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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

#151

Post by jayGlow »

hbn wrote: post #102
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…

Microsoft infamously is adding AI to Windows to constantly watch your screen and people understandably are not super excited for it.

if it ran entirely on the local machine and didn't send information back to Microsoft I think people would be far more accepting of it.

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

#152

Post by Nevermark »

snoman wrote: post #149
freedomben wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.

Clippy was useless.

But attaching a Clippy to a language model? Still nominally useless, but mindfully so!

It would be self-deprecating (un-deprecated???) humor for Microsoft, which would take the edge off of the often pushy and tone-deaf corporate look they continually and crassly paint themselves into by default.

And actually potentially useful as a branding touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.

They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.

An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.

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

#154

Post by raydiak »

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.

To me, the value of these types of projects is specifically that they are self-contained and local-only. That's the only kind of interaction with it I'm comfortable with right now. I mostly jumped ship on commercial software a long time ago, so I'm hoping there will still be some AI-free linux distros for a good long time. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. At the point that the type of AI integration you're imagining becomes ubiquitous and mandatory, I may or may not stop working with computers entirely, depending on the state of the tech and the state of society by then.

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

#157

Post by dylan604 »

Levitz wrote: post #137
dylan604 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you accept that likening how it is intended, and I can't imagine that being a good thing. Clippy was universally panned. To me, I wouldn't be telling people that the thing I'm spending time working on was received as this generation's Clippy.

Clippy was panned because it was intrusive and offered very little real help, but the design and concept themselves were always popular.

you just described modern LLM bots as well

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

#158

Post by prezjordan »

rhet0rica wrote: post #12
tasn wrote: post #10

I love the terrible font rendering! Is it a special font, or some CSS?

Looks like it's a special font provided by https://github.com/jdan/98.css (Which has come a long way in the past couple of years, despite still being 0.1.x) Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth Maybe with enough retro revivals it will…

I should probably 1.0 it and call it a day, it's pretty much done. In the back of my mind I've thought of making the markup more amenable to LLMs like Sonnet (maybe with tailwind style utility classes)

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

#159

Post by richardw »

snoman wrote: post #149
freedomben wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do it on April 1. With a “we told you so” tagline. Have a few 2025/6 templates, like writing a presidential executive order because there are so many of them.
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