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.
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 :)
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!]
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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..
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
