[raydiak]

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.

[mrandish]

> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.

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..."

[raydiak]

I'm in the exact same boat as you describe, except it was some other precompiled local-only project instead of this one that I tried a few months ago. That's why I said I like projects like these, because it's a fully private hassle free way to try out LLMs. Haven't really figured out any good purposes for it in my life, but I like to see these tools being made available to people without the time/motivation/savvy to jump through a bunch of hoops.

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.

[mrandish]

> Which made it just another config burden when I'd be installing office on many computers in a day.

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.

[raydiak]

That makes total sense. I can see why many would be more Clippy tolerant if they hadn't had to explain its interruptions to other people and/or turn it off and move on with their day several dozen times or more.

[volkk]

i'm not sure if this post was written with humor as intent, but i found it hilarious. ive never heard someone talk about clippy with such disdain.

> 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.

[raydiak]

I'm glad! :) I do actually feel some less exaggerated version of what I wrote, but the excess in the verbiage was largely comedic. If you look it up pretty much anywhere, you'll find that there's a very large camp of us Clippy haters who never recovered. I was doing some amount of IT support at the time, and one of the main problems was all the popping up and asking questions confused people in various ways, and if you hid it the obvious way it'd just pop up again. Back when computers were still a new and novel thing for many people, having constant offers of "help" popping up when you're just trying to type a letter introduced counterproductive amounts of cognitive load for some frustrated users I got to deal with.

[ants_everywhere]

is it possible you're not the target audience?

[raydiak]

Which part of my original comment made that a question worth asking? Thought I had already expressed that fairly clearly.

[basch]

I’d prefer it be an OS API.

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.

[hadlock]

There's a number of standard APIs already, OpenAI supports Anthopic's MCP, LM studio supports both their proprietary API as well as OpenAI's API. OpenAI has open sourced their realtime API (https://github.com/openai/openai-realtime-console/tree/webso...) and others. Most local clients just have a https://URL:port and then a drop down box for which RESTful API you want to use (for 88% of use cases they all support the same stuff, for realtime it's not quite settled yet), plus a field for an API key if needed.

[raydiak]

To me, the value of these types of projects is specifically that they are self-contained and local-only. That's the only kind of interaction with it I'm comfortable with right now. I mostly jumped ship on commercial software a long time ago, so I'm hoping there will still be some AI-free linux distros for a good long time. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. At the point that the type of AI integration you're imagining becomes ubiquitous and mandatory, I may or may not stop working with computers entirely, depending on the state of the tech and the state of society by then.

[fallinditch]

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.

[raydiak]

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.

[fallinditch]

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.

[raydiak]

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.