Finally!
Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
221–230 of 300 posts
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually this is a good way to find product ideas. I placed a query in Grok to find posts about what people want, similar to this. Then it performs multiple searches on X including embedding search, and suggested people want stuff like tamagotchi, ICQ etc. back.
I feel like these are all great examples of things people think they want. Making a post about it is one thing, actually buying or using a product, I think the majority of nostalgic people will quickly remember why they don't actually want it in their adult life.
Yeah this is not even faster horses. It's horses that can count like Clever Hans.
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#223Earlier 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 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).
I think it was the modal dialog box that forced you to stop what you were doing and click 'piss off clippy', rather than being able to ignore it.
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#224Earlier 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…
> I think that is what makes it a humor goldmine.
Agreed!
Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#225Great 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…
Might as well bring back the entire Microsoft BoB interface as well
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#226That's a ghost of Clippy. It's not reacting at all!
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#227Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually this is a good way to find product ideas. I placed a query in Grok to find posts about what people want, similar to this. Then it performs multiple searches on X including embedding search, and suggested people want stuff like tamagotchi, ICQ etc. back.
I feel like these are all great examples of things people think they want. Making a post about it is one thing, actually buying or using a product, I think the majority of nostalgic people will quickly remember why they don't actually want it in their adult life.
I see this a lot in vintage computing. What we want is the feelings we had back then, the context, the growing possibilities, youth, the 90s, whatever. What we get is a semi-working physical object that we can never quite fix enough to relive those experiences. But we keep acquiring and fixing and tinkering anyway hoping this time will be different while our hearts become torn between past and present.
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#229This app is so much fun—it really brings back memories of when I used Windows 98 as a kid.
Re: Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's exactly what recall was and is