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Show HN: Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs

(felixrieseberg.github.io)
1122 points felixrieseberg | 3 comments | 06 May 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.321s | source
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raydiak ◴[06 May 25 18:51 UTC] No.43908420[source]▶
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 those things. Clippy would be more suitable for a horror game than an assistant. Going out of their way in the README to profusely thank Microsoft for summoning that hellspawn is just icing on the cake.

I hate to put down anyone's open source hobby project, and the guy looks so friendly and happy in his picture. But my honest reaction is fear of what further nightmares people are going to start animating with AI. I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day. Might as well add Rover from Microsoft Bob, some blink/marquee tags, a MIDI file playing in the background, and a minigame about diagnosing DMA conflicts in mixed plug and play and non-PnP systems. Some parts of the 90s should stay in the 90s.

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fallinditch ◴[06 May 25 22:10 UTC] No.43910152[source]▶
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.

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1. raydiak ◴[07 May 25 02:49 UTC] No.43911770[source]▶
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.

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2. fallinditch ◴[09 May 25 03:11 UTC] No.43933484[source]▶
Sounds like you were a bit traumatized, I can see how clippy could become the stuff of nightmares!

Recently I've been playing with webgl, Three JS, SVG and CSS animations - it's all so accessible with AI coding that one's creativity naturally becomes the main thing. Sometimes even vibe coding on my phone - it's a lot of fun, and so yes I'm sure we're also going to get a lot more annoying stuff that gets in the way.

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3. raydiak ◴[11 May 25 05:00 UTC] No.43951541[source]▶
You're not entirely wrong, though I was also playing it up a little. Meant to be read more like a standup comedy bit, some part honest opinion and some part exaggeration. Someone told me a long time ago that laughing at my own jokes isn't funny, and ever since, nobody including me is ever quite sure how serious I am or not. :)

I'm not so opposed to vibe coding as recreation. Though if you're ever interested, those are all pretty easy and fun things to work with directly in my opinion, at least at hobby scale. Well, maybe not bare webgl, but that's why three.js is in the list.

AI sure does it a lot faster than I can though. I totally get your point that it lowers the bar to entry, and that the speed and near-instant mutability is more conducive to creativity. I'm more opposed to the semantically inscrutable term "vibe coding", but it seems pretty well entrenched already.