Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "clippy"
-
"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
-- Dennis Ritchie10 -
Beep bop, I’m a bot.
Future CEO of GitHub Nat Friedman made an AMA on Reddit to respond to questions about the future of GitHub.
Of course, Clippy came up.
Source: https://reddit.com/r/AMA/...6 -
Doesn't it look like Bixby(New virtual assistant from Samsung) logo got inspired a bit from Clippy(Microsoft office assistant)?
Or is it only me?5 -
CLIPPY IS BACK! Who needs rubber ducks when you can have this old friend back?
https://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fu...4 -
Does anyone remember these? I would navigate to search just to see these characters perform different animations and movements
What a wonderful time it was🥺7 -
How lawyers fuck up technology!
I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:
Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.
Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.
However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.
I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.
Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!
What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!
(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)12 -
A server application pulled off some sort of listings as table. Problem was, it crashed with some thousand data files after one and a half hours. I looked into that, and couldn't stop WTFing.
A stupid server side script fetched the data in XML (WTF!) and then inserted shit node-wise (WTF!!), which was O(n^2) - in PHP and on XML! Then it converted the whole shebang into HTML for browser display although users would finally copy/paste the result into Excel anyway.
The original developer even had written a note on the application page that pulling the data "could take long". Yeah because it's so fucking STUPID that Clippy is an Einstein in comparison, that's why!
So I pulled the raw data via batch file without XML wrapping and wrote a little C program for merging the dumped stuff client-side in O(n), spitting out a final CSV for Excel import.
Instead of fucking the server for 1.5 hours and then crashing, shit is done after 7 seconds, out of which the actual data processing takes 40 bloody milliseconds!4 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.3 -
Me: Hey girl, what's your address?
Girl: 5.15.126.4
Me: No man, your local address.
Girl: 127.0.0.1
Me: Oh, you geeky nerd! I mean your physical address!
Girl: 40:37:0E:6A:A7:AD2 -
My favorate bookmarklet (ES6 only):
javascript:(()=>{var b,c,a=document,f="onreadystatechange",h="https://rawgithub.com/smore-inc/...=(p,q)=>{p.readyState?p[f]=()=>{"loaded"!=p.readyState&&"complete"!=p.readyState||(p[f]=null,q&&q())}:p.onload=function(){q&&q()}},k=()=>{clippy.load("Clippy",p=>{$(".clippy").css("position","fixed"),$(".clippy").css("z-index",1e3),p.show(),p.moveTo(100,100)})},m=()=>{(c=a.createElement("script")).src=h+"clippy.js",a.body.appendChild(c);var p=a.createElement("link");p.rel="stylesheet",p.type="text/css",p.media="all",p.href=h+"clippy.css",a.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(p)};"undefined"==typeof jQuery?(b=a.createElement("script"),b.src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/...,j(b,()=>{m(),j(c,k)})):"undefined"==typeof clippy?(m(),j(c,k)):k()})();14 -
devRant needs some sort of Offspring-of-Clippy tool.
"It looks like you're posting a sort-of-humorous-the-first-time joke or meme. Have you bothered to scroll more than twice to see if this dead horse has, indeed, been well flogged?" 😜 -
Digital minds, ranked:
1. Skynet
2. GLADOS
3. HAL-9000
4. The OS from movie “Her”
5. GPT-4
6. GPT-3
7. Clippy from MS Word 2003
8. Half-Life 1 cockroach ai
9. a brain-dead Markov chain
10. human ai from cyberpunk 2077 beta
11. virtual therapist from Emacs
12. GPT-4o6 -
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof software, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."
Source: Can't remember -
In production, whenever nginx can't find an upstream it will display a static 'maintenance' html file that tells the user the come back later
In development, it shows clippy :D -
Clippy is awesome and I wish Cortana would have a Clippy "skin". I don't use Cortana sure but it sounds nice
-
!rant
I really like the Material Design guidelines that Google has released with Android 5.0, and maybe, @dfox, you could make the status bar match a darker tint of the app's color, as this color is also used on the recents menu and on my keyboard, and it really (IMO) makes an app stand out.
Thanks!9 -
Microsoft resurrects Clippy. “I see you’re having an existential crisis. Would you like me to help you write your last will and testament?”
https://zdnet.com/article/... -
> Can you help me make this excel document more readable when it's printed? *looking to change the text size and column widths*
Who do you think I am, Mr fucking clippy? Why are you printing it anyway? Step into the millennium and email it to them you fucking nugget, save the planet.
This was after three people already approached my desk in a line, five minutes after I got in. All asking stupid questions, which not only do they have a service desk for but could quite easily Google. -
Clippy belongs on GitHub. Open source <3 Clippy, let's get this to 100 signatures:
https://change.org/p/...1 -
This will sound silly as I was a 6 yo back then. My father had got a computer for doing some office work. He used to do a lot of the stuff using MS Word. I loved seeing the Pipes screensaver marvelling at the infinite combinations of pipes. But, what got me the most excited was Clippy, the infamous Office Assistant. I started using computer just to play around with clippy. Right click, do a trick and stuff. Oh the memories...1
-
I can’t use paper clips anymore, everywhere I look I see his face.
C is for cool
L is for lots of useful advice
I is for I love u Clippy
P is for passion u passionate boi
P is for more passion u rock my world
Y is for y did the bad windows men take u away3