Tyler Frisbee
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2025
0:39 · 634K views · Apr 7, 2012
A one-minute clip of Microsoft's Clippy, the Office assistant character, in action.
Mostly used as a reference for Clippy as an annoying assistant, including as a precedent for forced AI features.
3 comments from Hacker News
I remember the hate well. Clippy was this obnoxious know it all who did shit like lean in and wave his eyebrows at you tapping on the monitor glass condescendingly asking QUESTION after QUESTION when you were trying to do stuff like focusing on writing your dissertation or important TPS reports for the boss. It was so annoying. It even made noises. [1] I think it was appealing in a cartoony 90's kind of way for maybe 10 minutes for anyone who liked that kind of thing, but if you had to sit down and use this program for hours until you were done this character was the worst. Good thing you could turn it off, I remember a ton of people asking me how to do that back in the day. [1] this video
Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: [LINK] ) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference) This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video ( this video ), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating . But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool? For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy [LINK]
AI buttons are a fad, they’ll be gone soon. Just like Clippy (an assistant for Microsoft Word in the 90s). this video The real uses of AI will be far more subtle.