I think GP is using "hostile" as a synonym for "malicious". Yes, Clippy was disruptive to your workflow, but it wasn't (as far as I know) exfiltrating private data, installing malware, trying to sell you on Bitcoin, etc.

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throwaway150 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.

It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.

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TeMPOraL 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.

It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The "what" is material to this conversation. BonzaiBuddy, a 90's or early 2000s malware that showed a purple monkey on your desktop, hijacking your computer and collecting your web browsing habits in Internet Explorer, a totally different program, and sending it to advertisers, is different from your computer telling Adobe when Photoshop crashes so they can fix it.

	▲	TeMPOraL an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Except Photoshop does both, doesn't it? Not to mention, the OS itself. This is a difference of degree, not of kind.