality that people wanted, it was just shitty, and that was as bad as it gets.
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.
So my point stands doesn't it? If Clippy was as hostile as it could be with the technology available then, and the trillion dollar companies hoarding our data are as hostile as they can be with the technology present now, is Clippy a good mascot for an initiative like this or is it a good mascot for the trillion dollar companies?
> It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us.
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.
> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.
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.
I think GP is using "hostile" as a synonym for "malicious". Yes, Clippy was disruptive to your workflow, but it wasn't (as far as I know) exfiltrating private data, installing malware, trying to sell you on Bitcoin, etc.
It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.
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 wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.
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.
The "what" is material to this conversation. BonzaiBuddy, a 90's or early 2000s malware that showed a purple monkey on your desktop, hijacking your computer and collecting your web browsing habits in Internet Explorer, a totally different program, and sending it to advertisers, is different from your computer telling Adobe when Photoshop crashes so they can fix it.
Clippy was Daikatana of its time. Horrible, poorly thought out and annoying. Yet in most way, infinitely better than modern AAA shooters.
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.
Clippy was bothersome to me, but somehow some people liked it or had fond memories. This effort may not make a difference, but whatever- it’s fun for someone.
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.
Clippy is almost certainly the most hated computer avatar in all of human history. Jar Jar Binks or Wesley Crusher come to mind as equivalent foci of psychic negativity. Using him for any movement is self-sabotage, not to mention all the organizations you will scare off because using a copyrighted/trademarked character invites legal risk.
Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.
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.
The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
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.
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.
Clippy was pretty universally hated back in it's day though. The way it just refused to let you do anything without it's help was annoying.
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.
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
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."
Clippy narrative aside, the "Set your profile picture" aspect has had a negative effect on me. When I see a clippy profile picture in-the-wild, I've begun to correlate it with people who are more annoying than average - which is unfortunate because I certainly support the right to repair movement.
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.
Back when people were still trying to make ASPs happen, clippy removal was a professional service. Having clippy running over RDP would cripple servers otherwise capable of serving a bunch of office users.
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!"
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).
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.
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?
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?
Basically, this. My first tech job was IT support at the time and ordinary people using their computers for actual work liked them too. I remember the dog/puppy being particular popular. At worst the assistants were seen as charmingly naff, not actively hostile. They were simple for power users to disable and this weird retroactive hatred for them feels more like some kind of nerd bitterness over the fact that normies ever started using computers in the first place. There was plenty of reason to be critical of Microsoft in those days that wasn't their office assistant.
I swear I read somewhere that Clippy actually did have spyware in it. But I can't find the source anymore. I thought it was on Hacker News within the last 2 years or so, some Microsoft retrospective on building MS Office.
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.
I think HN users are mostly in support of right to repair, there isn't much to discuss there. Criticism of a bizarre branding choice is not a criticism of the movement as a whole.
I think it's (partially) because the link is mainly a video; there isn't a mention of those things in the site text either. Perhaps the submission should have [video] so as to be clear about what the main content is.
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.
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.
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.
Clippy really ... wasn't bad? It mostly stayed out of your way, occasionally showed a button to perform a useful task, and could interact with the help system without having to click through 3 menus.
It wasn't a panacea but it was at least positive-value, unlike most current AI.
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.
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.
It's a cute nostalgic way to say "the bar was on the floor and you blew it anyway."
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.
I didn't care for it, but it was easy to turn off.
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.
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.
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.
[1]https://youtu.be/2_Dtmpe9qaQ?t=344
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.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to think that people should approve of an advertisement if they approve of the product.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YObNc2jbD0k
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.
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).
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.
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
>In June 2021, Microsoft applied for a Clippy image trademark.
Familiar with that at all?
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!".
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
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.
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.