[HN Gopher] The Twisted Life of Clippy
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       The Twisted Life of Clippy
        
       Author : CharlesW
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2022-09-10 17:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.seattlemet.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.seattlemet.com)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | throwaway9870 wrote:
       | I knew Cliff and Byron at Stanford. Despite the reputation of
       | Clippy, they were two wonderful, talented and amazingly smart
       | people.
        
       | dehrmann wrote:
       | Friendly reminder: always read Clippy in Gilbert Gottfried's
       | voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu_Pzuwy-JY
        
       | mikehar wrote:
       | Great article, it got a lot of it right. I worked on Bob and Bob
       | 2. Yes, there was a Bob v2, but for some reason it got canceled.
       | -\\_(tsu)_/-
        
         | Mezzie wrote:
         | Because they knew that it would be too powerful, too ahead of
         | its time. We all would have wept at the beauty and been unable
         | to continue on in our meagre existences if Bob v2 came into
         | being.
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | I suspect with new AI chatbots we're getting close to the level
       | of tech to be able to remake clippy and make him _actually
       | useful_ this time...
       | 
       | Things like "Hi Clippy, I wrote a draft of this brochure, but can
       | you pad it out and send it out with a customized intro to all
       | promising looking leads in salesforce?"
        
         | fortran77 wrote:
         | It's not clippy, but Microsoft has added "suggested styling" to
         | Powerpoint, and I let it re-layout my pages, and the results
         | are beautiful. It sees your page and suggests a layout, which
         | you can choose to accept.
         | 
         | It's explained badly here, but it works well:
         | 
         | https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-profession...
         | 
         | I think there is room for a good "AI" companion that runs when
         | you're in Word, or Powerpoint. (Maybe not Excel.)
        
           | MereInterest wrote:
           | Microsoft has also added "suggested phrasing", which
           | prioritizes concision even when it removes deliberately
           | inserted uncertainty. In some cases, following its
           | suggestions wouldn't even have resulted in coherent
           | sentences. For a sentence of the form "Do $X, unless $VAR is
           | true." had the recommend replacement "Do $X, unless $VAR.".
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | HeckFeck wrote:
       | I never understood the hatred of Clippy. Certainly seems to be
       | from an age where a whimsical touch was allowed in software,
       | nowadays there just seems to be either stern cynicism or forced
       | chuminess in its place.
       | 
       | Then again I was aged below ten when I first played with Office
       | 97.
        
       | makapuf wrote:
       | Of course, everyone here knows where "cargo clippy" come from.
       | But do you know vigor ( http://vigor.sourceforge.net/ )?
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-11 23:00 UTC)