Same here, since I'm the only one using my instance. But, you should be aware that there is an CVE in that version that allows any account level to increase their own permissions to admin level, so it's inherently unsafe
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
Clippy was definitely hostile. It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us. Wasted CPU cycles and our time when CPUs weren't very fast. Clippy was hated by everyone. It was not just useless. It was intrusive, wasteful, and hostile. I can't believe my eyes that anyone could think that Clippy is an appropriate mascot for anything good. If anything, Clippy would be a perfect mascot for the trillion dollar companies that exploit our data.
Is there such a thing as anti-rose-tinted glasses? I feel like this is an example of that.
No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.
They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
You could say the same about Microsoft's telemetry in Windows which this article is complaining about due to it being opt in. The telemtry's purpose is to improve user's experience by allowing Microsoft to make the product better by knowing where things are going wrong or if they are making harmful changes.
Telemetry is a lot harder of a sell if you're talking about "improving the user experience". Whereas Clippy was a case of "we assume this will help UX for new users -> it seems pretty harmless -> include it in our product", something like telemetry can only be simplified to "having mountains of telemetry data will help us because 0.0001% of it may be useful in resolving an issue -> this 0.0001% is so useful that every user should by default uplink their actions to Microsoft, regardless of any privacy concerns (which we know of ahead of time) -> enable it for everyone, they need to sacrifice a bit for the greater good". The intentions behind the two are similar only if you look at them in broadest possible terms.
In what way could it be ad hominem? Where did I attack the poster? I did make an assumption of why they were arguing against it in such strong terms, but how does an assumption make for a personal insult on the author?
I realize they also brought up points about why they thought this was bad. The rest of my comment was spent replying to those points.
You’re both making similar points I think. It was “bad” - for all the reasons you mention, but back then it was done seemingly to try to add functionality that people wanted, it was just shitty, and that was as bad as it gets.
Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.
Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
So my point stands doesn't it? If Clippy was as hostile as it could be with the technology available then, and the trillion dollar companies hoarding our data are as hostile as they can be with the technology present now, is Clippy a good mascot for an initiative like this or is it a good mascot for the trillion dollar companies?
Clippy is a mascot for the trillion dollar companies. It's emblematic of the beginning of the end of user-centric computing. It marks the new era of intrusive business-centric computing.
It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
I think it's a good choice precisely because it's so bad. It's like "Remember how this thing seemed like the worst thing imaginable? Now it seems utterly harmless."
In my circle of friends: Clippy was something to be mocked, not hated. Hate is a very strong word. I doubt any of us thought that it was hostile, because it was clearly intended to be a friendly aide for those who did not know how to use computers. The fact that we mocked it said more about us than it said about those who liked it.
Exactly, it was the first thing you'd do when you launched Word. Nowadays, the only option available would be "See less of Clippy" and he'd be back in the next session.
[Remind me again in an hour] [Remind me again in 15 minutes] [Changed my mind, keep him]
May everyone who makes such dialogues be afflicted with severe depression and be forced to ruminate at night about how empty they feel despite their "good" job and high salary.
I reckon it would be more like "Pay subscription to see slightly less of Clippy" with some small print explaining that "less" is relative to other people's future experience, not your current one.
> It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us.
With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.
> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.
This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.
The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.
The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
It's not the same logic. They legitimately thought they are making helpful assistant for new users, not veneer to siphon user behavior data and sell it to highest bidder. They still competed with competition at that point, not tried to monetize same user base more and more
Clippy was Daikatana of its time. Horrible, poorly thought out and annoying. Yet in most way, infinitely better than modern AAA shooters.
Louis Rossmann talks about it in his original Clippy talk: the issue isn't going to the good old days[1], but to spook current set of software rulers to do better. Think of it as an Anonymous mask for the Right to Repair.
I don't need clippy for the right to repair movement though.
Louis is great - the right to repair movement is much bigger, though. Louis made the movemoent more widespread, of course with his channel, but right to repair kind of can even be found when GPL was founded. Of course the GPL focused more on software and not on hardware, but to me these are basically almost identical fights / causes. It is the question as to who owns/controls something.
Sure. And you don't need Guy Hawks mask to have Anonymous, yet we did.
Right to repair (RtR) needs a vocal majority to really move the needle. Politicians hate when people unite around things that they work against. Namely unchecked corps doing whatever they want and donating them money.
When are anti-monopoly judges going to split GOOG and MSFT?
Somehow it seems everyone has forgotten the headache of clippy popping up whenever you didn't want it to. I don't remember clippy fondly other than the art I suppose.
EDIT: It just occurred to me this is why `cargo clippy` is named as such. Crazy that I never questioned that.
I think GP is using "hostile" as a synonym for "malicious". Yes, Clippy was disruptive to your workflow, but it wasn't (as far as I know) exfiltrating private data, installing malware, trying to sell you on Bitcoin, etc.
It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.
It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
> It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.
It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.
The "what" is material to this conversation. BonzaiBuddy, a 90's or early 2000s malware that showed a purple monkey on your desktop, hijacking your computer and collecting your web browsing habits in Internet Explorer, a totally different program, and sending it to advertisers, is different from your computer telling Adobe when Photoshop crashes so they can fix it.
Photoshop does not monitor your traffic in Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Brave/Ladybug/etc. Photoshop does hit the Internet to use Creative Cloud for fonts and stuff, so they do know about that, though. The difference is in kind. How you're using Photoshop is relevant to Adobe, the creators of Photoshop. The websites you're browsing are not relevant to them and none of their business.
It definitely looks only annoying by modern standards because today we are willing to let websites load MBs of crap into our browser to show text news and nobody thinks twice about it.
But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.
So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.
It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".
Your comment leaves me unsure: were you actually alive when clippy was a thing, or do you only know about it from stuff you read? Because I was alive at the time and remember clearly that it was disliked even at the time.
Clippy was bothersome to me, but somehow some people liked it or had fond memories. This effort may not make a difference, but whatever- it’s fun for someone.
And AI taking your data is not the biggest problem. Many sites and devices have been taking your data. LLMs can’t use that much data currently to do anything. Thumbprinting people, business server side data collection, and lack of laws around that is a bigger threat to privacy, but it’s too late. There’s nothing you can do about that.
Want to be an activist? Let people know AI will always be imperfect and support moral and ethical behavior in respect of all perspectives and abilities for the betterment of humanity.
Clippy is almost certainly the most hated computer avatar in all of human history. Jar Jar Binks or Wesley Crusher come to mind as equivalent foci of psychic negativity. Using him for any movement is self-sabotage, not to mention all the organizations you will scare off because using a copyrighted/trademarked character invites legal risk.
That's a load of learned helplessness horseshit. The users need to be loud in telling these companies that "this is not okay" and the companies need to listen or face consequences. How about YOU start by phoning your local representative instead of telling other people that nothing can be done.
I agree clippy was useless. Whether it was hostile or not - I think it actually was hostile. It jumped out of nowhere and stole my time. So I actually group clippy into neutral but slightly evil category.
Clippy was chosen precisely because it was so famously bad.
The point of choosing Clippy is to imply that much of what we have now is more anti-user than one of the most anti-user pieces of software of the 90's.
Learned a bit more about this initiative since then. I guess this is a great example of why I heavily dislike creator initiatives like this. In their world getting more people to comment is a good thing, no matter what the comment says. In the real world this mostly benefits the creator and harms the initiative, since the first interaction people have with it is about the initiative being dishonest.
Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
Digital Convergence tried to do similar with the CueCat, a low-cost barcode reader that had a hardware serial number and for which the official software to drive it required you sign up for an account with them, giving them PII. When people figured out how to neuter the serial number and encryption in hardware, DC invoked the DMCA.
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
At the time, that sort of behavior was expected in almost anything you downloaded, it really was perhaps even more invasive than today. Java was infamous for installing a search bar on your browser and making it hard to not “accept” it.
Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.
Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.
That adds clippy and all the other agents to a webpage. There is a PR on the repo that adds an example that hooks clippy up to a local ollama agent:
https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs/pull/17
You are obviously correct, but I don't know that it really matters.
As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.
Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?
Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
this clippywashing is paid by Bill gates? remember when everyone hated him for Windows 95 crashing every 10 minutes and he had to donate his whole Fortune to compensate
Seeing how reddit is moving in the opposite direction by doing things like allowing people to hide their submission histories, that seems highly unlikely.
It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)
It's a great example from 2002 that demonstrates that while the US have ramped up its isolationism efforts lately, it has been moving in the same direction for a long time, so what's happening now shouldn't be so surprising.
Many people raised the alarm back then, and were shouted down by promises that these laws would only be used when appropriate. In 2002, very few would've been okay with tearing apart American families, parents, and children based on the color of their skin, letting women miscarry through malnutrition while in custody, etc.
Just wait 25 years, buy the media, and slowly brainwash the population.
The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, and likely has roots that go much further back.
Difficult for a democracy to defend against this type of long term attack.
Because they’ve already entered into treaties making the offenses involved matters of universal jutisdiction which any state can prosecute their citizens for, and as a State Party to the Rome Statute, they would have more influence over the fairness and process of the ICC than they would over any national system outside of their own.
Also, because they are tired of the diplomatic cost and expense of working with other countries to set up ad hoc tribunals for particular conflicts and want to get the job done once and properly. (That's actually why the US was one of the leaders of the effort that produced the ICC, even though it did a U-turn against it at the last minute.)
It’s like any international treaty, you agree to it because there’s something in it for you in return for signing it.
In this case, there’s a straightforward benefit to it in that it could be used to prosecute crimes against the US and US citizens, and soft benefits e.g. of the US being seen a a paragon of lawfulness and trust. There’s likely more, these are just what I could think of immediately.
That's true, but the member states agree to offer that jurisdiction. For instance, joining the treaty would allow us to arrest suspected war criminals, or at least, discourage them from traipsing around on our territory.
A lot of people toss around “war criminal” pretty loosely. And regardless of whether you think say, George W Bush was a WC (I don’t), it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader, which could even be a popular one with broad support, to be prosecuted at The Hague, because Europeans disagreed with a military decision. Joining the ICC would mean the US would need to do just that.
> it would be awkward for any country to have to hand over its elected leader,
Since the leader (elected or not) generally controls the executive apparatus (that’s what makes them the “leader”), its unlikely that this would actually occur, irrespective of the nominal obligation. It is more likely that they would be turned over after being removed as leader (a process which an ICC warrant may or may not accelerate, depending on the response of other institutions, the populace, etc.)
At least, that is what has generally happened with the top leaders that have ended up at the ICC (or its predecessor ad hoc tribunals, back to Slobodan Milosevic, the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal—the ICTY—who wasn't turned over by Yugoslav authorities until after he resigned.)
> because Europeans disagreed with a military decision
The majority of State Parties to the Rome Statute are non-European, as are a majority of the current judges of the court, as is the current acting chief prosecutor, so it is really weird to describe ICC involvement this way.
I suppose it would be like the governor of a state getting prosecuted for Federal crimes.
Would GWB have acted differently, had he been forced to consider the legality of his actions under a broader framework? Would we have preferred for presidents to have even broader immunity from prosecution?
Why would any state enter into a treaty with a state that doesn't recognize them? Diplomacy requires it so it has been in the USA Constitution since the beginning:
Article VI, Clause 2:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Same reason most people prefer living in a society with laws: you are subject to laws, but so is everyone else, and provided the laws are beneficial ("just") you are overall better off.
On a national level I agree not to steal, and in return nobody else is allowed to steal from me. On the ICC level my country agrees not to genocide anyone, and in return others aren't allowed to genocide either
The fundamental problem with this logic is that there is no enforcement body here. In a just society, the law defines who is "allowed" to steal from you and the state's enforcement arm punishes those who violate the law. The law binds but also protects.
Creating a global enforcement arm is an obvious non-starter: Which laws shall be enacted and enforced against whom, and how are fundamentally political questions. The answers to those questions necessarily change once you cross into another polity. States can coordinate and agree mutually to enforce a law... but if Poland says that despite their commitments to the contrary they simply aren't gonna extradite that suspected Nord Stream saboteur: Tough nuggets. Such situations expose international "laws" as mere window dressing on powers that emanate from and remain held by individual states.
There is no global enforcement arm and plenty of evidence that if someone starts genociding you, nobody else is gonna do anything about it. You're on your own. Such "laws" bind but do not protect.
Especially in the context of the US as world hegemon: The US fully expects to shoulder the entire burden of deterring or defeating threats to the homeland. Joining the ICC would bring precisely zero extra protection from genocide. Indeed, such a commitment may limit the US's freedom of action, discredit US deterrence, and actually make a devastating war more likely.
Seems like the US is very involved in others' business for such an "independent" spirit.
E.g. Switzerland (a country I'd argue as having a far more genuine independent spirit) was labeled as a currency manipulator by the US [0], despite the designation being fairly arbitrary, and you know, her being her own country (and so surely subject to her own laws).
What you're describing as "independence" looks a lot more like "rules for thee are not rules for me", which the US just happens to have the privelage of preaching due to its preeminent position in the world.
Currency manipulation is meant to benefit the country doing manipulation (in this case Switzerland) at the expense of another country (in this case U.S.)
It's very much the role of U.S. government to protect U.S. from other countries trying to do harm to U.S., be it by bombing U.S. territory, tariffs on U.S. goods or currency manipulation that economically hurts U.S.
You could present an argument that Switzerland wasn't trying to harm U.S. economically via currency manipulation but instead you're trying to delegitimize the very idea that U.S. can defend itself from other countries trying to harm it economically by pretending that it's purely internal affair that has no effect on U.S.
Currency manipulation does hurt U.S. and that's the reason U.S. has the right to push back on it.
I said Switzerland was labelled a currency manipulator - its attempts to devalue the Franc was in response to the sharp rise in its value as a result of Covid and the markets plowing money into safe-haven assets. This presented a real problem for the country at the time, and the primary dynamic at play wrt exports in the country is actually between CHF and EUR, not CHF and USD. The US designation was widely considered arbitrary iirc, putting Switzerland into the same grouping as countries like China, which have vastly different reasons for devaluing their currencies, and arguably ones more in line with what the US was actually supposedly targeting.
So I haven't claimed that Switzerland is a currency manipulator, nor that this would be a good thing, nor that its efforts to devalue its currency had anything to do with the US. I don't see what the contention is here - unless it's that only the US is allowed to be "independent" (i.e. above all international law), here wrt the ICC, while other countries must curtail what is in their national interests (like not having their export markets decimated) for fear of provoking this one special, privileged land?
If the argument is that the US can enforce its agenda on other countries and they must just suck it, then sure. But that's not an argument about fairness or what's right, that's an argument about what to expect from the actor with the biggest stick.
yes we independently decide to invade other countries for no good reason and independently decide to extrajudicially murder people the president doesn't like, I'm so very glad
The reason has nothing to do with "independence". It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
At least that was the reason I was given in the US military. YMMV
I wouldn't believe anything the military tells you about justice.
The US military told people whatever they needed to tell them to follow orders. That's why they follow unlawful orders like those to extrajudicially blow up non-combatant US citizens abroad, and imprison people in Guantanamo for decades without trial, assist the disarming of innocent US citizens in NOLA in the aftermath of Katrina, blackball soldiers in Vietnam that reported war crimes, and all manner of other things that hardly anyone seems to be held to account for.
> The ICC is intended to complement, not replace, national judicial systems; it can exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals.
Interesting. Thanks for posting that. I hope the US will always prosecute war crimes of its own soldiers, but I'm skeptical--I don't think that's how war and power work.
> It is that the US has the death penalty for this, and they want to kill people who commit war crimes.
> At least that was the reason I was given in the US military.
That's obviously nonsense. For many reasons:
(1) ICC jursidiction does not supercede national jurisdiction that is actually exercised—that's explicitly a basis for ICC jurisdiction not to be applied (it can be applied in the case of sham proceedings designed to provide cover). So it wouldn't stop the US from trying, and applying the death penalty to, any war criminals.
(2) The actual reasons for the the US opposition, including Congress passing a law threatening the ICC, are matters of public record, and are much more about the US wanting impunity for accused (American) war criminals than any fear of inadequate punishment.
(3) The US response to its own war criminals that it has had the opportunity to punish since the establishment of, and its refusal to join, the ICC has shown a singular lack of capital punishment. And even the occasional Presidential pardon after conviction.
Even for US military propaganda directed at is own personnel, that's pretty lazy, low-effort stuff.
Every country tries that on a regular basis. The US might have more power on the world stage, but everyone tries it once in a while. If you look at history the US has been very restrained with using their power (which isn't a high bar)
Do you also think it's hypocritical that the Dallas Cowboys try to sack the other team's quarterback even though they don't want their own quarterback sacked?
The Dallas Cowboys operates according to team rules that encourages such violence. The entire point of international cooperation is to prevent the sort if wonton violence our military engaged in the last 80 years.
God willing, someone in this country or in another one will work up the nerve to erase such a malignant cancer out of existence eventually.
No man is an island, and no country is either. You live in an international community, whether you like it or not. You can choose to be a rogue state, but it doesn't reflect well on you.
Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here? If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do. Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
If US soldiers are (once again) committing war crimes, will the US do anything? What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes? Should there not be one?
> What’s the recourse for the victims of those crimes?
The war crimes (and some others) that are subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC are already crimes recognized explicitly in the treaties establishing them as crimes matters of universal jurisdiction. Yeah, its difficult to get your hands on them to exercise that jurisdiction, but... that hasn’t really been a problem the ICC has solved with regard to significant powers when their personnel are subject to its jurisdiction, either.
Seen this around quite abit over the past few days. I wish the github landing page/readme would actually substansiate why this is better beyond it being written in rust which seems to be the main argument for the tool right now. I make my money from PHP, I preffer stability.
Which means very little; european trucks are allowed to haul 10~15% more weight per axle. Being allowed to drive faster and or for longer has little to do with 'hardware' beyond different gearing and more to do with road safety and labor laws.
> on the understanding it was reasonably hackable and open
I, honestly, have no idea why you thought that. Bambulab has been under fire from the very beginning about not being open at all and not contributing back to the open source community they're build on.
I bought one of their printers during black friday too, it took me a long time to get over the fact that it isn't an open printer, and I never want to go back to tinkering for hours to get meh quality prints.
Ever since this kind of stuff was introduced I've been annoyed that there is no way to disable it for yourself. And it's allowed for straight up evil stuff like google buying the .dev TLD
Your mention of .dev seems like a complete non-sequiter to me. What happened to .internal here is the exact opposite of what happened to .dev. And how would you even propose to "disable" reservation of a TLD. Sorry your comment just makes no sense from my POV.
