Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

felixrieseberg.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 300 posts

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

#201

Post by bcoates »

Nevermark wrote: post #152
snoman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 touchston…

Clippy's popups were useless, but his chat interface actually worked fine (within the domian of MS office questions) things like "how do I add page numbers" or "count the paragraphs in my document")

The pre-clippy natural language help in MS word worked fine too. Chatbot interfaces that work fine are nothing new, it's just very few programs are complex and open-ended enough for them to be a reasonable UI -- but a full-featured word processor probably is

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

#202

Post by bcoates »

hnfong wrote: post #197
hosh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Clippy, but I don't remember why it was annoying. I am thinking that Robert Brooke's 3 laws of robotics applies here. (He had written one for AI but I think his thoughts on robotics are more relavent to AI agents).

It tends to randomly barge into your UI when you thought you dismissed/disabled it. And never provides any useful information or suggestions.

"It looks like you’re trying to write a term paper at 2am the night before it’s due, do you want me to just put out some LLM slop and hope for the best?"

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

#203

Post by raydiak »

fallinditch wrote: post #167
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…

Eloquently put. ... but I think we may be heading for a new 'golden age' of web animation and gratuitous creativity . Personally, I'm happy to see more crazy animated stuff, it's the corporate dark patterns and bad UX that I hate.

Thanks! Sounds like a reasonable prediction. To me, crazy animated stuff in the wrong context is a component of bad UX. Though I learned web design by interning under a literal Nazi, so my design opinions may be a bit...extreme.

Perhaps I could make room in my heart some day for animated cats on personal sites. Clippy is still pushing it. More because of a bunch of bad memories of trying to support people who were infuriated by it, or on a few occasions having to go to the trouble of opening Word just to disable it on several machines in a day, than its actual physical aesthetics. In my memory it looks more like an image search for "evil Clippy" (didn't think to try that until now, some pretty funny stuff).

Completely agree that corporate dark patterns are a much greater concern. That's why, except for Clippy, I like this project. It puts the tool directly in people's hands with no need for tech skills or cloud gatekeepers and spying.

Tangentially, I just realized that this nicely self-contained Clippy might be able to copy itself. It doesn't have to be able to write an LLM, just copy (or worse yet upload) one file and execute it. Like Agent Smith. But Clippy.

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

#207

Post by dbish »

kuberwastaken wrote: post #3

Is it insane that I tried to make a version of this exactly a week ago!? This is freakin awesome, congratulations!

Since Clippy 2.0 is out in the real world now, you can pick another legend to revive. I went with AIM, replacing your AIM friends with AIs. You should do Stumbleupon with AI generated websites or bring back MSN :)

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

#208

Post by raydiak »

mrandish wrote: post #170
raydiak wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the exact same boat as you describe, except it was some other precompiled local-only project instead of this one that I tried a few months ago. That's why I said I like projects like these, because it's a fully private hassle free way to try out LLMs. Haven't really figured out any good purposes for it in my life, but I like to see these tools being made available to people without the time/motivation/savvy to…

> Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day. Ah, well that does explain why you have some... baggage. My experience was different as I wasn't supporting or interfacing regularly back then with anyone who wasn't tech savvy. I endured Clippy for about 30 seconds, realized it was a stupid idea only a big corporation would think was cool or useful, turned it off and…

That makes total sense. I can see why many would be more Clippy tolerant if they hadn't had to explain its interruptions to other people and/or turn it off and move on with their day several dozen times or more.

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

#210

Post by nashashmi »

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.

It should at least have been an April fools joke. “Microsoft renames copilot for MS word as Clippy’s Pilot”
Post reply on HN