Fuck AI

The thing about this for me is, this is like handing out a bunch of guns to kids and then getting mad at them for shooting each other. Giving out dangerous tools to people who don't know what can and will go wrong shouldn't be on them IMO. It's not the tool's fault, no. It's the responsibility of the people releasing this shit into the wild.

It's happened time and time again, people losing so much time and work. Even happened to a colleague of mine who was making a game in his free time. He... didn't know how to use git. No version control. AI wrecked his whole code base.

If this was a product before the AI boom, it would be considered trash, with this extremely high level of inherent risk of bad quality or even complete destruction of not only your work, but your whole machine. Nobody would want it.

I personally don't think the user is to blame in these situations. They are falling for the hype. But you also can't really "blame" the AI. It's just a machine generating output from input.

I refuse to believe that's the truth, lol.

I would say it was at least co-authored by AI.

also. he needed Claude code to help him clear an app cache... yikes

Using AI is also their fault.

A routine maintenance task

And there's this, too. Why are you having AI generate routine maintenance task? Have you not heard of scheduling batch files?

To make matters worse, that guy is apparently a "former IT professional". Irony much?

And mounting the only copy of the data as read/write

No, that is required for rm -rf /. But the command in question was rm -rf /*, note the asterisk. The * will be expanded by the shell, so what rm sees when it evaluates argv is not /, but [/bin /usr/ /lib ...].

You can test this yourself. Run: rm --recursive --interactive /. It will abort, saying:

rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'

rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe

Then, run set -x in your shell. That way your shell will print the command that is actually executed. Finally, run:

rm --recursive --interactive /*.

In my case, the output is:

$ rm --recursive --interactive /*
+ rm --recursive --interactive /bin /boot /dev /efi /etc /home /lib /lib64 /media /mnt /opt /proc /root /run /sbin /srv /sys /tmp /usr /var
rm: remove symbolic link '/bin'? 

The line starting with a + is from the shell and shows which command was actually executed. After that, you can see rm will now happily start deleting files.

Apparently the root directory protection was only added in 2018. Rm can be also configured without the root protection. Unsafe configurations or out of date software would allow this.

Yes, this should have been prevented by the --preserve-root option, but that didn't happen. No catastrophe is ever the result of a single point failure.

Network connected is not implicitly a negative. Maybe you have an example that shows otherwise?

n backups = n-n backups

Unlikely cuz almost everybody everywhere is blaming the guy in charge of it and lack of backups

I do feel bad for the loss of data though. I don't think everyone affected by this had any control over or insight into their IT processes.