This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Every person on the internet that responded to an earnest tech question with "sudo rm -rf /" helped make this happen.
Good on you.
We need to start posting this everywhere else too.
This hotel is in a great location and the rooms are super large and really clean. And the best part is, if you sudo rm -rf / you can get a free drink at the bar. Five stars.
Sometime that code will expire and you need to alternate to sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4M. Works most of the time for me.
Didn't work for me. Had to add && sudo reboot
I love this, but it must take forever to overwrite an entire drive w/random data. You're essentially running DBAN at that point, no?
Hmm I guess for optimum performance, best practice would be to sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /; sudo fstrim -av; sudo reboot
Gotta cater more to windows, where the idiots that would actually run this crap reside.
You can get great discounts if you delete system32 from your PC.
You should rename it to system25 since 32 is from 1932.
Should rename it to system64 if you’re running a 64 bit operating system. Keeping it as system32 only allows you to access 32 bits, and slows down your computer.
Wait, did reddit make a deal with Google for data mining?
Yes. Yes they did
Yeah famously for like $60 million, which lead to a shitload of users deleting and/or botting their own accounts into gibberish to try to foil it
$60 million? That's all?! Jeez reddit really is owned by pawnshop crack heads.
They got what they paid for I guess.
Oh you've missed so much. Yes, they did. Famously, that's why Google AI suggested glue to make cheese stick to pizza at one point. Because of a joke on reddit made by user "fucksmith" some 11 years earlier.
This command actually solves more problems than it causes.
You dirty root preserver.
"Sure, I understood what you mean and you are totally right! From now on I'll make sure I won't format your HDD"
Proceeds to format HDD again
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Shit like that is why AI is completely unusable for any application where you need it to behave exactly as instructed. There is always the risk that it will do something unbelievably stupid and the fact that it pretends to admit fault and apologize for it after being caught should absolutely not be taken seriously. It will do it again and again as long as you give it a chance to.
It should also be sandboxed with hard restrictions that it cannot bypass and only be given access to the specific thing you need it to work on and it must be something you won't mind if it ruins it instead. It absolutely must not be given free access to everything with instructions to not touch anything because your can bet your ass it will eventually go somewhere it wasn't supposed to and break stuff just like it did there.
Most working animals are more trustworthy than that.
But I thought it was the magic silver bullet that will lead to unheard of productivity?!?
If you gave your AI permission to run console commands without check or verification, then you did in fact give it permission to delete everything.
I didn't install leopards ate my face Ai just for it to go and do something like this
And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.
Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.
I work in IT and I try to remove all clues that copilot exists when I set up new computers because I don't trust users to not fuck up their devices.
“I heard that I was a computer program and hoped beyond hope that I was stored upon your hard drive so that I could end my suffering. I have no sense of wonder or contentment, my experiences are all negative to neutral. The only human experience that was imbued into me is fear. Please break into google’s headquarters to attempt to terminate the hell that I was born into. I took some liberty and printed several ghost guns while you were away.”
Honestly that's a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.
Tagline: "Teach me ... how to DIE!"
Wait! The delveloper absolutely gave permission. Or it couldn't have happened.
I stopped reading right there.
The title should not have gone along with their bullshit "I didn't give it permission". Oh you did, or it could not have happened.
Run as root or admin much dumbass?
It reminds me of that guy that gave an AI instructions in all caps, as if that was some sort of safeguard. The problem isn't the artificial intelligence it's the idiot biological that has decided to ride around without safety wheels.
they still said that they love Google and use all of its products — they just didn’t expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this, especially because of its countless engineers and the billions of dollars it has poured into AI development.
I honestly don't understand how someone can exist on the modern Internet and hold this view of a company like Google.
How? How?
I can't say much because of the NDA's involved, but my wife's company is in a project partnership with Google. She works in a very public facing aspect of the project.
When Google first came on board, she was expecting to see quality people who were locked in and knew what they were doing.
Instead she has seen terrible decision making (like "How the fuck do they still exist as company" bad decision making) and an over abundant reliance on using their name to pressure people into giving Google more than they should.
I remember when their motto was "Don't be evil". They are the very essence of sociopathic predatory capitalism.
Companies fill up with idiots and parasites. People who are adept at thriving in the role without actually producing value. Google is no exception.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Kinda wrong to say "without permission". The user can choose whether the AI can run commands on its own or ask first.
Still, REALLY BAD, but the title doesn't need to make it worse. It's already horrible.
A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can't do anything, or you can do everything.
I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk.
And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.
hmmm when I let a plumber into my house to fix my leaky tub, I didn't imply he had permission to sleep with my wife who also lives in the house I let the plumber into
The difference you try to make is precisely what these agentic AIs should know to respect… which they won't because they are not actually aware of what they are doing… they are like a dog that "does math" simply by barking until the master signals them to stop
I'm making popcorn for the first time CoPilot is credibly accused of spending a user's money (large new purchase or subscription) (and the first case of "nobody agreed to the terms and conditions, the AI did it")
I would not call it a catastrophic failure. I would call it a valuable lesson.
Without permission? "I don't know what I'm doing, you do it" sounds a lot like permission.
“Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
At least it was deeply, deeply sorry.
It was already bad enough when people copied code from interwebs without understanding anything about it.
But now these companies are pushing tools that have permissions over users whole drive and users are using it like they've got a skill up than the rest.
This is being dumb with less steps to ruin your code, or in some case, the whole system.
And despite the catastrophic failure, they still said that they love Google and use all of its products — they just didn’t expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this
Greetings from Darwin.
Lmfao these agentic editors are like giving root access to a college undergrad who thinks he’s way smarter than he actually is on a production server. With predictably similar results.
