VS Code Pets
137 comments
·January 18, 2025Bloomy22
ltr_
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
It is the logo.sys which is actually a bitmap file if I remember it correctly.
gryfft
Brings back memories of bricking the family PC way back before I knew what a bootloader or filesystem was. Good times.
creaktive
Snitch :)
fooker
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
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
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
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
this is a gem, thanks for sharing!
iterateoften
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
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.
Volundr
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
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.
thaumasiotes
> 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
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.
cyberax
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
It sounds like this guy came out on top in this, he found out really quickly that he joined a shit company.
alfiedotwtf
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
veunes
Some IT departments spend years trying to drill "Lock your computer!" into people’s heads yet you need just really simple solution!
SketchySeaBeast
We used to set the desktop wallpaper to David Hasselhoff.
greazy
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
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
Yes, it was that one!
InsideOutSanta
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.
null
DontchaKnowit
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
I love that kind of tech workplace comedy
helsinki
Let’s get them in Neovim and call them Neopets.
_ache_
It already exists for neovim.
dailykoder
Yes, but only if they run in javascript. We need more javascript.
gertlex
Do you mean Flash?
sdflhasjd
My I also mention the Nyancat Progress bar for Jetbrains IDEs? https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8575-nyan-progress-bar
hurflmurfl
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.
behnamoh
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
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
Google Colab has this setting, too
entropie
Yes nice, a dog could express its opinion by peeing on the lines of code
Frotag
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.
LordShredda
A cat that spins around in circles if it detects a function results in an infinite loop?
bitwize
Yes, because cats have solved the halting problem, and whether P=NP. They're just not telling us.
bitwize
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
It could enforce 80 char line width limits by batting stray characters “of the ledge” to watch them fall
baal80spam
> 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
Make it chase the text cursor and get confused by multi-cursor
urbandw311er
I would like to be able to feed my pets, ideally feeding them obsolete parts of my code.
_ink_
Finally, I can claim the dog ate my merge request, when being asked what's taking so long?
phaedryx
Would that make them sick?
markus_zhang
"Your pet feed on comments so be aware of that!"
imgabe
Reminds me of BonziBuddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
nunez
Much less nefarious...I hope.
joshuaturner
Neko is back
beala
eSheep was my favorite. Apparently someone is keeping the dream alive: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mx2v0tqt6rm?hl=en-US&gl=U...
bornfreddy
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).
shakna
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
That unholy petvar symbiosis owns the codebase like a cat owns your house. The program and the company are now in service of minTaxRateOffsetTemp.
snarfy
Seeing this reminded me of power mode.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hoovercj...
SketchySeaBeast
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.
animal_spirits
Yes, the settings allow you to change the size of them!
SketchySeaBeast
Ah, there it is. Thanks!
behnamoh
Ideally they would grow as time goes on :)
moffkalast
Then you might eventually need to buy an extra monitor just for the cat.
behnamoh
All the more reason to justify extra monitors!
krish98sai
This is like Google Colab's corgi mode: https://x.com/GoogleColab/status/1116487177364365313
ack210
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 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