Classic. Remember, the BOFH is no longer the "operator" of some systems at a university. Now he's your ISP, your search engine, your social media services, and many other important things you rely on.
"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 has changed. There is less opportunities for the kind of evil the BOFH is known for. The operator used to be one guy doing stuff no one understand, maybe not a high salary, but a huge amount of individual power when it comes to computers.
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.
GauntletWizard 105 days ago [-]
The situation hasn't changed at all. There are tons of compliance auditors, and they can write all the policy they want, but they can't audit the day to day.
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.
The European privacy regulators would love to know about the impersonation at Facebook, if it's still happening or if there's any evidence.
Facebook should consider this a business risk — one disgruntled employee could report it.
sulandor 105 days ago [-]
> It is over the line twice.
satire definitely took a few punches during the last decade
tempodox 105 days ago [-]
The success of social media gave more influence to people who have no sense of humor.
CRConrad 102 days ago [-]
Oh, they do, they do... It's just that it's on a three-year-old's level.
As was to be expected from people who are in all other ways too.
Anarch157a 105 days ago [-]
> It is much harder to wipe one guy's data just because he pissed you off and get away with it.
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.
samatman 105 days ago [-]
Corporate personhood is a very old doctrine which is described by the law itself as a legal fiction.
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.
ls612 104 days ago [-]
All that Citizens United means is that corporate persons can speak freely to the same degree that natural persons can. Which makes sense, collectively speaking is just as core to the First Amendment as speaking alone is.
samatman 104 days ago [-]
Agreed, I've found that much of the criticism of Citizens United isn't very well-informed. In a way it's an embarrassment that the Supreme Court had to affirm that a First Amendment right extends to corporations, because it's right there in the plain text: "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". "The press" has always, universally, been understood to mean publishing, which is a business, and hence a corporate practice.
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.
fdhfdjkfhdkj 104 days ago [-]
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anamexis 105 days ago [-]
That has nothing to do with Citizens United, which only concerned campaign finance rules in federal elections. Furthermore, the Citizens United ruling makes no reference at all to corporate personhood.
devilbunny 105 days ago [-]
CU was a strange but IMHO probably correct decision. A lot of people don't like its practical effects, and that's certainly their right, but purely as a legal matter, it does seem odd that you would lose autonomy when you band together. It is, in a way, the ultimate conservative comeback to "government is just another name for things we choose to do together" - well, so are corporations.
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.
martin-t 105 days ago [-]
> purely as a legal matter, it does seem odd that you would lose autonomy when you band together
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.
CRConrad 102 days ago [-]
> It is, in a way, the ultimate conservative comeback to "government is just another name for things we choose to do together" - well, so are corporations.
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?
devilbunny 101 days ago [-]
Could be. Probably should. But good luck getting a constitutional amendment through nowadays.
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.
fdhfdjkfhdkj 104 days ago [-]
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FuriouslyAdrift 105 days ago [-]
Oh I assure you we in the systems admin game still have a lot of tricks for people who piss us off...
Most comman is "malicious compliance"
Just do EXACTLY what management tells us to do... things tend to go to crap real fast.
Moru 105 days ago [-]
This is what is meant with Bureaucracy. And it's not just the BOFH's of the world, this is the same in all areas where there is a bit of personal power. There will be rules and they will be followed very very closely no matter what breaks down. Be it package delivery, care of elderly, hospitals, permissions related to building houses, and so on.
tempodox 105 days ago [-]
The upside of bureaucracy is that it allows you to ignore reality. And if reality doesn't conform, it's reality's fault.
amiga386 105 days ago [-]
> not a high salary, but a huge amount of individual power
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.
necovek 105 days ago [-]
BOFH was funny because it showcased the technical possibilities when applied in the worst possible way, just like lots of comedy today. Remembering a bunch of those stories, they were pretty much highly unlikely even back in the day (tracing phone calls — many of these stories were redirecting calls to other numbers — was possible even back in 80s).
h2odragon 105 days ago [-]
To whom it may concern, the TN state "BOFH" license plate should be available now. I've had it for 30 years, but i'm not able to drive anymore and the truck died, so I didn't renew it last month.
jasoneckert 105 days ago [-]
If there is such a thing as passing the BOFH torch, this is it. I'm sure someone here will thank you for mentioning this!
CoastalCoder 105 days ago [-]
I respectfully disagree.
This torch isn't passed, it's taken. Shortly after some off-label use of quicklime.
h2odragon 105 days ago [-]
Have you no swamps nearby? Recycling, and so on.
CoastalCoder 105 days ago [-]
> Have you no swamps nearby? Recycling, and so on.
I smell "carbon offset fees" on the BOHF's invoices. Good thinking.
gerdesj 105 days ago [-]
How did I miss your comment? I'd normally claim great minds think alike, but mine clearly isn't!
gerdesj 105 days ago [-]
TN: Tennessee. No mention of swamps on its wikipedia page. There are three bloody great major rivers mentioned and mountains, so I'm thinking hydro powered cattle prods, weights and a river.
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.
beng-nl 105 days ago [-]
Off-Topic, but drove around for a few months in a TN state “PWNAGE” license plate for the few months I lived there to intern :-)
I loved that plate, it looked cool in real life; and I kept it, it’s proudly hanging in my NL office now.
devilbunny 105 days ago [-]
In about 1998, I was driving down the highway in Mississippi and saw a tag: "UID ZRO". I had a passenger at the time and said hey, I'm going to pass this guy, but tell me if he looks like a Unix admin. Passenger was familiar with the type and said yes, he did.
I had BOFH as a vanity plate on my car and I never met one person that understood the reference outside of work. Yes I'm old. lol
EvanAnderson 105 days ago [-]
It's probably the case that there are people who know the reference but are just seeing you in traffic.
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 105 days ago [-]
If anyone wants to ROTFL, then this is a good place to start.
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.
esafak 105 days ago [-]
Back when computer expertise was hard to come by, so admins could lord over users. The Internet has made these people extinct. SNL parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25J3u3P-HHg
h2odragon 105 days ago [-]
relatable by all the unseen engineers whose job it is to keep the machines running, so that everybody else can do their jobs.
especially so in the early days of computing, from whence the stories come; where "reliability" was a laugh
surfingdino 105 days ago [-]
They still lord over us, but ask ChatGPT to write Terraform for them.
josefx 105 days ago [-]
Most users only bother with quick solutions for whatever problem they have, not with any deeper understanding. They get the kind of expertise where the BOFH only has to sit on the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn, watch the user shred their own system and offer a pristine replacement with all their local data gone.
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.
CRConrad 102 days ago [-]
1) WTF, Jackie Chan was on SNL?!? Ya live and learn...
2) And they had -- remarkably current, today of all days -- pagers.
I had a run-in with the BOFH in real life many years ago as a university student where he was working. I'd messed up something network-related on a lab PC, and noticed that the NIC was now in promiscuous mode for some reason. I did a bit of idle poking around and pinged a few interesting hostnames I found. I was called into the the BOFH's office the next day and interrogated. He glared at me as I explained, and eventually let me off with a stern warning, though the PC was snatched from the lab before I made it back there and never seen again.
photonthug 105 days ago [-]
If you like bofh and don’t know the ancient lore of tae the paramedic, you’ll enjoy reading it since it is similar in flavor.
Probably a better archive somewhere besides Reddit, but this is another Usenet classic
Still have the three BOFH Omnibus volumes in my Kindle app, bought originally from Simon, who has since discontinued their sale on Amazon for some reason, IIRC Amazon fees/taxes/something like that which would actually lose him money from having it for sale there.
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.
rollcat 105 days ago [-]
Apologies for going further off topic, but
> 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?
Lev1a 105 days ago [-]
Ah, found the reason [1]:
> 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.
Simon has since updated his website—a couple of different times I think?—but I only feel right reading the pre-El Reg archives the way I read them in 2007, which happily is still on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20070811042222fw_/http://bofh.nt...
(Open an episode in a new tab/window to escape the IFRAME viewport.)
fmeyer 105 days ago [-]
BOFH, BileBlog, The Daily WTF;
No wonder we all turned cynical.
_ZeD_ 105 days ago [-]
it's the opposite.
we are cynical, so we build that stuff
bitwize 105 days ago [-]
Artifacts of the toxic "contempt culture" historically endemic to hacker culture.
"Contempt culture" is one way to put it, definitely had some toxic elements, but it was also actual hacker culture. The nice-ification of tech has come with corporatization and has its own downsides.
maxbond 105 days ago [-]
It was a gatekeeping strategy. Opening the gates means opening them for the people you like and the people you don't. Ultimately, it's the hackerly thing to do. Knowledge wants to be free.
lll-o-lll 105 days ago [-]
Strategy? You think a bunch of people sat down and planned a specific set of rules to ensure only the “right sort” (cynical bastards), were allowed in the club?
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.
maxbond 105 days ago [-]
I think a bunch of people, without explicit coordination, were rude to the sorts of people who weren't seen as belonging. My experience jives with the article GGP linked, and I've played both parts (and for anyone who had to put up with me shit talking PHP, I apologize). It's a tale as old as time; people form cliques and gatekeep, c'est la vie. Rarely is it by explicit coordination (secret societies notwithstanding), but I would still call it a strategy.
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.
Aeolun 105 days ago [-]
You can only deal with stupid (or ‘differently aligned competencies’) for so long before it starts to irk you, and you start assuming that anyone that calls—and anything they want—is stupid
newswasboring 105 days ago [-]
Was suddenly reminded of this while trying to fix my laptop. Thought other people might also enjoy it on lazy Saturday afternoon.
newswasboring 105 days ago [-]
I'm on a real nostalgia trip today. Found that bash.org is down. But its available on the way back machine[1].
There's also a static archive at [1]. It keeps the "Random" feature intact (although I wish it showed 20 or so quotes at a time like the original site, rather than just one)
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.
shagie 105 days ago [-]
> The wisdom of Devops Borat (RIP, may Taichi Ohno himself carry him into Valhalla!) condensed in fortune cookie format without any @ messages included. Just the goofiest random shit :)
To this day, I still occasionally imply that perhaps someone needs to power surge their drivers.
codr7 105 days ago [-]
Love it!
Not because I would, or think anyone should, just because it's funny as hell.
camgunz 104 days ago [-]
Wow does the BOFH kill the user in all of them. That's so dark lol
enneff 105 days ago [-]
I remember finding this funny back in the 90s but it’s just kind of sad to me now. Today he just seems like a very unhappy, psychopathic character.
enimodas 104 days ago [-]
I expected to experience something similar, but on reading, it's so over the top that my brain has no problem realizing it's a joke. Violent movies on the other hand I can't really enjoy much anymore.
"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."
https://www.chinet.com/html/bofh/lastbofh.html
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...
Facebook should consider this a business risk — one disgruntled employee could report it.
satire definitely took a few punches during the last decade
As was to be expected from people who are in all other ways too.
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.
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.
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.
Most comman is "malicious compliance"
Just do EXACTLY what management tells us to do... things tend to go to crap real fast.
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/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashlee_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.
https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/
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...
[1] https://bash-org-archive.com/
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.
https://x.com/DEVOPS_BORAT
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.
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...
---
The original https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/ is up. The server that it points to is still running.
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.
Ah, refreshing.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
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.