Clippy is now reborn as an AI chat interface. Don't tell me this is not Just Plain Wrong.
"Clippy let's you run a variety of large language models (LLMs) locally on your computer while sticking with a user interface of the 1990s."
—Felix Rieseberg, CLippy @ Github
Back in the day, I was writing the outline for a new training course in the then-new version of M$ Office 97 (I think!) and kept getting interrupted by the damned "assistant" chipping in with what Microsoft clearly believed were helpful suggestions. As it was a big distraction, I looked for ways of disabling it. Finally I used the assistant itself for help, typing "Fuck off, paper clip" into its prompt. Thankfully it dutifully outlined how to disable it, and I was thereafter untroubled by it. Seriously, I never heard of anyone who found it even remotely useful otherwise, just like the ill-conceived Microsoft Bob.
I am not going to tell you all about Microsoft's Clippy; you've probably come across it at some point in your IT travels; besides, there is plenty of material out there from informative history to YT videos of the awfulness, to countless memes, many distasteful: "It looks like you're writing a suicide note. Would you like some help?" My loathing of the perky paperclip began the moment i opened a Word Document at work, and he popped up with inane suggestions. Finally i told him to fuck off, and he helpfully told me how to disable him, his own suicide note if you will. My feelings about this awful intrusion on my workflow were strong enough that when i asked the IT bods about it, they dutifully removed him fro all installations.
Incidentally, this was the last straw for me and MS Office; after this I installed open Office, a FOSS office suite with almost all the capability of the MS offering. i have never gone back, and never missed it, and could yet chuckle at the many memes, variants of which were everywhere on the internet for a long time, though often invoking sexist and racist themes (thanks, Reddit!). Pregnant Clippy was the worst, and finally marked the end of my appreciation of it.
Now Clippy is reborn, this time as an interface for locally-hosted AI inference engines. As this is something I am planning on having in the future, my interest has been piqued by this project, which offers:
Simple, familiar, and classic chat interface. Send messages to your models, get a response. Batteries included: No complicated setup. Just open the app and chat away. Thanks to llama.cpp and node-llama-cpp, the app will automatically discover the most efficient way to run your models (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, etc). Custom models, prompts, and parameters: Load your own downloaded models and play with the settings.nit is totally offline, local, free: Everything runs on your computers. The only network request Clippy makes is to check for updates (which you can easily disable).
If it's truly as simple as it sounds, the comedy, nostalgia and novelty may be worth it, after all, even the worst AI can't be more inane than the original.
video
Hazelnut says re Clippy: I believe its internal name during development was TFC, or "
that Fucking Clown."
xclip -o | wc -w
522