Be Like Clippy

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

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?

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."

This clippy white-washing is annoying as hell. Just like clipppy was.

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.

My grandmother loved clippy.

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...

Clippy would have absolutely having sold your data if Microsoft were forethinking enough.

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.

Looking forward to the "Be Like ChatGPT" site 20 years from now.

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.

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).

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?

For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs

Be like clippy, entirely useless and annoying?

I liked Clippit and all the other assistants. I found them really useful when I was 11-12 years old and learning Office 97.

The assistant's name is Clippit, not Clippy.

is this an example of retro-cultural misappropriation?

Cool they have NFTs

A most forward thinking Bayesian network consumer product ever.

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.

People positive about Clippy never lived the terror that was Clippy. SMH

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.

People love free things and despise things that come with a cost. Tale as old as time.

What makes them think they can license Clippy out under the GPL?

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 didn’t sell your data. Clippy didn’t hold your data hostage. Clippy was there to help you."

Clippy was there to demonstrate to you that it's now the computer "who" is in control.

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 hell.

[dead]

Clippy was Microsoft was absolutely DO sell your data.