This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of seeing the people photos and the attached images, he saw strange images. As in the past we had some scare with xss reflected, we immediately got scared and went straight to investigate the matter. It turned out that the colleague had a Firefox extension installed that changed his images for Nicholas Cage's faces. He didn't remember having done it, but we did remember his blunder hahaha
Damn, I was half hoping it was doing some deepfake face swapping rather than just totally replacing the whole image. Part of me would love to install a "Being John Malkovich" style face replacement plugin onto someone's machine.
At university, we used this extension to teach our classmates about good security practices, such as locking their computers when left unattended. It was fun, especially when professors didn't lock their computers. And my former classmates did learn to lock their computers :)
violating security policies in order to “teach a lesson” is a sure fire way to get people to lose trust in you.
Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.
I worked at a place where if you left your laptop unlocked, anyone could use your slack account to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow. That was more effective than any training video they could have made us watch. But I obviously wouldn't do something like that as a lone wolf.
I’m of two minds about it. I agree that these days it’s by far the safer choice to steer clear of such antics.
But I do sort of miss the days when we had a little more fun with computers even at work. Twenty years ago it was pretty ubiquitous to get a goofy desktop background if you left your machine unsecured all the time and I never saw any harm come from it.
Ironic, given that a ton of the security dogma these days is "don't trust anyone" --- you can guess why that started happening; precisely because of people like him.
Not really: both Google's internal VS Code based IDE and Colab have various background pets as an option: [1]. I am pretty sure the developer saw them.
Yes! This is along the lines of what I thought of when I saw ghostty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42524537
It's too bad I don't use vscode. I think it would be cool to have something that can jump between terminal emulators, something that isn't shackled to a text editor.
EDIT: I seem to vaguely remember something similar to this concept from some anime I watched that depicted a "hacker". It might have been serial experiments lain, or cowboy bebop..
Sadly they only appear in the right/left hand side, not the editor :( I want a cat that reacts to my code, ideally getting mad at me for writing poor quality code, and stretching/sleeping when I'm thinking.
I got "power mode" (or something similar) installed in Intellij/Jetbrains IDE. The faster I write or bigger change I make the more sparkles and flames etc grow around the cursor. Similar plug-ins exist for other editors as well. A bit fun to enable before pairing with a coworker to see their reaction.
Triggering an animation based on what's under the cursor sounds interesting. Like moving to a loop declaration starts a chase-your-tail animation. Or moving to a function signature gives the pet some paint and paper.
Hmmm. Given the state of your code we would also need to incorporate a VS Code Veterinary Hospital and I’m not sure you can afford the insurance premiums.
[obviously I know nothing about the state of your code which I am sure is very good and so this should simply be understood as me being ‘amusingly’ mean!]
This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of seeing the people photos and the attached images, he saw strange images. As in the past we had some scare with xss reflected, we immediately got scared and went straight to investigate the matter. It turned out that the colleague had a Firefox extension installed that changed his images for Nicholas Cage's faces. He didn't remember having done it, but we did remember his blunder hahaha
That's hilarious. Sounds like someone was pranking your colleague.
Was this the extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/
Damn, I was half hoping it was doing some deepfake face swapping rather than just totally replacing the whole image. Part of me would love to install a "Being John Malkovich" style face replacement plugin onto someone's machine.
Yes, it was that one!
At university, we used this extension to teach our classmates about good security practices, such as locking their computers when left unattended. It was fun, especially when professors didn't lock their computers. And my former classmates did learn to lock their computers :)
violating security policies in order to “teach a lesson” is a sure fire way to get people to lose trust in you.
Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.
It all depends on the company of course.
I worked at a place where if you left your laptop unlocked, anyone could use your slack account to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow. That was more effective than any training video they could have made us watch. But I obviously wouldn't do something like that as a lone wolf.
I’m of two minds about it. I agree that these days it’s by far the safer choice to steer clear of such antics.
But I do sort of miss the days when we had a little more fun with computers even at work. Twenty years ago it was pretty ubiquitous to get a goofy desktop background if you left your machine unsecured all the time and I never saw any harm come from it.
Times change I suppose.
Ironic, given that a ton of the security dogma these days is "don't trust anyone" --- you can guess why that started happening; precisely because of people like him.
This is such a great idea. Very original, at least as far as I'm aware. Kinda nice to see something like this in today's cynical world.
> Very original
Not really: both Google's internal VS Code based IDE and Colab have various background pets as an option: [1]. I am pretty sure the developer saw them.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Incorgnito/comments/195savi/corgi_m...
It’s gotta be heavily inspired by Pixel Pals
I would like to be able to feed my pets, ideally feeding them obsolete parts of my code.
"Your pet feed on comments so be aware of that!"
Let’s get them in Neovim and call them Neopets.
It already exists for neovim.
https://github.com/giusgad/pets.nvim
Yes, but only if they run in javascript. We need more javascript.
Do you mean Flash?
My I also mention the Nyancat Progress bar for Jetbrains IDEs? https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8575-nyan-progress-bar
Seeing this reminded me of power mode.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hoovercj...
Reminds me of BonziBuddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
Neko is back
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
eSheep was my favorite. Apparently someone is keeping the dream alive: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mx2v0tqt6rm?hl=en-US&gl=U...
It's almost like Sheep.exe, but not quite there yet!
Reminded me of that too.
Tiny Elvis next?
I want to hear how huge my code is.
https://archive.org/details/win3_TELV150
Yes! This is along the lines of what I thought of when I saw ghostty.
It's too bad I don't use vscode. I think it would be cool to have something that can jump between terminal emulators, something that isn't shackled to a text editor.EDIT: I seem to vaguely remember something similar to this concept from some anime I watched that depicted a "hacker". It might have been serial experiments lain, or cowboy bebop..
That's adorable, first time I've had my wife engage with what I'm writing. Any way to make them larger? They're so tiny on high resolution screens.
Yes, the settings allow you to change the size of them!
Ah, there it is. Thanks!
Ideally they would grow as time goes on :)
Then you might eventually need to buy an extra monitor just for the cat.
All the more reason to justify extra monitors!
This is like Google Colab's corgi mode: https://x.com/GoogleColab/status/1116487177364365313
Posthog built something similar too, a hedgehog you can move around and that interacts with some of the elements on the page: https://posthog.com/blog/rome-hackathon#hedgehog-mode
For anime connoisseurs there is Desktop Mate, suprisingly easy to mod and use your own (or found in the Internet) character models
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3301060/Desktop_Mate/
I love goofy stuff like this - it kind of reminds me of FL Chan, a built-in effects plugin for FL Studio who dances in sync with the music.
https://youtu.be/v4hPIDfS3qI?t=51
Sadly they only appear in the right/left hand side, not the editor :( I want a cat that reacts to my code, ideally getting mad at me for writing poor quality code, and stretching/sleeping when I'm thinking.
I got "power mode" (or something similar) installed in Intellij/Jetbrains IDE. The faster I write or bigger change I make the more sparkles and flames etc grow around the cursor. Similar plug-ins exist for other editors as well. A bit fun to enable before pairing with a coworker to see their reaction.
Google Colab has this setting, too
Yes nice, a dog could express its opinion by peeing on the lines of code
Triggering an animation based on what's under the cursor sounds interesting. Like moving to a loop declaration starts a chase-your-tail animation. Or moving to a function signature gives the pet some paint and paper.
It could enforce 80 char line width limits by batting stray characters “of the ledge” to watch them fall
> a cat that reacts to my code, ideally getting mad at me for writing poor quality code, and stretching/sleeping when I'm thinking
This... this needs to happen!
A cat that spins around in circles if it detects a function results in an infinite loop?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oo-ee-a-e-a-cat-remixes
Yes, because cats have solved the halting problem, and whether P=NP. They're just not telling us.
Make it chase the text cursor and get confused by multi-cursor
Atom could have them in the editor. But one of the wins for VS Code was better security isolation for plugins.
Maybe Microsoft could bring back the Bob team to integrate pets with all facets of VS Code.
Can my pet subtly react to the state of my workspace? If there’s errors and warnings, or if various events happen.
Hmmm. Given the state of your code we would also need to incorporate a VS Code Veterinary Hospital and I’m not sure you can afford the insurance premiums.
[obviously I know nothing about the state of your code which I am sure is very good and so this should simply be understood as me being ‘amusingly’ mean!]
The state of some of my projects? I’d be convicted of animal cruelty.
Now integrate them with your linter of choice, so the pet's attitude reflects the current state of your code.
How does it boost productivity? I feel like it is a distraction.
The readme is using what is called “sarcasm”
So basically, Clippy? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant)
https://steve-lovelace.com/the-ghosts-of-microsoft-bob/
clippy is one of the pets and mentioned at the top of the readme