the myth of the good tech giant
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I thought the whole "clippy just wanted to help" meme was sarcastic since clippy's nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything, but it seems it is not.
clippy’s nagging was just as intrusive as the current AI being forced into everything
I thought the opposite was (part of) the point. Just right-click the assistant and tell it to go away, that's it. If all the AI garbage that's being integrated into Windows and many applications was that easy to get rid of I'd be considerably less annoyed by it. It was clumsy and misguided but not nearly as intrusive, also didn't require an account and an Internet connection.
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I don't think they would've, they already had the market, and the attitude about privacy was very different back then
This also was before late-stage capital converted to endgame capitalism, back then they wanted to protect the cash cow. They cared about customer loyalty, because they cared about future revenue
Now? Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Any example of this?
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I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
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I remember struggling with the idea that all companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. People are good and care about good things. How can companies who are made of people always cause problems? There must be at least one good company out there, right?
It's only after I spent some time in the world that I figured out that money really messes with things. It pressures companies to do whatever they can get away with. It separates the people who run the companies from the bad outcomes that company creates.
And at the end of the day everyone needs to make a choice. Live and participate in a system that causes problems, or die. I chose to live and I don't blame anyone else for choosing to live.
wrote last edited by [email protected]People are good and care about good things.
We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists. -
The entire clippy thing baffles me.
Let's use the mascot of Microsoft, a tech giant who invades every inch that they can, to say we don't like tech giants!
I don't think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is. It's the equivalent of changing your twitter profile to show support for the victims of something, and then carrying on as usual.
Microsoft would kill for Clippy to be remembered as a friend. Because that just sanewashes their history as a company when clippy was a thing. Yes, please ignore the anti-trust busting in Congress. Please ignore how we made computers worse for the end user by restricting what you can do on your purchased computer.
"Clippy was your friend. Clippy didn't want to steal your data. Clippy just wanted to help."
Help infantize the masses with "It looks like you're writing a document, do you want help with that? Yes, or maybe later?"
This entire clippy thing is just basically free whitewashing and advertising for Microsoft, one of the biggest players in the reasons why people use the avatar.
At least invent something new, if it's about protecting artists, instead of copying a jpg from a 90s corporate milquetoast mascot.
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I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).
The video that started this clippy campaign mentioned that. The message is that those sort of transgressions seem so minor compared to what companies bot only do, but get away with now
Clippy was hated at the time, but an annoying useless assistant that doesn't send anything to the Internet, let alone your personal data, seems like a dream now.
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Link here. Clippy never tried to sell our data. He just wanted to help, even if he was bad at it.
He would have tried to sell your data if he could have. Clippy would use Recall 24/7 if he could have.
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Random trivia: The clippy 3D animations were created by Deadpool director Tim Miller (of Blur Studio).
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The entire clippy thing baffles me.
Let's use the mascot of Microsoft, a tech giant who invades every inch that they can, to say we don't like tech giants!
I don't think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is. It's the equivalent of changing your twitter profile to show support for the victims of something, and then carrying on as usual.
Microsoft would kill for Clippy to be remembered as a friend. Because that just sanewashes their history as a company when clippy was a thing. Yes, please ignore the anti-trust busting in Congress. Please ignore how we made computers worse for the end user by restricting what you can do on your purchased computer.
"Clippy was your friend. Clippy didn't want to steal your data. Clippy just wanted to help."
Help infantize the masses with "It looks like you're writing a document, do you want help with that? Yes, or maybe later?"
This entire clippy thing is just basically free whitewashing and advertising for Microsoft, one of the biggest players in the reasons why people use the avatar.
At least invent something new, if it's about protecting artists, instead of copying a jpg from a 90s corporate milquetoast mascot.
I don't think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is.
Didn't Rossmann say the whole point of changing your profile to clippy was to show everyone participating how many people would be willing to actually fight for consumer rights?
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Microsoft nowadays is one of the evil companies. Microsoft back in the day was the evil company.
What about Monsanto (Roundup) and Philip-Morris (lol)? You could probably include Dole. As well as the East India Company.
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Companies are dismantling themselves for one more good quarter
Any example of this?
What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money
For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit
It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you'll have to pay them more. It'll make you a bit more money next quarter... But in 2-5 years when there's no new game?
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I don't think any company that uses AI or scrapes data gives two shits what your avatar is.
Didn't Rossmann say the whole point of changing your profile to clippy was to show everyone participating how many people would be willing to actually fight for consumer rights?
So instead of fighting it they changed their profile picture. Might as well post "Down for this sort of thing, I hereby declare Facebook can't steal my posts" and then never actually do anything to help stop it.
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So instead of fighting it they changed their profile picture. Might as well post "Down for this sort of thing, I hereby declare Facebook can't steal my posts" and then never actually do anything to help stop it.
So I suppose you never watched his follow-up video?
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Random trivia: The clippy movement is not saying that Microsoft was noble. It’s saying we need to go back to the 90s version is the internet.
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What about Monsanto (Roundup) and Philip-Morris (lol)? You could probably include Dole. As well as the East India Company.
Fair point. Has meant IT companies.
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What do you think laying off your workforce does? These are the people who produce the things that make money
For a clear cut example, Microsoft and gaming. They lay off entire studios the moment they release a hit
It costs like 18 months+ of salary to replace a role like that, and you'll have to pay them more. It'll make you a bit more money next quarter... But in 2-5 years when there's no new game?
Microsoft is doing pretty well so I wouldn't call it "dismantling", it seems to be working for them.
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He would have tried to sell your data if he could have. Clippy would use Recall 24/7 if he could have.
Are you telling me there was no shift in how companies want to make money over the last 30 years? That is absurd. They would have never done that in the 90s.
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Random trivia: The clippy movement is not saying that Microsoft was noble. It’s saying we need to go back to the 90s version is the internet.
new meta: putting "random trivia:" before your contrarian comments
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Microsoft is doing pretty well so I wouldn't call it "dismantling", it seems to be working for them.
Microsoft is dismantling itself to keep "doing well". That's my point
Their gaming division keeps acquiring and killing game studios. They're killing off consoles, instead they're going to sell prebuilds running windows. They're scaling it all way back and releasing their exclusives, letting steam run the infrastructure, and milking all of their current IP, but not really making more
They've ended support for a ton of different product lines. Azure is a mess. Their desktop market share is falling too.
They're all in on AI at this point, literally every tool they offer has it now. It's not even opt in, it doesn't require an account anymore... They're desperate to inflate the numbers so they can project growth a little longer
What do you think happens when you continuously lay off your workforce and kill projects? When you stop actually doing things, and run a company based on speculation?
Eventually, the bubble pops.
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I remember struggling with the idea that all companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. People are good and care about good things. How can companies who are made of people always cause problems? There must be at least one good company out there, right?
It's only after I spent some time in the world that I figured out that money really messes with things. It pressures companies to do whatever they can get away with. It separates the people who run the companies from the bad outcomes that company creates.
And at the end of the day everyone needs to make a choice. Live and participate in a system that causes problems, or die. I chose to live and I don't blame anyone else for choosing to live.
Here's the thing... Once an organization grows to a certain point, it takes on a mind of it's own.
Decision making becomes fragmented. Details are lost between the decision and the decision maker
It's impossible to manage 100, let alone 1000 people directly, so metrics creep in as a way to reward good performance (and maybe punish low performance).
And because we're a hierarchial society, we further group into divisions and teams. The people who get the best metrics out of their teams are more likely to move up, the bad managers are more likely to be towards the bottom. And honestly, good lower management is mostly taking care of your people
So you're more likely to get managers who don't have the integrity to take a firm stand, so maybe when a worker realizes "oh shit, were leaking into the groundwater" it gets watered down to "we found a leak, but it won't impact production" before it gets up to someone who could authorize a shutdown and fix
It's possible for a company to do horrible things without any bad actors, and we do have plenty of bad actors around.
It's possible to fight against this sort of thing through culture or policy, but the natural inclination is always going to maximize the metrics at any cost
