Bloomy22 5 hours ago | next |

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

greazy 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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 4 hours ago | root | parent | next |

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.

mocamoca 4 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

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 :)

iterateoften 3 hours ago | root | parent |

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.

Volundr 2 hours ago | root | parent | next |

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 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

benreesman 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

ireadmevs 2 hours ago | root | parent |

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

albert_e an hour ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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".

userbinator 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

puffybunion 2 hours ago | prev | next |

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.

corank an hour ago | prev | next |

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

aleden 6 hours ago | prev | next |

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..

SketchySeaBeast 6 hours ago | prev | next |

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 7 hours ago | prev | next |

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 7 hours ago | root | parent | next |

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.

Frotag 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

baal80spam 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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!

bitwize 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

Waterluvian 6 hours ago | prev | next |

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

saaaaaam 4 hours ago | root | parent |

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 4 hours ago | root | parent | next |

[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!]

vunderba 5 hours ago | prev | next |

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