Bloomy22 6 months ago

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

  • ltr_ 6 months ago

    I remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.

    • iamthejuan 6 months ago

      It is the logo.sys which is actually a bitmap file if I remember it correctly.

      • gryfft 6 months ago

        Brings back memories of bricking the family PC way back before I knew what a bootloader or filesystem was. Good times.

  • fooker 6 months ago

    Here's anecdote from Google's glory days! We had a similar extension, with Larry Page instead of Nicholas Cage. And anyone leaving their computer unlocked were subject do it.

    This became widespread enough to be mentioned at the new employee orientation.

  • mocamoca 6 months ago

    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 :)

    • pjerem 6 months ago

      A pretty good one is https://fakeupdate.net

      I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.

      • saghm 6 months ago

        A roommate of mine in college used to leave his laptop unlocked all the time, and I found an app that would put an overlay on the screen that looked like a kernel panic. This went on for months, and he became convinced that his laptop had some issue where it would panic if he left it idle for too long. One day he happened to be going through his apps folder, and he saw something with a name like "iPanic.app", and watching his dawning comprehension as he realized what just must have been going on was probably the satisfying conclusion to a prank I've ever experienced.

      • Arech 6 months ago

        this is a gem, thanks for sharing!

    • iterateoften 6 months ago

      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.

      • rhet0rica 6 months ago

        There is a time and place for everything—and you should not assume a business environment is the only possible setting in which colleagues might pass by unattended workstations.

        Ideally the prank is pulled in a high-trust, low-stakes environment like a college campus or high school computer lab, before corporate policies are part of one's life.

        It is also a rich tradition, from the days of yore, before robust security practices became standard:

        http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/baggy-pantsing.html

        http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/derf.html

        https://www.multicians.org/cookie.html

        I would much rather my colleagues be taught this lesson (even if just through a verbal reprimand) than work with someone who is allowed to remain ignorant of the risks of their behaviour.

        • Sammi 6 months ago

          Man if you can't trust the guy sitting next to you to pull this prank on you, then you've got serious issues.

          • alfiedotwtf 6 months ago

            At the same time, a new hire could actually be a pentester, investigator, or corporate espionage actor. I know people who’s job this was to take over employee computers while the target went to lunch

            • Sammi 6 months ago

              The guy who sits next to you regularly...

      • Volundr 6 months ago

        It depends on the company and probably even the team. At least when I was running an IT team I generally viewed a colleague doing something like this as more effective than me nagging some sysadmin about them leaving their computer unlocked. Would have never tolerated someone on my team doing it to someone outside the team though.

      • do_not_redeem 6 months ago

        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.

        • KineticLensman 6 months ago

          > to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow

          Where I used to work the thing was to reply-all to emails simply saying "I love you very much".

        • maeil 6 months ago

          Similar here at a big company that placed a lot of emphasis on opsec. It worked.

      • thaumasiotes 6 months ago

        > 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.

        That's a very strange policy to apply to your security team. They have good reason to make a point about leaving your workstation unsecured.

        Working for NCC Group, the expectation was that if you left your computer unsecured, something would happen to it, and you, not the person who followed office policy by highlighting your mistake, would look bad.

      • benreesman 6 months ago

        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.

        • bee_rider 6 months ago

          It is definitely a better CYA move to just have a policy that nobody touches the unlocked computers, but is it actually more effective? If the company mostly employs adults that can be trusted to keep their pranks reasonable, it seems like a good way of self-policing.

          If calling out somebody’s unlocked computer gets them punished for real, nobody will call out their friends…

        • ireadmevs 6 months ago

          Good times when I used to do a screenshot with notepad window open and use that as their new background wallpaper

      • cyberax 6 months ago

        At Amazon there was a "unicorn game". If you find an unlocked computer, you could send "I love Unicorns" message using the credentials of the logged on person.

        There was even an internal site with the unicorn image.

      • mosselman 6 months ago

        It sounds like this guy came out on top in this, he found out really quickly that he joined a shit company.

      • alfiedotwtf 6 months ago

        I guess it’s a company cultural thing. In one past company, the SECURITY guys were the ones to do this to us teach us a lesson.but rather than a panic screen, it was porn.

        To this day a few milliseconds before I stand up I wiggle my mouse to lock the screen. Muscle memory because lessons were learned

        • FeteCommuniste 6 months ago

          At my office it was either a picture of a shirtless David Hasselhoff as your desktop background, or an email sent to the networking+devs list announcing that you were giving away $20 bills at your desk, lol.

      • arccy 6 months ago

        There's definitely a difference in company culture. One place I worked at you'd shout donuts into the office chat from your coworker's unattended laptops (and they'd be on the hook to bring in donuts or equivalent).

        Always easy to catch the people who usually work from home.

        • LandR 6 months ago

          One jnr dev at a place I worked left his desktop unlocked and a very elaborate email about his love for my little pony and wanting to start a company my little pony fan club was sent from his account to whole company lol.

      • darkwater 6 months ago

        What a sad company you worked for

      • goguy 6 months ago

        We used to send an email from their account saying lunch/donuts are on me!

      • userbinator 6 months ago

        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.

        • saagarjha 6 months ago

          It’s because people like him are usually less polite.

      • albert_e 6 months ago

        Yeah I lean on this side - avoid doing pranks and other practical jokes.

        When there is any actual malware or security incident, you don't want your colleagues to think of you and go "Maybe this is just Dave pulling one of his clever pranks".

    • veunes 6 months ago

      Some IT departments spend years trying to drill "Lock your computer!" into people’s heads yet you need just really simple solution!

    • SketchySeaBeast 6 months ago

      We used to set the desktop wallpaper to David Hasselhoff.

  • greazy 6 months ago

    That's hilarious. Sounds like someone was pranking your colleague.

    Was this the extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/

    • sam_bristow 6 months ago

      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.

    • Bloomy22 6 months ago

      Yes, it was that one!

  • InsideOutSanta 6 months ago

    At a company selling a B2B platform, we had an internal extension used to teach how to write extensions that drew an interactive pet on screen, similar to the one in this VS Code extension. It accidentally got deployed to one client, which caused a complete company shutdown because lots of people suddenly reported being hit by a virus to their internal IT team, causing company-wide panic.

    I'm not sure what the lesson here is.

  • DontchaKnowit 6 months ago

    At my company this happened once across all our internal tools. It was a joke inside one department that accidentally got pushed comapny wide

  • veunes 6 months ago

    I love that kind of tech workplace comedy

  • nunez 6 months ago

    Stuff of legends.

behnamoh 6 months ago

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.

  • matsemann 6 months ago

    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.

    • firejake308 6 months ago

      Google Colab has this setting, too

  • entropie 6 months ago

    Yes nice, a dog could express its opinion by peeing on the lines of code

  • Frotag 6 months ago

    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.

  • bitwize 6 months ago

    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.

  • parpfish 6 months ago

    It could enforce 80 char line width limits by batting stray characters “of the ledge” to watch them fall

  • baal80spam 6 months ago

    > 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!

  • cluckindan 6 months ago

    Make it chase the text cursor and get confused by multi-cursor

urbandw311er 6 months ago

I would like to be able to feed my pets, ideally feeding them obsolete parts of my code.

  • _ink_ 6 months ago

    Finally, I can claim the dog ate my merge request, when being asked what's taking so long?

  • phaedryx 6 months ago

    Would that make them sick?

  • markus_zhang 6 months ago

    "Your pet feed on comments so be aware of that!"

fuzzy2 6 months ago

It's almost like Sheep.exe, but not quite there yet!

  • hoyd 6 months ago

    Reminded me of that too.

shakna 6 months ago

Random thought... What if you could link pets to visibility of a variable? If the variable is in scope, a certain pet appears. You get both cute, and something to tickle your brain with familiarity.

  • bulatb 6 months ago

    That unholy petvar symbiosis owns the codebase like a cat owns your house. The program and the company are now in service of minTaxRateOffsetTemp.

SketchySeaBeast 6 months ago

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.

  • behnamoh 6 months ago

    Ideally they would grow as time goes on :)

    • moffkalast 6 months ago

      Then you might eventually need to buy an extra monitor just for the cat.

      • behnamoh 6 months ago

        All the more reason to justify extra monitors!

mahdihabibi 6 months ago

This reminds me of Bisqwit's text editor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74&ab_channel=Bisqw... He has a super mario running on the bar which is so cool! is there a way to bring the pets to vs code bar ? bcz I usually close the side panel when I'm writing to a file and I want pets to be there when I don't have the side panel open. chat, also please let me know if you know any alternative for vim.

Waterluvian 6 months ago

Can my pet subtly react to the state of my workspace? If there’s errors and warnings, or if various events happen.

  • saaaaaam 6 months ago

    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.

    • saaaaaam 6 months ago

      [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!]

    • Waterluvian 6 months ago

      The state of some of my projects? I’d be convicted of animal cruelty.

e-master 6 months ago

On a slightly unrelated note, I am absolutely thrilled about tonybaloney’s other project[1] that automatically generates C# bindings for python. Can’t wait for it to support complete class mappings and finally I will be able to use python ‘type-safely’.

[1] https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes

corank 6 months ago

Is there evidence showing that such things do boost productivity? Or any research on how they affect the way people work?

  • upmind 6 months ago

    I can't think of a reason why it would improve productivity, can you think of anything?

    • corank 6 months ago

      Perhaps these 1. Stress relief 2. Makes boring work a bit more interesting 3. Rubber duck debugging 4. A small amount of distraction might actually boost productivity by allowing us to jump out of a local optimum?

sen 6 months ago

I've have this installed for years, and actually find it useful. It's my version of "rubber duck programming", where when I'm thinking through something I sit there throwing balls to the little puppy while my brain crunches away.

matt3210 6 months ago

Make one that has anime girls sitting on panels. Classic window sitters!

puffybunion 6 months ago

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.

esaym 6 months ago

Would be cooler if it walked around the whole screen and not just stuck in a dedicated panel.

alfiedotwtf 6 months ago

Ok… this should be like tamagotchi - but if the more errors you have the closer it is to dying, and you feed it by taking breaks often i.e. coding for too long in one sitting and it starts dying incentivising you to take breaks!

therealfiona 6 months ago

This makes me write better code. I use it daily.

aleden 6 months ago

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..

veunes 6 months ago

Really cute and charming! And beyond the fun factor, I can see something like this subtly boosting morale.

landsman 6 months ago

Adopt dog in shelter and get a life.

deadbabe 6 months ago

Any way to get them to die if you don’t get work done? Would be pretty motivating.

tempodox 6 months ago

What a cute idea. As long as it's not a tamagotchi :)

  • veunes 6 months ago

    On the contrary, I think it would be cool! A little distraction to feed a thing

m3kw9 6 months ago

More distraction are welcome

mouse_ 6 months ago

when he started climbing the overview pane I screamed

vunderba 6 months ago

Now integrate them with your linter of choice, so the pet's attitude reflects the current state of your code.

johnisgood 6 months ago

How does it boost productivity? I feel like it is a distraction.

  • cr125rider 6 months ago

    The readme is using what is called “sarcasm”

  • veunes 6 months ago

    Brief interactions with your "pet" encourage you to take small mental breaks. For me it can be a big boost of productivity

    • johnisgood 6 months ago

      Uninvited, randomly forced small mental breaks is disruptive for me.

      That said, I have a real pet, when I get the feeling to play with it, I do so, and it helps my mind to come up with a solution while I'm not consciously thinking about it. I often came up with great ideas while I was talking to my girlfriend as well, essentially when I wasn't actively focusing on the issue.

      • veunes 6 months ago

        Yet for me, I’ve found that small, low-effort breaks like interacting with a virtual pet actually help me reset without taking me out of the zone for too long

elcapitan 6 months ago

I imagine software archaeologists of the future will use this prominently to explain why developers have been replaced with AI. /s