Silly Mistake, Permanent Solution

In Unix systems, the tilde (~) represents the user's home directory. This poor soul created a literal directory named "~" instead of referencing the actual home directory. Then they proceeded to delete it with rm -rf ~/ which doesn't delete the wrongly created directory - it recursively deletes everything in their actual home directory. That "Stopped thinking" at the end is the exact moment they realized they just nuked all their personal files. Classic case of "I'll just quickly fix this" turning into "time to update my resume."