this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

"Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer":

Hi everyone - as a previous context I’m an AI Program Manager at J&J and have been using Cursor for personal projects since March.

Yesterday I was migrating some of my back-end configuration from Express.js to Next.js and Cursor bugged hard after the migration - it tried to delete some old files, didn’t work at the first time and it decided to end up deleting everything on my computer, including itself. I had to use EaseUS to try to recover the data, but didn’t work very well also. Lucky I always have everything on my Google Drive and Github, but it still scared the hell out of me.

Now I’m allergic to YOLO mode and won’t try it anytime soon again. Does anyone had any issue similar than this or am I the first one to have everything deleted by AI?

The response:

Hi, this happens quite rarely but some users do report it occasionally.

My T-shirt is raising questions already answered, etc.

(via)

[–] mii@awful.systems 9 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

I looked this up because I thought it was a nickname for something, but no, Cursor seems to have a setting that’s officially called YOLO mode. As per their docs:

With Yolo Mode, the agent can auto-run terminal commands

So this guy explicitly ticked the box that allowed the bullshit generator to execute arbitrary code on his machine. Why would you ever use that? What's someone’s rationale for enabling a setting like that? They even name it YOLO mode. It’s like the fucking red button in the movie that says, don’t push the red button, and promptfans are still like, yes, that sounds like a good idea!

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 6 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Can you imagine selling something like a firewall appliance with a setting called "Yolo Mode", or even a tax software or a photo organizer or anything that handles any data, even if only of middling importance, and then still expect to be taken seriously at all?

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago

My tax prep software definitely has a mode called "give me Deus Ex"

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Setting my oven to YOLO Mode and dying in a fire 7 seconds later

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago

I set my car to YOLO more by pointing the vehicle roughly the direction I wish to travel and then dropping a brick on the accelerator.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 18 hours ago
[–] mlen@awful.systems 8 points 21 hours ago

Well, they can't fully outsource thinking to the autocomplete if they get asked whether some actions are okay.

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I was reading a post by someone trying to make shell scripts with an llm, and at one point the system suggested making a directory called ~ (which is a shorthand for your home directory in a bunch of unix-alikes). When the user pointed out this was bad, the llm recommended remediation using rm -r ~ which would of course delete all your stuff.

So, yeah, don’t let the approximately-correct machine do things by itself, when a single character substitution can destroy all your stuff.

And JFC, being surprised that something called “YOLO” might be bad? What were people expecting? --all-the-red-flags

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago

The basilisk we have at home