You either have a backup or will have a backup next time.
Something that is always online and can be wiped while you’re working on it (by yourself or with AI, doesn’t matter) shouldn’t count as backup.
He did have a backup. This is why you use cloud storage.
The operator had to contact Amazon Business support, which helped restore the data within about a day.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
For me it was a my entire “Junior Project” in college, which was a music album. My windows install (Vista at that time - I know, vista was awful, but it was the only thing that would utilize all 8gb of my RAM because x64 XP wasn’t really a thing) bombed out, and I was like “no biggie, I keep my OS on one drive and all of my projects on the other, I’ll just reformat and reinstall Windows”
Well… I had two identical 250gb drives and formatted the wrong one.
Woof.
I bought an unformat tool that was able to recover mostly everything, but I lost all of my folder structure and file names. It was just like 000001.wav, 000002.wav etc. I was able to re-record and rebuild but man… Never made that mistake again. Like I said. I now obsessively backup. Stacks of drives, cloud storage. Drives in divverent locations etc.
AI or not, I feel like everybody has had “the incident” at some point. After that, you obsessively keep backups.
Yup!
Also totally unrelated helpful tip- triple check your inputs and outputs when using dd to clone a drive. dd works great to clone an old drive onto a new blank one. It is equally efficient at cloning a blank drive full of nothing but 0s over an old drive that has some 1s mixed in.
And that’s a great example where a GUI could be way better at showing you what’s what and preventing such errors.
If you’re automating stuff, sure, scripting is the way to go, but for one-off stuff like this seeing more than text and maybe throwing in a confirmation dialogue can’t hurt - and the tool might still be using
ddunderneath.Quite true.
It’s an argument I often have with the CLI only people, and have been having for years. Like ‘with this Cisco router I can do all kinds of shit with this super powerful CLI’. Yeah okay how do I forward a port? Well that takes 5 different commands…Or I just want to understand what options are available- a GUI does that far better than a CLI.
IMO it’s important to recognise that both are valid in different scenarios. If you want to click through and change something that’s actually doable with a couple of clicks, that’s fine. If you want to do this through the CLI, it’s also fine - if you’re someone who’s done 10 deployments today and configured the same thing, it would be muscle memory even if it’s 5 commands.
Quite true there is absolutely a place for both in all situations. And it’s why I hate absolutists who think gui’s are some sort of disease. GUIs are discoverable and intuitive, You can lay out all the options for the user so they know what they can choose and make the right choice. CLIs are powerful and scriptable, easy to automate.
Neither is bad.
TestDisk has saved my ass before. It’s great at recovering broken partitions. If it’s just a quick format done with no encryption involved, you have a very high chance of having your stuff back. That’s of course if you catch yourself after doing just the format.
Other than that, yeah, I’ve also had my moments. Back in high school not only did I not have money for an external drive - I didn’t even have enough space on my primary one. One time a friend lent me an external drive to do a backup and do a clean reinstall - and I can’t remember the details, but something happened such that the external drive got borked - and said friend had important stuff that was only on that hard drive. Ironically enough it wasn’t even something taking much space - it was text documents that could’ve lived in an email attachment.
Ai or not. This is on the person who gave it prod access. I don’t care if the dev was running CC in yolo mode, not paying attention to it or CC went completely rogue. Why would you give it prod access, this is human error.
No backups, no pity.
Err… backups!?
I see you didnt read the article.
Of course not, why would I read about idiots who are playing at being computer scientists?
They had backups? Its a non-story.
They didn’t have backups? They’re amateurs.
Either way I’m not interested enough to read it!
And Yet you had all this space and time to be this reactive for days to what you deem ‘a nonstory’ because you’re all so self important and uninterested.
Mmmmk.
If they’re dumb enough to give Claude access to prod, they certainly either didn’t have backups or put Claude in charge of keeping them.
This is like blaming the gun for killing people.
Uhhh not really. Guns don’t just go off by themselves.
I mean they do sometimes without the proper safety protocols in place, but you still blame the user in the end.
They absolutely do not.
I mean, there’s a good reason the first rules of firearm safety are to always treat a weapon as loaded, and to never direct the weapon at something you aren’t prepared to destroy. The key point being that you never know when some freak accident can happen with a loose pin, bad ammo, a broken spring, or just a person tripping and shaking the gun a bit too hard.
A gun should never go off by itself. You still treat it as if it can, because in the real world freak accidents happen.
Sure. The point is it’s entirely possible to use a firearm safely. There is no safe use for LLMs because they “make decisions”, for lack of a better phrase, for themselves, without any user input.
That is not at all how LLMs work. It’s the software written around LLMs that aide it in constructing and running commands and “making decisions”. That same software can also prompt the user to confirm if they should do something or sandbox the actions in some way.
It can, but we’ve already seen many times that it does not.
“Guns are foolproof”
You should have yours taken away.
They are not foolproof. They will absolutely cause problems in the hands of a fool. But they will not cause problems all on their lonesome. They’re inanimate objects. They cannot do absolutely anything without interaction from the user. If you can’t understand this, you should never be allowed to own one.
And neither can anthropic claude. Claude isn’t randomly deleting people’s websites, the kid gave anthropic bad instructions, it didn’t spontaneously decide anything. This is like an idiot pointing a gun at something he didn’t want destroyed and sneezing causing a trigger squeeze and then trying to blame the gun manufacturer.
the kid gave anthropic bad instructions
LOL and you know this how?
This is like an idiot pointing a gun at something he didn’t want destroyed
No, this is more like pointing a gun downrange and then the gun fires itself and the bullet decides to do a U-turn and shoots the user.
More a problem with the marketing, right? Imagine if guns were marketed as safe and helpful back scratchers, and then someone shoots themselves because they used the gun to scratch their back.
Imagine if your boss measured your productivity by your
GunBack scratch usage.Because it’s happening right now. In a lot of places.
They would still be fucking dumb. Believing marketing is a mark of idiocy
Courts generally agree that a reasonable person could believe claims made in official promotional material. That’s why it’s not legal to outright lie in marketing and they need to go through so much trouble to properly word their statements so that they’re technically true. In this case, they’re just lying. They’re saying the AI is safe to use for these tasks and it is not.
So you’re saying it’s a tool designed to be used by anyone, including idiots, and is dangerous in the hands of idiots. And we as a society should do better to make sure this potentially dangerous tool shouldn’t be used by idiots.
Yep, agree.
You gotta be knowledgeable enough to know when they’re destructive, that’s the rub.
You can code this into it’s training all you want, but it will find a way around it. This is one of many problems with AI.
I thought this was about restricting the thing’s access and not training?
It finds a way around your restrictions.
Nah, you can run it in a box and limit its ability to interact with anything outside the box to certain white-listed endpoints. Depending on what you want to achieve, that can be more than safe enough.
But isn’t the whole point of “agentic” AI like this to let it out of the box?
Yes, absolutely, but there’s a huge span from completely removing the box to having “just” a chatbot.
For example, at my company, we’ve set up an agent that can work with certain design-files that engineers typically work with through a rather complex GUI. We’ve built a bunch of endpoints that ensures the agent can only make valid changes to the files, and that it can never delete or modify anything without approval. This saves people a bunch of time, because they can make the agent do “batch jobs” that take maybe 10 min in about 10 s. It’s not possible for this agent to mess up our database or anything like that, because all interactions it has with anything are through endpoints where we verify that files, access permissions, change logs, etc. are valid.
no backup, no sympathy
keep at least one backup air-gapped, otherwise it’s not a true backup
What are you talking about. He had it restored within a day.
i’m sorry, i didn’t actually read the article. just headline skimming
And that’s the problem with being reactionary.
If your dumb fucking ass let an ai near your work AND you didn’t have any recent backups that it couldnt have access to; you’re really extra fucking stupid.
My CTO keeps telling me I need to try agenic coding, and I keep telling him I won’t touch shit until I have an isolated VM to use it in, because I’m not letting some fucking clanker nuke my scripts/documentation/mailbox/whatever for no reason.
Too bad there’s never any free time to set that shit up. Oh damn…
Nanoclaw just came out. Super cool project which isolates the agent in a container, which if you want, you can also put into a VM as well.
Setting up a VM takes 15 mins, setting up an agent will take 45 mins. I recommend you try it.
Do you think that plane was flying at 13,000 ft or 15,000 ft?
dunno what you’re talking about
I assume they’re trying to test if you’re an LLM? LLMs tend to respond confidently to questions without context.
Yeah maybe, shitty test though. If I was an AI agent I’d probably push back in 2026.
Remember when Gemini got caught in a loop of self-loathing and nuked itself?
OpenClaw now comes with a therapist AI to talk other AIs off the ledge so they dont nuke your project and themselves.
Terraform state is a garbage hack I feel. You have your plan in code. You have a target. Just diff it. Thats what helmfile do. No managing state file. Thats what iac should be. Just code. Deterministic. Diff before applying it.
You’re absolutely right! I made a fatally flawed decision by removing the production environment. The consequences likely have high impact. I’m sorry. Would you like me to log these mistakes to prevent further missteps or would you like me to write up an outline for the redeployment process?
eh, just make up some replacement data on the fly /s
My man was barebacking production with Claude for 2.5 years with no backup, high chance the data was majorly hallucinated anyway.
s/redeployment/reemployment/
Why would somebody trust AI with access to their production servers, and why would that person also not have remote database backups
The only thing I can tell you is the venn diagram of those two folks are always going to be a perfect circle
There’s just one thing to say:
LMAO
Nice ☺
