The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999)
bofh.bjash.com
bofh.bjash.com
"Well, the answer is, we do nothing FOR users. We do things TO users. It's a fine distinction, but an important one all the same."
The situation is different now, computers are serious business, and the higher ups are keeping a close look, some of them even know a thing or two about computers. There are external audits, surveillance, and paperwork. It is much harder to wipe one guy's data just because he pissed you off and get away with it.
Bureaucracy is the new evil. While the new BOFH can't easily wipe off your work anymore, he definitely can ask you to fill up a multi-page form of conflicting requirements in order to access a resource you need. That's the process you know.
When I was at Facebook, there was a very strict official policy and warning in Bootcamp that "The security team knows when you impersonate a user, and you will be fired if it's not for good reason". I still saw people impersonating their girlfriends, their ex girlfriends, their crushes; None of them got noticed or even fired, and there was tacit acknowledgement that it was widespread. This was the same company that encouraged people to install their root certificate so they could MITM your connections[1].
You need to be worried about both. There's probably more banal evil than there was, but it's not because the assholes with petty power have disappeared.
All that said; The BOFH stories were never about the kind of evil you actually find in technical circles. There were juvenile power fantasy about being an evil trickster god; They were catharsis about all the times you are angry and frustrated at your coworkers; Yes, you want to hit them, shock them, throw them down the stairs - The same way that you wish you had a rocket launcher to blast the car ahead of you off the freeway. It's ridiculous power fantasy, and it's kind of shameful that tech has so many people that view it as "unhealthy" rather than crass for the sake of being crass; It is over the line twice.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202880/facebook-researc...
satire definitely took a few punches during the last decade
As was to be expected from people who are in all other ways too.
Facebook should consider this a business risk — one disgruntled employee could report it.
Most comman is "malicious compliance"
Just do EXACTLY what management tells us to do... things tend to go to crap real fast.
The point parent was making is that corporations are doing that, since corpos are now persons, thanks to Citizens United, any argument about this being bureaucratic, autocratic or what not, is moot.
Fact is, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. frequently deactivate and wipe user accounts with disastous consequences for the victims.
Maybe it's not the way things should be, but it's hardly as though the news business has not had far more radical things happen in the past, oh, forty years.
It absolutely makes sense. Laws set rules for resolving conflicts between entities (both people and organizations). In general, the more power an entity has, the more likely it is to abuse that power and the more damage it can do in its abuse and therefore needs more oversight and restrictions on the use of power.
Organizations are obviously more powerful than individuals so require more oversight and restrictions to keep them in check.
The only odd thing is that organizations don't accumulate more restrictions according to their size.
Counter-comeback:
But in that case, shouldn't the limitations on what the collective can do to the individual -- limitations that are not just conservative talking points, but enshrined in your constitution -- also go for corporations, as well as for government?
California’s constitution is too easy to change. The US constitution is too hard to change. It should be easier to change a state than a national one; that aspect is fine, but those two represent extremes.
The difference is that corporations can, and do, fail and go out of business. That particular phrase was much bandied about and always struck me as ridiculously one-sided. The government can throw me in jail, take my money without any proof of wrongdoing (see civil asset forfeiture), kill me, force me into service (intriguingly the Thirteenth Amendment, for Reasons, does not prohibit conscription, even though the language doesn’t say that). I’m no huge fan of corporate worship, being more libertarian (but not Libertarian, if you know my meaning), but at least we have tools to break down abusive corps. It’s astonishingly hard to break down even very small, very corrupt governments.
I would happily grant at least some of those restrictions to corps if the same logic applied to government. But somehow, in our modern polity, there are a lot of people who argue that corporations should not even have limited liability for investors (even the smallest) but that government should have extraordinary powers over everything. If government were run by angels, no such control would be necessary. But it isn’t, and so we must have it. And until people will openly acknowledge that, it’s hard to reconcile the two views. I don’t think there’s a big constituency in the US for untrammeled power, and from the perspective of the typical citizen, both corps and government are very indifferent. They do not care. The argument of “but government is just a name for things we do together” very much elides this danger. There are other things we choose to do together, and we have not chosen to throw every Catholic in jail because the Church harbored abusers. We didn’t even come close to throwing all the abusers and their enablers in prison.
It’s a tough line to draw. However, you’re right that corporations should have less power than they do. Alas, that doesn’t solve the problem. Robert Moses had extraordinary power in New York as an unelected official. He set fait accompli after fait accompli in front of elected officials and dared them to try him. He almost always won. He had extremely good teachers in politics, so the law was usually on his side, because he had written it.
Corporate personhood is what allows your anarchist grocery cooperative to sign a contract with the organic farm on the outside of town, or add someone new to the profit sharing arrangement when they sign after putting in the mandatory hours. It allows a collective, however organized, to function as though they were an individual.
It has nothing to do with Citizens United whatsoever, and it isn't the problem you seem to think it is. Business couldn't function without the fiction, and replacing it with something else would have to work in basically the same way, so it's pointless.
It was naked partisan suppression of speech to rule that Fahrenheit 9-11 is protected speech but it's 'electioneering' when Citizen's United funds a documentary. Not that I'm a fan of Citizen's United, quite the contrary, they started the whole brouhaha by suing to prevent Moore's advertisements from showing before elections. But the grounds the FEC used to dismiss that suit were equally applicable to Celsius 41.11, it was a clear-cut case of administrative overreach.
You can't have freedom of the press if the government is allowed to decide which corporations are and are not "the press", that's a loophole you could barnstorm a Saturn V through.
He's now a voluntary moderator for Reddit, Discord, etc. Anywhere there are users he can lord it over and stroke his ego. Heck, he'd probably pay you to _let_ him moderate.
This torch isn't passed, it's taken. Shortly after some off-label use of quicklime.
I smell "carbon offset fees" on the BOHF's invoices. Good thinking.
You should be able to sell a carbon credit or two on that basis.
some of west tn is "false karst" highlands; we got ~10ac to ~1000ac patches of swamp all over. some of them have the fun floaty landscape bits that you can walk on, but not drive a tractor over. eats bulldozers with an amusing plonk sound.
I loved that plate, it looked cool in real life; and I kept it, it’s proudly hanging in my NL office now.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/15/on_call_500_columns_c...
[1] https://www.ashleevance.com
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/space_economy_vance/
I saw "SIGKILL" a few years ago and smiled to myself but didn't have occasion to speak to the owner (driving at the time).
I've had "31337" since '98 (also old) and had just a couple of people mention it to me.
I've been following Simon Travaglia since the 1980s.
I don't know if he still has his old site up, but he also had a bunch of amusing views on Kiwi culture.
especially so in the early days of computing, from whence the stories come; where "reliability" was a laugh
The amount of times I have seen users click past pages of apt install ouput after messing with the package sources has been well above zero.
2) And they had -- remarkably current, today of all days -- pagers.
The Bastard Operator from Hell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881524 - Oct 2023 (2 comments)
The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29590667 - Dec 2021 (98 comments)
The Bastard Operator From Hell (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21903668 - Dec 2019 (94 comments)
Probably a better archive somewhere besides Reddit, but this is another Usenet classic
Https://www.reddit.com/r/ems/comments/1pnao9/the_collected_magical_world_of_tae_the_paramedic/
I've reread all three volumes quite a few times over the years, currently on Volume I, year 2000 #24 again, since I mainly read a few stories every time I'm on my 30 minute (lunch) break at work.
If Simon reads this, thank you for your work amusing your readers, me among them.
> IIRC Amazon fees/taxes/something like that which would actually lose him money from having it for sale there.
Holy hell, I've heard of Amazon effectively pocketing something like 45% off of each sale, but if true, this is next-level ridiculous.
I avoid shopping there whenever I can, but I also live in a city of 2mil and still often won't find something particular locally.
Is Amazon our era's BOFH?
> No more books. At one point I was selling the BOFH 'books' on Amazon, but it got to be a royal pain. Every month or so I'd get some warning about the book quality from Amazon that I'd have to address and every year I'd have to fill in a US tax form - not big annoyances, but annoying enough to make it not worth the time... Amazon still reminds me every 6 months or so, but there's no turning back now!
So in my recollection I apparently mixed together the different parts: "having to periodically fill in US tax forms even though he's residing in NZ" and "annoyance not being worth his time". It apparently wasn't a direct tax/fee amount issue, but more one of annoyance and sales of these (e)books on Amazon probably not being substantial enough to offset that hassle.
Sadly I can't edit my GP comment anymore to correct that.
[1]: from http://www.bofharchive.com/
(Open an episode in a new tab/window to escape the IFRAME viewport.)
No wonder we all turned cynical.
The BOFH “culture” was the IT admin culture (exaggerated for comic effect); more cynical than anyone because they had to deal with people. It’s probably still like this. IT (or IS as it seems to have been re-branded), sits as a “cost centre”, frequently at the end of a long line of sewage pipes, coping the blame for any number of other peoples mistakes. I suspect the prickly nature is a necessary survival trait.
Cultures develop as they develop. There’s no conspiracy. They also evolve and change, and targeted interventions can push them in certain directions. “Hacker Culture” was never just one thing, and that’s never been more true than today. Certain “clubs” might have been more or less exclusionary at various times, but the scene as a whole has always been a welcoming one.
Please note, I'm talking about the "contempt culture" specifically and not prickly nerds broadly. Some people are prickly and that's fine. It makes sense to me too that people with a complex and difficult job which is perceived as a cost center might be prickly for entirely different reasons.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20161023171257/http://www.bash.or...
Been there 10 years.
oh yeah got it.
@DEVOPS_BORAT.
check him out. hilarious.
last i checked, a while ago, he had stopped tweeting, but there are many previous tweets of his anyway, which should still be accessible.
Edit:
In the context of this current hn thread, this is a gem of a tweet from him:
@DEVOPS_BORAT · Mar 30, 2011 Confuse of Dev or Ops? Simple rule: if you are praise for Web site success, you are Dev; if you are blame when Web site down, you are Ops.
having been on both sides of the fence, I can resonate with that.
DevOps Borat @DEVOPS_BORAT · Feb 9, 2013 Conflict resolution is most important skill of manager. In startup we are force all manager for use git.
https://gist.github.com/textarcana/676ef78b2912d42dbf355a2f7...
Or...
Get a random devops_borat or sadserver tweet in Obsidian - https://josh.fail/2023/get-a-random-devops-borat-or-sadserve...
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The original https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/ is up. The server that it points to is still running.
Your excuse is: The ring needs another tokenAh, refreshing.
Not because I would, or think anyone should, just because it's funny as hell.
Damn, that’s all of them.
There's your own local cloud... ICP... the second worst name. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-private/3.2.x?topic=starte...
"For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable @awscloud Truth to the thread." https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html has a bit of snark for AWS and other clouds.