Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Apr 4, 2016 · Article · Medium

Podcast #7: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 2

Podcast #7: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 2

Click on this to hear the podcast

We finish our conversation with Dean Hachamovitch, and while we start out making fun of Clippy, we end up discussing conversational interfaces, security and privacy, and the responsibilities of software development.

As Rich puts it, “I just want to congratulate everyone here for smoothly weaving Clippy into some NPR-ish conversation.”

If you like people talking about big software problems and how to solve them in giant matrixed organizations, you’ll enjoy this.

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Rich (on Clippy): You ever go to a cocktail party, and you sort of position yourself to not be noticed by that guy, or that girl, so they don’t come and talk to you again?

Paul: For me it was just like, wow, I have a roommate. It was a personal computer, it was just me and this computer, and then somebody else was living in there.

Dean: The intentions were so good, and if only there were some way I could not sound defensive in describing this, if only there were some way I could not sound like I was trying to make my brother-in-law look smarter than he is.

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A thing you should read

Dwarf Fortress is game about magic and dwarven mining. It looks like a lot of letters on a screen but it seeks to simulate all of dwarf-mining reality.

If Wikipedia were a game it would be Dwarf Fortress.

One of the people who makes Dwarf Fortress gave an interview to PC Gamer and explained how he found a bug in the game’s code, and it’s one of the best things I have ever read about software. Basically, people asked why cats were vomiting all over the taverns. He said:

Now, the cats would walk into the taverns, right, and because of the old blood footprint code from, like, eight years ago or something, they would get alcohol on their feet. It was originally so people could pad blood around, but now any liquid, right, so they get alcohol on their feet. And then I wanted to add cleaning stuff so when people were bathing, or I even made eyelids work for no reason, because I do random things sometimes. So cats will lick and clean themselves, and on a lark, when I made them clean themselves I’m like, ‘Well, it’s a cat. When you do lick cleaning, you actually ingest the thing that you’re cleaning off, right? They make hairballs, so they must swallow something, right?’ And so the cats, when they cleaned the alcohol off their feet, they all got drunk. Because they were drinking.
But the numbers were off on that. I had never thought about, you know, activating inebriation syndromes back when I was adding the cleaning stuff. I was just like, ‘Well, they ingest it and they get a full dose,’ but a full dose is a whole mug of alcohol for a cat-sized creature, and it does all the blood alcohol size-based calculations, so the cats would get sick and vomit all over the tavern.

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From our friends

From: Margaret Howie
Subject: Potentially *interesting* friend-of-Postlight project

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Subject: for your consideration in the Postlight newsletter

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As technologists, empathy and compassion should be at the center of our practice. The first time, even though we were uncomfortable with it, we dodged a bullet because the client decided to pull it. But this time we’re fully responsible for what we’re putting out into the world.

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