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
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.
It is the logo.sys which is actually a bitmap file if I remember it correctly.
Brings back memories of bricking the family PC way back before I knew what a bootloader or filesystem was. Good times.
Snitch :)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
this is a gem, thanks for sharing!
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.
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.
Man if you can't trust the guy sitting next to you to pull this prank on you, then you've got serious issues.
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
The guy who sits next to you regularly...
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.
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.
> 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".
Similar here at a big company that placed a lot of emphasis on opsec. It worked.
> 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.
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.
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…
Good times when I used to do a screenshot with notepad window open and use that as their new background wallpaper
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.
It sounds like this guy came out on top in this, he found out really quickly that he joined a shit company.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh, we do that with croissants here!
What a sad company you worked for
We used to send an email from their account saying lunch/donuts are on me!
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.
It’s because people like him are usually less polite.
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".
Some IT departments spend years trying to drill "Lock your computer!" into people’s heads yet you need just really simple solution!
We used to set the desktop wallpaper to David Hasselhoff.
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 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.
At my company this happened once across all our internal tools. It was a joke inside one department that accidentally got pushed comapny wide
I love that kind of tech workplace comedy
Stuff of legends.
Let’s get them in Neovim and call them Neopets.
It already exists for neovim.
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
This is actually the first plugin I install on every new installation of a Jetbrains IDE... Used to include it in my "mentoring about advantages of IDEs" rants, just before configuring debugger.
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.
A cat that spins around in circles if it detects a function results in an infinite loop?
Yes, because cats have solved the halting problem, and whether P=NP. They're just not telling us.
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.
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!
Make it chase the text cursor and get confused by multi-cursor
I would like to be able to feed my pets, ideally feeding them obsolete parts of my code.
Finally, I can claim the dog ate my merge request, when being asked what's taking so long?
Would that make them sick?
"Your pet feed on comments so be aware of that!"
Reminds me of BonziBuddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
Much less nefarious...I hope.
It's almost like Sheep.exe, but not quite there yet!
Reminded me of that too.
Neko is back
eSheep was my favorite. Apparently someone is keeping the dream alive: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mx2v0tqt6rm?hl=en-US&gl=U...
Thank you for the link! This is their GitHub repo if anyone is curious: https://github.com/Adrianotiger/desktopPet (I couldn't find the license info though).
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.
That unholy petvar symbiosis owns the codebase like a cat owns your house. The program and the company are now in service of minTaxRateOffsetTemp.
Seeing this reminded me of power mode.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hoovercj...
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
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.
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.
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’.
Is there evidence showing that such things do boost productivity? Or any research on how they affect the way people work?
I can't think of a reason why it would improve productivity, can you think of anything?
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?
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.
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.
Make one that has anime girls sitting on panels. Classic window sitters!
I love how the description ends "to boost productivity."
Remind me of this
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.
Not original. Things like this go back at least to the 1980s.
Some I ran ~30 years ago:
Neko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
Sheep: https://adrianotiger.github.io/desktopPet/
There were even things like this for text mode DOS. I had one that was smiley faces moving around eating letters.
> 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...
I hadn’t seen those prior to making it. From memory, the example vs code extension is a typing cat so I just evolved that. I had used the old Windows desktop animals from the 90’s.
It’s gotta be heavily inspired by Pixel Pals
For anime connoisseurs there is Desktop Mate, suprisingly easy to mod and use your own (or found in the Internet) character models
Would be cooler if it walked around the whole screen and not just stuck in a dedicated panel.
Next evolution of this will be MS Agents. We will finally see the return of Peedy, Merlin, Genie, and Robby.
I need Links back in my life :(
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!
I love it! I something like that on my "about page" http://crn.hopto.org/about/
Move your mouse around and it will follow you.
This makes me write better code. I use it daily.
Yes! This is along the lines of what I thought of when I saw ghostty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42524537
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..
Really cute and charming! And beyond the fun factor, I can see something like this subtly boosting morale.
Adopt dog in shelter and get a life.
Any way to get them to die if you don’t get work done? Would be pretty motivating.
What a cute idea. As long as it's not a tamagotchi :)
On the contrary, I think it would be cool! A little distraction to feed a thing
More distraction are welcome
when he started climbing the overview pane I screamed
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”
Brief interactions with your "pet" encourage you to take small mental breaks. For me it can be a big boost of productivity
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.
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
Seriously?
yes bvan, but i think we should fork it and use alf
I imagine software archaeologists of the future will use this prominently to explain why developers have been replaced with AI. /s
clippy is one of the pets and mentioned at the top of the readme