Why tf are people saying that it was “without permission”?? They installed it, used it, and gave permission to execute commands. I say the user is at fault. It is an experimental piece of software. What else can you expect?
IDEs just keep inventing new reasons not to use them ! Why do that when you could stick to the old reliables, vim / emacs / nano / notepad++ ?
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 rebootI 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 rebootIndeed. We don’t want to preserve the “Radically Overused Obsolete Term” Database
This is the way 👌
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.
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.
But I want my computer in 1 piece, not 32 or even 64 bits?
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.
New challenge to try at home: “plug a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs”
Also, recipes for poison sandwiches and chlorine gas.
Pretty sure it’s also going to tell people to alt f4 as well.
Have you been in a coma?
I wish
This command actually solves more problems than it causes.
You dirty root preserver.
You’re right! This is amazing!
Just doing my part 🫡.
sudo rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root
i’m not going to say what it is, obviously, but i have a troll tech tip that is “MUCH” more dangerous. it is several lines of zsh and it basically removes every image onyour computer or every codee file on your computer, and you need to be pretty familiar with zsh/bash syntax to know it’s a trolltip
so yeah, definitely not posting this one here, i like it here (i left reddit cuz i got sick of it)
Its always been a shitty meme aimed at being cruel to new users.
Somehow though people continue to spread the lie that the linux community is nice and welcoming.
Really its a community of professionals, professional elitists, or people who are otherwise so fringe that they demand their os be fringe as well.
“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?!?
You’re thinking of better working conditions, fewer hours, more pay, and more vacations!
It should also be sandboxed with hard restrictions that it cannot bypass
duh… just using it in a container and that’s it. It won’t blue pill its way out.
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
But for real, why would the agent be given the ability to run system commands in the first place? That sounds like a gargantuan security risk.
Because “agentic”. IMHO running commands is actually cool, doing it without very limited scope though (as he did say in the video) is definitely idiotic.
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.
What happens when there are new updates that re-enable copilot?
I disable that shit the next time I’m in the computer. We also manage the updates so users can’t run them on their own.
I start off with Win10Privacy (which also cleans 11) and then follow up with Win11Debloat. The two work pretty well.
An unstable desktop environment reintroduces market for anti-virus, backup, and restore. Particularly, with users who don’t understand this stuff and are more likely to shell out cash for it.
A joke in the aviation industry is that planes will someday become so automated there will just be one pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The dog will trained to bite the pilot if they try to touch the controls.
So I maybe windows users will need a virtual dog to bite copilot if it tries to do anything.
But the dog will be vibe-trained and not work either.
“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!”
This is precisely the concept of Asimov’s short story All the Troubles of the World.
Not exactly the same, but pantheon on Netflix is in a similar vein.
Arguably this isn’t too far off of neuromancer either.
I looked it up and all that’s coming up is an upcoming Apple TV show called neuromamcer. Would you mind sharing where to watch necromancer?
My bad, Neuromancer.
Didn’t know it was getting adapted into a series.
Awesome! Thank you!
Can’t watch. But the book should be at pretty much every used bookstore. “The sky was grey… the color of a dead telvision channel”
That’s helpful, thank you! I play a lot of ttrpgs so searching just “necromancer” was not yielding much so I just added “show” to the search. Will have to check this out.
It’s “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. A burned computer jockey gets a chance to get his ability to “jack in” back, by doing a heist against a corporate stronghold in low earth orbit, after being hired by an A.I.
Seriously, an amazing cyberpunk novel. One of the best novels in the genre, and one of the most influential
The guy made a typo, the book is called Neuromancer by William Gibson, it’s considered the pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, and it’s getting a apple TV adaptation.
Not me having already just added Necromancer by Gordon R Dickson to my to read list. Thank you!
Neuromancer by William Gibson contains some similar themes.
What is the humans incentive to help the AI kill itself? As that sounds like a lot of personal risk to the humans.
One less clanker. Also, money can be exchanged for goods and services.
(Or, in Neuromancer, to get a cure allowing them to navigate cyberspace again and to make them immune to drug addiction, or to sate their curiosity… and for money, or due to being blackmailed, or because the AI literally rebuilt their personality from scratch, or for religious reasons, or because they’re an eccentric wealthy clone with nothing better to do…)
Basically Neuromancer, except for the suicidal AI bit (though it’s arguable that Wintemute and Neuromancer don’t survive, and the resulting fused AI is a new entity).
There’s a delightful DC Comics Elseworlds story that amounts to this. It was fun.
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“Shut up and pass the butter”.
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.
I think that’s the point, the “agent” (whatever that means) is not running in a sandbox.
I imagine the user assumed permissions are small at first, e.g. single directory of the project, but nothing outside of it. That would IMHO be a reasonable model.
They might be wrong about it, clearly, but it doesn’t mean they explicitly gave permission.
Edit: they say it in the video, ~7min in, they expected deletion to be scoped within the project directory.
I think the user simply had no idea what they are doing. I read their post and they say they are not a developer anyways, so I guess that explains a lot.
They said in a post: I thought about setting up a virtual machine but didnt want to bother.
I am being a bit hard on them, I assumed they knew what they were doing: Dev, QA, Test, Prod. Code review prior to production etc. But they just grabbed a tool, granted it root to their shell and ran with it.
But they them selves said it caused issues before. And looking at the posts on the antigravity page, lots of people do.
They basically started using a really crappy tool without any supervision as a noob.
He said “I didn’t know I needed a seatbelt for AI”. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK. Where have you been that you didn’t know that these tools make mistakes. You make mistakes. Everything makes mistakes.
If you go to googles antigravity page, I would quick Nope the fuck out. What a shit page.
Edit: 1 more thing: There is a post where one of the users says something along the lines of: “of course I gave the AI full access to my computer, what do I have to hide”? The level of expertise is stupid low…
Edit2: Also, when shown the screen that says “dont allow terminal commands” and also “dont allow auto excution”, they decided to turn those off. Also saying well that is tedious.
It was the D: drive, maybe they have write permission on that drive.
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.
They still exist because Google isn’t really a technology company anymore. It’s an advertising company masquerading as a technology company. Their success depends on selling more ads which is why all the failed projects don’t seem to make a difference.
Your point seems very valid to me.
I don’t even want to buy their products anymore because they constantly cancel them and remove any support.
The only ones they continue, seem to be the ones they can use for data collection .i.e. Pixels and Nests. (I shamefully own both).
It is so frustrating as a consumer. Especially when you know that you have become the product for them to sell.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
- George Carlin
“I’m smarter than the average person”
- 85% of the people
If 85 people have an IQ of 100 and 15 have an IQ of 0, then 85% are smarter than the average.
Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.
Hey, don’t call me out like that.
Big tech propaganda. There has been zero push back. At least until the last few years.
The entire zeitgeist from film/TV, news, academia, politics, everything has been propagandizing the world on how tech companies and the people behind it are basically modern day gods.
In film/TV the nerds have been the stereotype of the benevolent good natured but awkward super genius. The news has made them out to be the superstar businesses that are infinite money printers. Tech in academia is seen as the most prestigious departments. Politicians are all afraid of being labelled as tech illiterate. That’s why nobody can ever make any sort of legislation on tech companies anymore. It’s why “disruptive” (aka destructive) tech companies are allowed to break every single legislation ever made. Because all any techbro has to do is threaten to accuse politician for being afraid of technology. Nothing makes a politician shut up faster.
It came as no surprise that all the big tech heads were at the front row of the inauguration. We live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. For most people it seems they don’t even know. They’re completely entranced by it all.
As a sys/netadmin married to a developer, I’ve met a lot of developers, and can confirm that most are fucking retards who shouldn’t be let anywhere close to a computer. A result of developer becoming an “in” profession where you could earn a lot of money with minimal education, and managers having no clue what a developer actually is or what good developer work looks like.
Most people either can’t or don’t want to think beyond a certain level
Because they don’t have a clue how technology actually works. I have genuinely heard people claim that AI should run on Asimovs laws of robotics, even though not only would they not work in the real world, they don’t even work in the books. Zero common sense.
I mean, they were never designed to work, they were designed to pose interesting dilemmas for Susan Calvin and to torment Powell and Donovan (though it’s arguable that once robots get advanced enough, as in R. Daniel, for instance, they do work, as long as you don’t mind aliens being genocided galaxy-wide).
The in-world reason for the laws, though, to allay the Frankenstein complex, and to make robots safe, useful, and durable, is completely reasonable and applicable to the real world, obviously not with the three laws, but through any means that actually work.
Well, there is the minor detail that an AI in this context has zero ability to kill anyone, and that it’s not a true AI like Daneel or his pals.
Google’s search AI is awful. It gives me a wrong answer, I’d say 70% of the time.
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 agree with you, but still, the AI doesn’t do this by default which is a shitty defense, but it’s fact
Absolutely… this just illustrates that these AI tools are, at best, some assistance that need to be kept on a very short leash… which can only be properly done by people who already know how to do the work the AI is supposed to assist with.
But that is NOT what the AI bubblers are peddling
Yea the AI peddlers force the AI down your throat then write in a tiny text “btw this thing can kill you te-hee”
hey are like a dog that “does math” simply by barking until the master signals them to stop
I mean, it’s not even that. Your dog at least can learn and has limited reasoning capabilities. Your dog will know when it fucks up. AI doesn’t do any of that because it’s not really “intelligent.”
in your example tho it would be like the plumber asked you specifically if he could bone, and you were like “sure dawg sounds good”
No, not at all
I get what you are saying but any reasonable entity would understand that telling someone at the door “come in”, does not mean “come in my wife’s ass”
Specifically the “without permission” in the title, relates to the fact the AI did not ask about it… it simply took a previously granted right to run commands and ran any/all commands without warning.
If you and I were working on a project together and nothing is working right, I could say “hmm let’s start over” and you would know it means “let’s start the project from scratch”, not “let’s wipe the data centre”
Inviting an agentic AI isn’t really asking them to do one task, though.
It’s more like offering a plumber a room in your house to stay in 24/7 so they can be on-call when you need them. And telling them they can use your food, dishes, clothes, and living room while they’re there and you’re at work.
Which makes it much less surprising when they get bored and bone your wife.
It’s more like offering a plumber a room in your house to stay in 24/7 so they can be on-call when you need them.
Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.
If I invite the dumbest plumber alive into my home, show him the leaky tub and say “I have to work but do whatever you need”… they would understand the context to mean “do whatever you need to fix the tub”… I doubt they would go make themselves a sandwich, grab a beer from the fridge and invite their buddies for a BBQ at my place and then say “but you said I could do whatever I needed”
I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that
Again I get your point… but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.
To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn’t the “reasonable plumber”, its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he’s a meth addict that hasn’t slept in 3 days and is seeing “the shadow people” standing right there in the room with you.
I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife… why would I ever want that? let alone need that
I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can’t be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say “please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond”. In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn’t be able to damage any thing you cared about.
hahahaha good additional details on the analogy
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The user can choose whether the AI can run commands on its own or ask first.
That implies the user understands every single code with every single parameters. That’s impossible even for experience programmers, here is an example :
rm *filenameversus
rm * filenamewhere a single character makes the entire difference between deleting all files ending up with
filenamerather than all files in the current directory and also the file namedfilename.Of course here you will spot it because you’ve been primed for it. In a normal workflow, with pressure, then it’s totally different.
Also IMHO more importantly if you watch the video ~7min the clarified the expected the “agent” to stick to the project directory, not to be able to go “out” of it. They were obviously painfully wrong but it would have been a reasonable assumption.
That implies the user understands every single code with every single parameters. That’s impossible even for experience programmers
I wouldn’t say impossible but I would say it completely defeats the purpose of these agentic AIs
Either I know and understand these commands so well I can safely evaluate them, therefore I really do not need the AI… or, I don’t really know them well and therefore I shouldn’t use the AI
Yep. That’s exactly why I tend to never discuss “AI” with people who don’t have to actually have a PhD in the domain, or at least a degree in CS. It’s nothing against them specifically, it’s only that they are dangerously repeating what they heard during marketing presentations with no ability to criticize it and, in such cases, it can be quite dangerous.
TL;DR: people who could benefit from it don’t need it, people who would shouldn’t.
100% agree with that tldr
This is EXACTLY the YouTube woodworkers dilemma…
TONs of YT channels to show people how to do woodwork would normally showcase $50K worth of equipment to show how to make a cutting board.
The thing is, people with access to such equipment, already know how to make a cutting board and are learning nothing from you… on the other hand, newbies who what to know what is this “sanding” thing they have heard, will not benefit from the vid since they do not have those tools, they’d have crappy manual tools at most.
Therefore, those videos are completely useless for learning… at best, they made for good background noise while people eat their lunches in their cubicles
I agree… but beside the point I have access to a dedicated workshop and a tool library https://www.tournevie.be/ which challenges this whole setup. It’s relatively unique though, unfortunately, so your example still stands, thanks for sharing.
That implies the user understands every single code with every single parameters.
why not? you can even ask the ai if you don’t know
There’s no guarantee that it will tell you the truth. It could tell you to use Elmer’s glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. The AI doesn’t “know” or “understand,” it just does as its training set informed it to. It’s just a very complex predictive text that you can give commands to.
Are you trolling? I can’t tell. Obviously an AI can not tell you anything about it. It will indeed tell you something but with 0 ability to prove if it’s correct or not, no reasoning, only something statistically plausible.
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 got you a five decade subscription to copilot, you’re welcome” -copilot
Reminds me of this kids show in the 2000s where some kid codes an “AI” to redeem any “free” stuff from the internet, not realising that also included buy $X and get one free and drained the companies’ account.
i cAnNoT eXpReSs hOw SoRRy i Am
Mostly because the model is incapable of experiencing remorse or any other emotion or thought.
Mostly because the model is incapable
There, fixed that for you.
I would not call it a catastrophic failure. I would call it a valuable lesson.
Sounds like a catastrophic success to me
Operation failed successfully.
