VS Code Pets
61 comments
·January 18, 2025Bloomy22
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
null
userbinator
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.
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?
urbandw311er
I would like to be able to feed my pets, ideally feeding them obsolete parts of my code.
markus_zhang
"Your pet feed on comments so be aware of that!"
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.
puffybunion
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.
skirmish
> 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...
taspeotis
It’s gotta be heavily inspired by Pixel Pals
snarfy
Seeing this reminded me of power mode.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hoovercj...
imgabe
Reminds me of BonziBuddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
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...
aleden
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..
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!
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