←back to thread

1122 points felixrieseberg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
jl6 ◴[] No.43907000[source]
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 easier way to do what you’re doing”. I don’t think the necessary trust exists yet to do this using public LLM APIs, nor does the hardware to do it locally, but crack either of those and I could see ClipGPT being genuinely useful.
replies(10): >>43907133 #>>43907138 #>>43907168 #>>43907265 #>>43907418 #>>43907981 #>>43908398 #>>43908908 #>>43909895 #>>43913051 #
1. PaulHoule ◴[] No.43907168[source]
The way I remember it a lot of software had "help" documentation with full text search in the late 1980s and early 1990s but the common denominator was that it didn't work in the sense that you got useful answers less than 10% of the time. Until Google came along, users got trained to avoid full text search facilities.

The full text facility attached to Clippy really was helpful, getting useful answers around 50% of the time. I thought the whole point of making him an engaging cartoon character was to overcome the prejudice mid-1990s users had towards full-text search in help.