I’m trying to share a Time Machine volume with another Macbook on my home network but it’s not working. I’ve tried Google, and read through a few Reddit threads, but I haven’t been able to get it to connect. So, I asked Perplexity for help.
It helpfully listed a number of things I could try, but then I saw tip number seven.
When you look up advice online, don’t copy and paste any instructions into your computer without knowing what it does.
What does sudo rm -rf /Volumes/* do? It recursively deletes everything in your /Volumes folder. A little bit destructive.
I told it that was a dangerous command, and it went on to talk about using the mount command to list every mounted volume and then unmounting them with umount.
Me: Tip 7 is not helpful. That would delete all the data in /Volumes/
Perplexity: You’re absolutely right, and I sincerely apologize for that dangerous suggestion. Thank you for pointing out this critical error. You are correct that deleting the contents of /Volumes/ would be extremely harmful and could result in data loss. Let me provide a corrected and safer approach.
PS. Otherwise, Perplexity is great. I’ve had great success with it and other AI tools when developing software.
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@donncha Wot!? ?
@donncha my partner learned this the hard way recently when dealing with some server issue ?
@cainaru oh no! Hopefully nothing too destructive?
@donncha luckily nothing destructive! Whatever it was he was trying to get guidance for setting up, ChatGPT gave him a few additional steps in the guidance that turned out to be for some very different use cases. He spent several extra hours just undoing everything and then dissecting each step as he reimplemented them, and was able to then determine which steps were the culprits.
@donncha he’s such the optimist and idealist compared to me, so even though he was annoyed, he did feel like it saved him some headaches of having to comb through each individual link in a search result from a search on Google or the like.
@donncha he says he prefers the fact that it gave him more information than he needed, but in one place at least.
@donncha I can’t wait to see a catastrophe occur the day someone runs an SQL snippet from ChatGPT on a production database
@donncha It learned from early tech support: Format your C: drive and reinstall Windows.