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Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

felixrieseberg.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#141

Post by hadlock »

basch wrote: post #130
raydiak wrote: post #103

I'm all for these prepackaged local-only AI projects. Much more my speed than corporate cloud services. Real shame this one went down the path of choosing an embodiment that makes me want to shoot holes in my screen. It's even worse than those pixel art cats that chase my cursor on certain blogs. I miss plenty of things about the 90s, but I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to forget how much Clippy is not one of…

I’d prefer it be an OS API. You link your os to a local or cloud llm, and a local program asking the OS for a response and can’t even tell which one you’re using or whether it’s on the machine or not. It should all be abstracted away.

There's a number of standard APIs already, OpenAI supports Anthopic's MCP, LM studio supports both their proprietary API as well as OpenAI's API. OpenAI has open sourced their realtime API (https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-console/tree/webso...) and others. Most local clients just have a https://URL:port and then a drop down box for which RESTful API you want to use (for 88% of use cases they all support the same stuff, for realtime it's not quite settled yet), plus a field for an API key if needed.

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#142

Post by raydiak »

volkk wrote: post #123
raydiak wrote: post #103

I'm all for these prepackaged local-only AI projects. Much more my speed than corporate cloud services. Real shame this one went down the path of choosing an embodiment that makes me want to shoot holes in my screen. It's even worse than those pixel art cats that chase my cursor on certain blogs. I miss plenty of things about the 90s, but I seriously doubt I'll live long enough to forget how much Clippy is not one of…

i'm not sure if this post was written with humor as intent, but i found it hilarious. ive never heard someone talk about clippy with such disdain. > I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane produc…

I'm glad! :) I do actually feel some less exaggerated version of what I wrote, but the excess in the verbiage was largely comedic. If you look it up pretty much anywhere, you'll find that there's a very large camp of us Clippy haters who never recovered. I was doing some amount of IT support at the time, and one of the main problems was all the popping up and asking questions confused people in various ways, and if you hid it the obvious way it'd just pop up again. Back when computers were still a new and novel thing for many people, having constant offers of "help" popping up when you're just trying to type a letter introduced counterproductive amounts of cognitive load for some frustrated users I got to deal with.

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#143

Post by jahewson »

mrandish wrote: post #56

Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying. I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at le…

That’s a lot of hate you’re channeling there.

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#144

Post by jahewson »

rossant wrote: post #121
jl6 wrote: post #45

IIRC correctly, Clippy’s most famous feature was interrupting you to offer advice. The advice was usually basic/useless/annoying, hence Clippy’s reputation, but a powerful LLM could actually make the original concept work. It would not be simply a chatbot that responds to text, but rather would observe your screen, understand it through a vision model, and give appropriate advice. Things like “did you know there’s an…

Even funnier would be to make it unnecessarily mean and vexing. Wait, are you really looking this up? You don't even know how to do this? Are you kidding me? Gosh, it's been an hour and you still haven't fixed this bug? Are you retarded or something? You don't deserve this job.

I already have a little voice in my head that tells me those things!

That said, if we could automate it, it might free up more of my brain for productivity…

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#145

Post by Spare_account »

bstsb wrote: post #135
nightski wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did though, I swear it was in a presentation you could select clippy as an avatar. Edit: yes found it. [1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...

clicked this link on mobile and every page scroll caused another malicious ad redirect (??) there's also a huge bouncing "remove ads" button with an X that opens an advert in the background. can't tell if the ads are on purpose or if the owners have just ticked every ad network box

Genuine question, if you're willing to indulge me: Why aren't you using ad-blocking of one type or another?

(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)

I don't browse without it these days.

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#146

Post by byearthithatius »

lolinder wrote: post #120
byearthithatius wrote: post #119

Fun fact: the newest generation (such as myself, a 23 year old programmer) were actually not even alive when Clippy existed. I only know of it from an Office reference. One day I will have something like that -- maybe MSN or internet explorer?

It's not quite that bad! The last version of Office released with Clippy was in May 2003! So you would have been born, if only just.

Yeah I was a tiny little two year old:) Definitely wasn't coding yet hahaha

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#147

Post by bstsb »

Spare_account wrote: post #145
bstsb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

clicked this link on mobile and every page scroll caused another malicious ad redirect (??) there's also a huge bouncing "remove ads" button with an X that opens an advert in the background. can't tell if the ads are on purpose or if the owners have just ticked every ad network box

Genuine question, if you're willing to indulge me: Why aren't you using ad-blocking of one type or another? (Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking) I don't browse without it these days.

> mobile

i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#149

Post by snoman »

freedomben wrote: post #64
mrandish wrote: post #56

Great idea! I've been humorously referring to chat agents as next gen Clippy because of their chipper, talky default personas which I find insufferably annoying. I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Really a huge miss on their part because I hate the overbearingly intrusive way they keep forcing it into their OS, apps and my fucking laptop keyboard. If they at le…

> I'm kind of shocked Microsoft didn't already do this as an alt version of their CoPilot UI. Seriously! This makes me think nobody at Microsoft with the authority to approve something like that has a sense of humor and/or good business sense. The nostalgia would be enormous . Hell I'm a linux person now and I'd install Clippy if it supported Fedora

Clippy was a laughing stock and target of derisive comedy for years. It has such bad brand recognition that nobody should be surprised that they aren’t using it.

Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

#150

Post by Spare_account »

bstsb wrote: post #147
Spare_account wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, if you're willing to indulge me: Why aren't you using ad-blocking of one type or another? (Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking) I don't browse without it these days.

> mobile i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone

Strong recommend for Android, Firefox and uBlock Origin

I also have these Extensions:

  ClearURLs

  Decentraleyes

  Privacy Badger

  I still don't care about cookies
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