Comment by jryio

Considering the ubiquity and necessity of driving cars is overwhelmingly a result of intentional policy choices irrespective of what people wanted or was good for the public interest... actually that's quite a decent analogy for integrated LLM assistants.

People will use AI because other options keep getting worse and because it keeps getting harder to avoid using it. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as convenience though, personally. Like with cars, many people will be well aware of the negative externalities, the risk of harm to themselves, and the lack of personal agency caused by this tool and still use it because avoiding it will become costly to their everyday life.

I think of convenience as something that is a "bonus" on top of normal life typically. Something that becomes mandatory to avoid being left out of society no longer counts.

I mean, we were there before this Cowork feature started exposing more users to the slot machine:

"Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222

"Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575

"Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532

> So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.

This is anecdotal but "people" care quite a lot in the energy sector. I've helped build our own AI Agent pool and roll it out to our employees. It's basically a librechat with our in-house models, where people can easily setup base instruction sets and name their AI's funny things, but are otherwise similar to using claude or chatgpt in a browser.

I'm not sure we're ever going to allow AI's access to filesystems, we barely allow people access to their own files as it is. Nothing that has happened in the past year has altered the way our C level view the security issues with AI in any other direction than being more restrictive. I imagine any business that cares about security (or is forced to care by leglislation) isn't looking at this as a they do cars. You'd have to be very unlucky (or lucky?) to shut down the entire power grid of Europe with a car. You could basically do it with a well placed AI attack.

Ironically, you could just hack the physical components which probably haven't had their firmware updated for 20 years. If you even need to hack it, because a lot of it frankly has build in backdoors. That's a different story that nobody on the C levels care about though.

Are average users likely to be using these features? Most devs at my company don’t even have Time Machine backups

RSX-11M for the PDP-11 had filesystem versioning back in the early 1980s, if not earlier.

Yeah. I also like Windows, but MS has done a wonderful job to destroy the OS with newer releases.

I haven't had to tweak an OS like Win 11 ever.

Didn't actually check out the app, but some aspects of application state are hard to serialize, some operations are not reversible by the application. EG: sending an email. It doesn't seem naively trivial to accomplish this, for all apps.

So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.

You can’t easily snapshot the current state of an OS and restore to that state like with git.

Git only works for text files. Everything else is a binary blob which, among other things, leads to merge conflicts, storage explosion, and slow git operations

Trash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents.

So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.

State isn't always local too

Most of these files are binary and are not a good fit for git’s graph based diff tracker…you’re basically ending up with a new full sized binary for every file version. It works from a version perspective, but is very inefficient and not what git was built for.

Git isn't good with big files.

I wanted to comment more, but this new tool is Mac only for now, so there isn't much of a point.

Arq does it better.

TimeMachine is worthless trash compared to restic

Yes, and I think we're already seeing that in the general trend of recent linux work toward atomic updates. [bootc](https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/09/24/bootc-gett...) based images are getting a ton of traction. [universal blue](https://universal-blue.org/) is probably a better brochure example of how bootc can make systems more resilient without needing to move to declarative nix for the entire system like you do in NixOS. Every "upgrade" is a container deployment, and you can roll back or forward to new images at any time. Parts of the filesystem aren't writeable (which pisses people off who don't understand the benefit) but the advantages for security (isolating more stuff to user space by necessity) and stability (wedged upgrades are almost always recoverable) are totally worth it.

On the user side, I could easily see [systemd-homed](https://fedoramagazine.org/unlocking-the-future-of-user-mana...) evolving into a system that allows snapshotting/roll forward/roll back on encrypted backups of your home dir that can be mounted using systemd-homed to interface with the system for UID/GID etc.

These are just two projects that I happen to be interested in at the moment - there's a pretty big groundswell in Linux atm toward a model that resembles (and honestly even exceeds) what NixOS does in terms of recoverability on upgrade.

Or rather ZFS/BTRFS/BchachFS. Before doing anything big I make snapshot, saved me recently when a huge Immich import created a mess, `zfs rollback /home/me@2026-01-12`... And it's like nothing ever happened.

Theoretically, the power drill you're using can spontaneously explode, too. It's very unlikely, but possible - and then it's much more likely you'll hurt yourself or destroy your work if you aren't being careful and didn't set your work environment right.

The key for using AI for sysadmin is the same as with operating a power drill: pay at least minimum attention, and arrange things so in the event of a problem, you can easily recover from the damage.

What percentage of non-IT professionals know what zfs/lvm are let alone how to use them to make snapshots?

I'm not even sure if this is a sarcastic dropbox-style comment at this point.