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 least acknowledged their behavior and owned it (with a sly wink), I'd hate it a little less. I might even be up for a "Clippy is my CoPilot" sticker on my laptop (calling back to the old 80s "Jesus is my Copilot" bumper stickers).
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
You posted that, and someone at Microsoft unwittingly twitched.
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 touchstone: a visual and interface link across otherwise seemingly disparate model interfaces. Clearly delineating and bridging MS AI tools from all the other mixes of tools we are accumulating.
They could lean into the “clip” in Clippy with a side app for saving and organizing clippings and logs of notable interactions with any MS model, akin to a notes app. With features for compressing convos into compact topic cheat sheets (with retained sources & convos), lists and other helpful info gathering and leveraging tasks.
An ongoing accumulated compressed common core of context for both (hu)man and machine, er … Clippy.
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
Agreed!
Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
That would be violating the second design principle:
"When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times."
With a physical robot, if it fails and freezes, it turns into a hazard.
With Clippy, it intrusively stops humans from being able to do what they are doing.
its just that it outlived its welcome quickly, once i learned everything that i needed. the lesson to learn is i think about how to move from that guided experience into more power tools
Especially the old 'suicide note' joke image... guess would be called a meme today.
Edit: yes found it.
[1] https://windowsreport.com/with-copilot-avatar-microsoft-will...
(Assumption: You're tech literate, given the audience of this website. So I tend to assume it must be a conscious decision not to use adblocking)
I don't browse without it these days.
i have ublock origin on my pc and macbook. trying firefox mobile with ublock but it's still habit to open chrome on my phone
I also have these Extensions:
ClearURLs
Decentraleyes
Privacy Badger
I still don't care about cookiesI attribute this to the fact that big corporations like Microsoft have so much bureaucracy and moving cogs that even something as simple as a request to reuse a UI element like Clippy would be stuck between the cogs forever.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/h...
They can bring back clippy, Cortana, and all the other variants, in classic or modern mode. Hell why not a BonziBuddy knockoff.
An opportunity for Carmen Sandiego as well.
I really can’t stand their brain dead appropriation of AI - first Cortana, which they stole from Halo, now CoPilot, which they stole from GitHub (and should have been named Cod*e*Pilot anyway) -
Clippy is right there!!
Thanks to the horrific beauty of ActiveX, this even allowed these Agents to be loaded into web pages.
The API was supported up till Windows 7 (though it was an optional component at the time) but still I would love for someone to dig up an old copy of the agent SDK (I couldn't find it myself) and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
https://archive.org/details/microsoftagentsoftwaredevelopmen...
> and hook up ChatGPT to the real, actual Clippy.
The actual character of Clippy was not included with the Agent SDK (unlike some other options available in Office, like the Wizard), so you’d have to dig it out of an actual copy of Office, or get it from someone who already did so:
https://archive.org/details/clippitMS
(Was the WinXP search dog also an Agent character? I never guessed that for some reason.)
That and an appropriate system prompt could get pretty close to vigor from User Friendly.
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/20000104...
(and, of course pico-chu for the noobs.)
fun times
After all it was requested almost daily over at x.com
https://x.com/search?q=ai%20bring%20clippy%20back&src=typed_...
I have often wondered what role their relationship played in keeping Clippy around. And now I wonder if Clippy makes Bill Gates sad since the divorce.
I doubt he thinks about clippy much at all.
Guys I think I found Bill’s HN handle
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.
Would you like help?
* Get help with writing the letter
* Just type the letter without help
|_| Don't show me this tip again
As you say though, I don't know how many people would be comfortable having screenshots of their computer sent arbitrarily to a non-local LLM.
Of the technical, hang-out-on-HN crowd? Ya, probably not many.
Of the other 99.99% of computer users? The majority of them wouldn't even think about it, let alone care. To quote a phrase, ”the user is going to pick dancing pigs over security every time”.
Even without the non-chalent attitude towards security, the majority of the population has been so conditioned that everything they do on a computer is already being sent to 1) Apple, 2) Google, 3) Microsoft, or 4) their employer, that they're burnt-out of caring.
All that is to say that if you can make a widely-available real-time LLM assistant that appeals to non-technical users, please invite me to your private-island-celebrity-filled-yacht-parties.
shudders.
Wait, are you really looking this up? You don't even know how to do this? Are you kidding me?
Gosh, it's been an hour and you still haven't fixed this bug? Are you retarded or something? You don't deserve this job.
That said, if we could automate it, it might free up more of my brain for productivity…
That could come off just as patronizing as the original Clippy. If it said things like "Would you like me to generate you a letter for X?" it would be miles ahead of the original.
Pretty soon I won’t even need biological memory.
It looks like you are writing a comment on Hacker News.
Would you like help with:
- Commas? There shouldn't be one behind "responds to text"
- Capitalization? You've missed a D in "did you know..."
- Punctuation? You've missed a question mark behind "what you’re doing". It goes inside the quotes, of course!
[] Don't ever suggest anything like this ever again.
I wish this sort of style had a more specific name and could be decoupled from the desktop a bit more.
Would love to see a native webpage inspired by windows 2000 or similar. I've struggled to find a name for it.
ICYDN: The proper name of Clippy is actually "Clippit", as introduced in Office 97.
Thank you Felix! This is extremely cool! Can you please make a short blog post explaining how is it technically implemented?
It used Merlin rather than Clippy and was extremely basic as AI. But it was a fun project.
The general idea is awesome though, and a lot more fun than just having a quake-terminal to interface with local LLMs via ollama.
I hope that one day a non-Electron app (to minimize resource usage when idle) will also appear!
I feel like a text editor + clippy would be an even more potent combo! After all, that was clippy's original context.
I have a 3090gtx, but never actually run/hosted any locally.
Cheers
Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth
Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.
> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
https://github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/releases/tag/v0.4.1
> Sadly, Clippy failed to successfully load the model. This could be an issue with Clippy itself, the selected model, or your system. You can report this error at github.com/felixrieseberg/clippy/issues. The error was:
> Error: Error invoking remote method 'ELECTRON_LLM_CREATE': Error: Error: NoBinaryFoundError
On macOS it always launches in the middle of the screen - is there a way to move it around?
I like the idea, though.
https://fabulous.systems/posts/2024/06/if-i-ever-get-a-dog-i...
- A JavaScript implementation of the Jinja templating language
- A full GitHub API client
- A library that takes a string and tells you if it's a valid npm package name
- A useless shim for the JavaScript Math module
And 119 other libraries? This thing would have taken up 10% of the maximum disk space available on a Windows 95 FAT16 volume.
In general, pruning libraries in Electron isn't as easy as it should be - it's probably something for us to work on.
If someone’s going to get RCE on my machine, I don’t want it to be through the silly Clippy LLM UI, you know?
A guess without looking into the code: Jinja templating is used to define how to prompt the model (i.e. system first, then this specific character / token, then user, then if it's a tool prepend this and append that, etc.)
This project isn't trying to be your best chat bot. I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology paired with one the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025.
You might be looking for the more minimalist Grumpy which is hand-hewn from a pure silicon monocrystal.
>> Ship project. >> Link out Github repo on the static site somewhere >> Gain trust instantly as users presume the public repo is what's used behind the scenes
Disclaimer: I'm a web dev and don't know a single thing about native MacOS software
I sign my binaries on macOS with Apple codesign and notarize - and with Microsoft's Azure trusted signing for Windows. Both operating systems will actually show you a lot of warning dialogs before running anything unsigned. It's far from perfect - but I do wish we'd get more into the habit of signing binaries, even if open source.
Don't install third party software except from highly trusted sources.
Snark aside, given the context, this really seems like a baseless attack on independent open source developers, who represent a significant potion of this site's subject matter and target audience. Genuine question: why do you feel that this warning is appropriate here but not the dozens of other solo github projects that make it to the HN front page every week?
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.
This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.
I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Giving a chat agent a retro 90s UX that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."
The Clippy character specifically is the part I find off-putting, but perhaps that's just an excess of relevant experience. How many times I had to explain to confused people that it's not saying anything you have to care about, or disable it for them when they're cursing at their screen because the "hide" option doesn't actually disable it you have to go into the settings for that or it keeps popping up. Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.
Now, a strong argument could be made that those experiences have made me unreasonable and bigoted against animated paperclips, because this is not the original Clippy. I can live with that.
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 moved on with my day.
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.
this is something else. i dealt with clippy when i was younger but i only have fond memories. it was useless, but it brought personality to an otherwise fairly mundane product.
You link your os to a local or cloud llm, and a local program asking the OS for a response and can’t even tell which one you’re using or whether it’s on the machine or not. It should all be abstracted away.
... 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.
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.