Hey fellow tech folks. We might get asked to do something terrible. I'd like to start a bit of an open discussion about how to deal with such requests.
The first thing I might recommend is enthusiastically agree to do whatever it is then forget about it and do something else. If asked about it in the future, pretend this is the first you've heard about it. Play as dumb as you can for as long as you can.
Now, if you can't get away with delaying by not doing anything anymore then find the absolute most complicated way to do whatever it is. This is actually a great time to use an LLM. Have an LLM write all your code then just run it. Ask the LLM to fix anything that's broken. Take some extra steps to force downgrade or upgrade libraries to incompatible versions. Write all of your own interfaces by hand. Write your own date parsing library. Write all of your own SQL without any abstractions. Add an LLM in the middle some how. Use libraries that haven't been supported for 15 years. Ever want to write code in Python 2.0? Now's your chance! Debug everything with Wireshark, no matter what it is. I bet there's a VB script library to do what you need to do, and if you can just write a C wrapper around that it'll interface perfectly with perl, as soon as you can get that old FoxPro program running in wine. I bet it would be easier without that commit hook that changes every zero to a capital letter O. "I'm getting the craziest error. It works on my system!"
There are a million ways to make things insanely complicated, and most of us have seen people legitimately do these things out of pure incompetence.
Now, if you end up against the wall and think you might get fired package everything up and hand it off to someone else, but make sure you make it clear that you're almost done and it should be super easy to finish. Leave behind some fun puzzles for the next person to figure out.
"How strange...the output changes when I change the whitespace, but not when I change the text. What is that?"
Who's got some other fun suggestions for extremely malicious compliance?
Edit: Since the post I was riffing on is no longer the top trending on my instance, I'm gonna bump it again. We've all been thinking about all kinds of malicious compliance in the case of a hypothetical (or perhaps some of us real) evil. This is a *specific* evil that *is* being asked for right now.
It's worth reading the original post that got me thinking about this, it you hadn't yet:
sauropods.win/@futurebird/1138…
If you work with a database and are asked to alter the table structure to comply in advance for citizenship or gender categorizations it's really important to NOT do it."The governor is concerned about all this stuff they want us to update our record keeping so we store both gender AND biological sex."
"We need fields to store the country of origin of people's parents."
If you don't have the power to rebuff this yourself, ask for help. At minimum ask for help online anonymously.
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CaliCarol
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to hex • • •Also, get randomized. If you have anything else, do that instead. Only work on whatever evil thing if you are explicitly asked to prioritize it above everything else. Then, if you're asked for anything after that point, drop the evil thing and take whatever new request. Add several days of delay for "task switching" when asked to come back.
One reason to feign compliance is so that the task doesn't get assigned to someone who might actually do it.
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hex
in reply to hex • • •JWcph, Radicalized By Decency reshared this.
wizzwizz4
in reply to hex • • •I'm pretty sure you can debug memory issues in Wireshark, though. Given enough probes, you can reconstruct an algorithm equivalent-enough to the contents of a black box to debug with paper and a pencil.
This is only rarely a good strategy, but how do you know this isn't such an occasion?
hex
in reply to wizzwizz4 • • •okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to hex • • •Document nothing. No comments in code, use obscure function and variable names, which you can reuse for different purposes from one routine to the other.
Schedule another meeting where you revisit and question past decisions.
hex reshared this.
okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •hex
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to hex • • •Here's another, underprovision EVERYTHING. Especially storage, and then turn off logrotate. Oh the fun when nothing works because it can't write to disc.
If you create logs for your process, make sure they are as useless as possible (oh my God I'm living my own #Sysadmin trauma) also, no dates or times, or if you do, choose one that is different from the system setting (aggghhhhhhh).
hex reshared this.
okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •If you ever do have to deliver "Evil Product" these elements will make it almost impossible to use or admin.
Also? These containers. Make some Debian Sid, some Fedora, some Centos, some Ubuntu, if you can cram some process on Windows server, even better. Hopefully scraping input from an Excel spreadsheet with tons of links.
Don Marti
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •hex
in reply to Don Marti • • •Don Marti
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
Riley S. Faelan
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •@Okanogen And the certificate-generating machine's clock runs just a little slow, until one day, with nobody seeing it in advance, it will start issuing certificates that have already expired by the time they're ready.
@Hex
hex
in reply to Riley S. Faelan • • •Riley S. Faelan
in reply to hex • • •A sufficiently multilayered stack of abstractions is indistinguishible from advanced industrial sabotage.
@Okanogen
Sabrina Web 📎
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •Marcos Dione
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •hex
in reply to Marcos Dione • • •Travis F W
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to Travis F W • • •@travisfw is someone told me half of people above middle management in any major company was trying to tank the company by using this strategy, I'd have a hard time arguing otherwise (both from internal experience and external observations).
This shit is invisible because it's already happening... Only thing is that most of it comes from the top and everyone below mid managers spend at least half their energy trying to fix it.
Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm • • •Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm
in reply to hex • • •me, too
Appreciate your suggestions. We need to quit complaining and do what we can. 🔥
Retired now from the corporation, so trying to start my own profit split restaurant where hopefully our small team is motivated not to screw up their own. The whole country is full of pissed off workers.
hex
in reply to Cedar Fen Farm Cedar Fen Farm • • •Annatifa
in reply to hex • • •Sir Rochard 'Dock' Bunson
in reply to hex • • •A modern interpretation of a classic!
en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Simpl…
sabotage book published by OSS in 1944 (at the end of WWII) and used later by CIA, united States intelligence services, compiling technics used by anarchists and communists against nazis.
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Codex ☯️♈☮
in reply to Sir Rochard 'Dock' Bunson • • •I think about the advice in that sabotage manual all the time. The ruling class sabotage your life everyday in subtle and overt ways. Why aren't you doing everything you can to fight back, to sabotage their profits and undermine the system they've forced on us?
jaKa Močnik
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to jaKa Močnik • • •jaKa Močnik
in reply to hex • • •jaKa Močnik
in reply to jaKa Močnik • • •hex
in reply to jaKa Močnik • • •Marcos Dione
in reply to jaKa Močnik • • •@jkmcnk archive.org link:
web.archive.org/web/2025011823…
We should probably make a torrent of it.
hex
in reply to hex • • •I am riffing a bit off this. I actually think both should probably be used together. It can be valuable to push back, and it can be valuable to undermine. Choose your path wisely based on how you read the situation.
sauropods.win/@futurebird/1138…
Edit: and if you boosted mine, you should probably boost this too.
myrmepropagandist
2025-01-21 11:25:00
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Blackoverflow
in reply to hex • • •Maximize language barriers:
Invent new and change terms regularly.
Translate those terms and use all the variants in the code.
Change the language used in meetings.
Have at least three incomplete and contradicting glossaries.
hex reshared this.
Virginicus
in reply to hex • • •Nazani
in reply to hex • • •Ben Evans
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
hex
in reply to Ben Evans • • •Eliot Lear
in reply to hex • • •Log 🪵
in reply to Eliot Lear • • •knack
in reply to Eliot Lear • • •@eliotlear "I refuse to personally march folks into camps, but I won't stop you if you want to do it" does not sound like a moral win to me.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Eliot Lear
in reply to knack • • •Cassandrich
in reply to Eliot Lear • • •@eliotlear @knack Lying is not only not wrong but an ethical mandate in many situations.
Yes this requires unlearning. It required a lot for me. But the principle that lying is always or even usually wrong is extremely privileged and harms those who are less so.
swachter
in reply to hex • • •Commenting your code? Not today, Satan!
Or go ahead and comment, just inaccurately and/or full of impossible to penetrate jargon and acronyms.
Be like Riker: youtu.be/WU_RGhavFbY?feature=s…
- YouTube
youtu.beswachter
in reply to swachter • • •“These specs aren’t clear. I need to see full wireframes with every corner case covered before I can possibly start to implement this.”
Parcel out your corner cases into as many distinct inquiries as possible. Stretch them out as long as possible. Do you really need to send that email or slack to get clarification right now? It can probably wait an hour. Or a day.
Does your team communicate on slack? Not you! You like email. Does your team communicate on email? Not you! You like synchronous meetings with every possible stakeholder. EVERY stakeholder.
Ooh, better spend some more time on that documentation.
Doesn’t this code need a refactor? It probably needs a refactor.
Have we considered the security and legal implications of this? We should probably get sign off from Security and Legal on these specs before we start work.
hex
in reply to swachter • • •swachter
in reply to hex • • •Man, it’s so weird how null values in the new field crash the whole system.
Better make sure to triple and quadruple check that migration before you run it. (Or: don’t! Fuck it, we’ll run it on prod!!)
hex reshared this.
swachter
in reply to swachter • • •When they said “move fast and break things” I really took that to heart.
Either it’s so urgent it’s gotta ship now right now with no error checking whatsoever orrrrr it’s so important that it has to go through absolutely every single step of review ever defined in the company and get sign off from the CEO personally.
swachter
in reply to swachter • • •Sensemaking variable names? No.
Variables that do the opposite of what the name implies? Yes.
Many variable names that are almost indistinguishable from each other? Yes.
Variable names that use “1” and “l” and “0” and “O” as often and as inconsistently as possible? Yes.
Code reviews should take forever. And not find all the problems. If they do find all the problems, make more problems when you fix those problems. Or don’t fix them all and make it go through another round of code review.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
in reply to swachter • • •@swachter
"Does your team communicate on slack? Not you! You like email."
It's sad how I do some of these without any bad intent, just because I'm old and cranky. I should write up a guide based on my actual practices.
"First, write everything in vi"
"Does everyone else think that you need no documentation? Well, you actually do."
@Hex
remmy
in reply to swachter • • •The Office of Strategic Services would be proud.
Claudius Link
in reply to swachter • • •I would beg to differ. Comment like hell, but make the comments slightly contradict the code 🤪
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
in reply to hex • • •Make data fields called things like user_id and populate them with "y" (yes, the user has an ID).
(I've actually written my own date parser, because I have to deal with date formats not in wide use anywhere, like the US Coast Guard's DD-MON-YY e.g. 10-JAN-25.)
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the elder sea
in reply to Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ • • •Lien Rag
in reply to Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ • • •@richpuchalsky
You mean the date format used by every sensible person ?
(when one doesn't need to precise the century, I mean)
@Hex
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
in reply to Lien Rag • • •@lienrag
I've never seen a date with the month spelled out as a 3 letter abbreviation in any other context. Because it was from the Coast Guard I assumed that DD-MON-YY was a specialty format designed for saying a date into the radio on a ship with a screaming loud storm going on.
Since it was mixed into a database with other more usual date formats I called it "demon-year".
@Hex
Lien Rag
in reply to Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ • • •@richpuchalsky
Oh rigtht, I didn't get the three-letter-abbreviation part.
My apologies.
Limnetic Villains
in reply to hex • • •If not working remotely, it's a health and safety breach if your working conditions do not have working toilet facilities.
Plaster of Paris should never be put down toilets or sinks, it hardens very quickly and causes blockages that can require expensive plumbing. If some amount of it is put down a sink or toilet at the end of a business day on a Friday, there is no doubt that Monday and Tuesday the working conditions would not be fit.
Health and safety is important.
hex reshared this.
Phil M0OFX
in reply to hex • • •Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
some kind of orange shape
in reply to hex • • •The International Obfuscated C Code Contest
www.ioccc.orgRei Acorn
in reply to hex • • •I am Jack's Lost 404
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to I am Jack's Lost 404 • • •crypticcelery 🔜 39c3
in reply to hex • • •Oberst Enzian
in reply to hex • • •Gary Parker
in reply to hex • • •@guyjantic alternate view/approach: having the confidence to firmly and politely say “no”, backed up with reasons and evidence, is a career super-power. It only comes with experience, but you go epic level when you unlock it.
Those reasons and evidence can incorporate cost, complexity, security, privacy, organisational reputation, regulations, time to deploy, and many more. Investigate all the reasons and have notes
Then say no
hex
in reply to Gary Parker • • •@WiteWulf @guyjantic some people absolutely should do this. I think it depends a lot on how much social and political capital you have in an org. If you have enough, then use it. There's a lot of value in other people seeing someone just flat out refuse.
It can inspire others. It can stop such requests in the future. It's great. For a lot of organizations, that can be enough to snap them out of compliance.
Also, some organizations are built to do evil things and anyone who resists that will be filtered out. We need people in those organizations making sure they *can't* do as much evil as they otherwise would. That is also valuable. We all work at different places, and everyone has a place.
alcinnz
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
Leaded Solder
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
in reply to Leaded Solder • • •@LeadedSolder
There are latin1 non-breaking-spaces as well. Don't restrict yourself to just Unicode. You may need some experimentation.
@Hex @mos_8502
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MacCruiskeen
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
hex
in reply to MacCruiskeen • • •"After 3 weeks of looking, I noticed we don't have a policy about how to do that. What's the protocol for making sure one gets written?"
MacCruiskeen
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏
in reply to hex • • •If you have some code metric thing that demands comments, then erroneous, meaningless, and insecure comments are the way to go:
// If a equals c
if (a ==b) {
// Set the flag (check with team, is this still wrong?)
flag = true
}
[ Jer moved instances ]
in reply to hex • • •Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)
in reply to hex • • •hex reshared this.
Void Turtle
in reply to Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD) • • •Alternatively, insist everything be written in C for performance reasons. Memory vulnerabilities? Not a problem, only bad programmers mismanage memory. Also introduce concurrency unnecessarily - only bad programmers find it hard to debug convoluted race conditions, right?
crypticcelery 🔜 39c3
in reply to hex • • •thanks for this post.
Just all the horrible ideas in here and the sheer creatitvity, I love it!
Especially the date thing, oh boy. youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
This should be one of the spots where you should let the requirements be lax. Yes, your solution needs to cover the entire human era, you never know. You will find excellent rabbit holes to spend your time in.
- YouTube
youtu.behex reshared this.
hex
in reply to crypticcelery 🔜 39c3 • • •crypticcelery 🔜 39c3
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to crypticcelery 🔜 39c3 • • •Farce Majeure
in reply to hex • • •hex
Unknown parent • • •hex
Unknown parent • • •Tom Walker
in reply to hex • • •hex
Unknown parent • • •hex
in reply to hex • • •There are a few different version of the sabotage manual in PDF linked from this thread too, but in case you want to download an epub, Gutenberg also has it...
gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services
Project GutenbergKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 reshared this.
Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
in reply to hex • • •Four words: Waterfall process. Feature creep.
Make sure you get *extensive* stakeholder input from as many departments as possible.
Especially if they're irrelevant.
Give every junior, middle, and senior manager the opportunity to provide input.
Ask to set up meetings with their full teams so that everyone in the company or organisation can have their say on the project.
Openly solicit them to suggest new features that should be included.
If they suggest a new feature, the answer is an automatic yes.
Invite them all to be part of the signoff process.
Document all feature requests, especially when they contradict.
If you have a design team, get them to do a mockup of the UI.
Build a mock-up of the front end first.
Then do another round of stakeholder feedback.
Ask for changes.
Sally from sales won't help you waste time by suggesting a different database. But she'll absolutely suggest that button should be placed differently and be a different shade of blue.
With all these stakeholders involved, you'
... Show more...Four words: Waterfall process. Feature creep.
Make sure you get *extensive* stakeholder input from as many departments as possible.
Especially if they're irrelevant.
Give every junior, middle, and senior manager the opportunity to provide input.
Ask to set up meetings with their full teams so that everyone in the company or organisation can have their say on the project.
Openly solicit them to suggest new features that should be included.
If they suggest a new feature, the answer is an automatic yes.
Invite them all to be part of the signoff process.
Document all feature requests, especially when they contradict.
If you have a design team, get them to do a mockup of the UI.
Build a mock-up of the front end first.
Then do another round of stakeholder feedback.
Ask for changes.
Sally from sales won't help you waste time by suggesting a different database. But she'll absolutely suggest that button should be placed differently and be a different shade of blue.
With all these stakeholders involved, you'll need regular meetings to keep them in the loop.
Do your upfront consultations right, and you'll be left with an awful piece of bloatware that will never ship with 100 stakeholders who'll fight to ensure all their suggestions are included.
And all that before you type the first piece of actual code.
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Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
in reply to Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au • • •As for how you could make a simple web app technically complicated, here's an idea.
Sure, you could code your web app's UI in PHP/Javascript/CSS/whatever as part of the app itself.
But where's the fun in that?
Alternatively, you could choose to do something more "robust" and complex.
Such as set up a virtual machine, with a full Arch Linux install, including KDE or Gnome.
Then have a full LAMP and networking stack on top of that.
Then install a full content management system (whichever out of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla your organisation doesn't use) on top of that.
(Very important note: This is not your organisation's main CMS for the front end. You're standing up a full CMS in a virtual machine just for the UI of one app.)
You will want many plugins.
The actual interface will be driven by a custom-coded plugin, which shares data with many other plugins on the same install.
You know that WordPress CMS plugin no-one uses because it slows down your website? You'll be installing that to store some of your data.
You'
... Show more...As for how you could make a simple web app technically complicated, here's an idea.
Sure, you could code your web app's UI in PHP/Javascript/CSS/whatever as part of the app itself.
But where's the fun in that?
Alternatively, you could choose to do something more "robust" and complex.
Such as set up a virtual machine, with a full Arch Linux install, including KDE or Gnome.
Then have a full LAMP and networking stack on top of that.
Then install a full content management system (whichever out of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla your organisation doesn't use) on top of that.
(Very important note: This is not your organisation's main CMS for the front end. You're standing up a full CMS in a virtual machine just for the UI of one app.)
You will want many plugins.
The actual interface will be driven by a custom-coded plugin, which shares data with many other plugins on the same install.
You know that WordPress CMS plugin no-one uses because it slows down your website? You'll be installing that to store some of your data.
You'll use webhooks and a custom integration to pull data in plain text from the rest of your app into a Google Sheet through a hard-coded URL, and then another API and custom integration to pull it into your virtual machine.
And all this for the web UI.
Have fun! =)
[ Jer moved instances ] likes this.
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Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
in reply to Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au • • •One final suggestion for mischief.
If you present a manager with a PowerPoint presentation titled "executive summary" with many pretty graphics and charts, and a Word document titled "detailed proposed technical specifications" that's AI-generated and around 30 or 40 pages long, I almost guarantee that they'll only look at the former.
And they'll make their approval decision based on what's in the executive summary.
So hypothetically, you could make the case in the executive summary for why key parts of your application should be hosted in the cloud across four separate VPSes.
And in the detailed tech specs, somewhere around page 17, you specify in a dense paragraph that for security purposes, each of those four virtual private servers is to run a different operating system.
One will be Linux, one Windows, one Haiku, and one AROS.
As in this AROS: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Res…
You hand over your nearly finished appl
... Show more...One final suggestion for mischief.
If you present a manager with a PowerPoint presentation titled "executive summary" with many pretty graphics and charts, and a Word document titled "detailed proposed technical specifications" that's AI-generated and around 30 or 40 pages long, I almost guarantee that they'll only look at the former.
And they'll make their approval decision based on what's in the executive summary.
So hypothetically, you could make the case in the executive summary for why key parts of your application should be hosted in the cloud across four separate VPSes.
And in the detailed tech specs, somewhere around page 17, you specify in a dense paragraph that for security purposes, each of those four virtual private servers is to run a different operating system.
One will be Linux, one Windows, one Haiku, and one AROS.
As in this AROS: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Res…
You hand over your nearly finished application by gicing your colleagues access to the VPSes, and by gum they'll be surprised that a critical chunk of the application is an AREXX script running on a virtualised Amiga.
When this is raised up the food chain, and it will, you'll be able to accurately point out that you explictly specified this on page 17 of the memo that was signed off by the more senior manager.
operating system
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MathiasTCK
in reply to Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au • • •Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au
in reply to MathiasTCK • • •@mathiastck Not necessarily...
There's also Secret of Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer, Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, The Chaos Engine, Alien Breed, Zool, Prince of Persia, Elite...
okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au • • •"Musty Bits" McGee
in reply to Now at @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au • • •Johanna, CanCon variety
in reply to "Musty Bits" McGee • • •@arichtman @ajsadauskas
Could be therapeutic to work back through it for the collective good this time?
Taking notes here. I've got the (time-limited, but still) privilege of unemployment as this begins, so my food money isn't entirely dependent on needing to comply with the software industry bullshit that will no doubt kneecap Canada as well. But there's room for all of us to find at least a small digital or procedural spanner for the works.
@laumann
in reply to hex • • •ManVsXerox: Resistful Dingus
in reply to hex • • •I think the best way to do this is with how tickets for the tasks as created.
1.Give the tickets you make the lowest priority possible in Jira.
2. Label all of the tickets as Technical Debt (they will never get done)
3. Know your Kanban Boards and set the tickets to trickle to the bottom.
4. Try to have the ticket target the most arcane and oldest/outdated micro service your company has. You know, the one everyone is too afraid to even look at.
Berkubernetus
in reply to hex • • •Vickie Gray 🍁
in reply to hex • • •Brainburner Games
Unknown parent • • •IcooIey
in reply to hex • • •cthululemon
in reply to hex • • •For I am CJ
in reply to hex • • •I like the energy... but I do have one point that I think could be done better/ should be done differently
Step 01 is never "agree"
Step One is always a dismissive, half assed "I heard you and I'm already creating a delay" type of malicious compliance 😉
"Oh... ok?"... can you send me something on that detailing what they're looking for?... Thanks!"
THEN... move on to "I forgot about it"
and also... start looking for your next gig while making this go as poorly as possible for whatever 'toxic enabler' bullshit the people who wanted this are trying to pull
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Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏
in reply to hex • • •My simple favourite is horribly misnamed variables. Store the debit in a variable called "credit", altitude in one called "eastness", the user name in "isThisBob", the password in "isloggedIn". If you don't have control of the DB schema, create aliases on your SQL queries to match.
Another fun one would be more useful if it wasn't too obvious in the code, but it's great to stick in a library:
if (rand(0, 1000000) == 1) {
someresult = someresult * 1.02
}
Lona Theartlav
in reply to hex • • •Thomas Sturm
in reply to hex • • •Also, no-one ever gets fired for creating incomprehensible database schemas.
Always make sure to use the least useful key for each table and use many, many tables. Make sure column names are nearly the same in different tables, but do wildly different things. Be creative about data types. Numbers can easily be stored as strings, just saying.
Create lots of documentation for all of this mess, but make sure to spread it out. Some google docs, some wikis, some text files, all 90% complete.
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sparrows (doll arc)
in reply to Thomas Sturm • • •An Overview of SQL Antipatterns
Horia Constantin (hackernoon.com)Thomas Sturm
in reply to sparrows (doll arc) • • •https://bdx.town/users/Seth
in reply to hex • • •Replace semi colons `;` by greek question marks `;` in any code you happen to write.
If doable, you could even make an automation to transform semi colons by greek question mark when typing gor every computer of the company^^
👨🏻✈️(Sky?)wanderer - Nicolas
in reply to hex • • •Nervensäge 💐
in reply to hex • • •Im UseNet, dem ersten öffentlichen Kommunikationsforum im Internet, galt die "goldene Regel": Alles, was länger als ein Bildschirm ist, wird nicht gelesen.Das waren damals 40x80=320 Zeichen.
Wenn du auf Mastodon postest, solltest du dies bedenken.
Ich habe deinen Post versucht zu lesen, aber es ist ein Schwall von Wörtern, und die anscheinend wichtige Information ist in einer Abkürzung versteckt.
Also habe ich nichts verstanden.
Bitte fasse dich kurz, konkret und verständlich.
Thomas Lee ✅
in reply to hex • • •Lien Rag
in reply to hex • • •Yeah, you're making things more complicated that they need to be.
Just applying exactly the management's demands, without fixing anything in the process, should be enough to stop everything from working.
@IcooIey
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hex
in reply to Lien Rag • • •obscurestar
in reply to hex • • •Code in old Perl and set this line somewhere in a library:
$[ = -1;
Many years ago, I spent weeks tearing my hair out because someone had done that to me. It makes ALL arrays in perl start at index -1 after that line is executed. Including ones you've already created and iterated through.
hex reshared this.
josefbakke
in reply to hex • • •You have rediscovered a technique has been used many times in other fields with great success.
onebigunion.ie/how-to-fire-you…
Malicious compliance is powerful on its own, but you have even more power when you stand hand in hand with your fellow workers. I invite people to contact me to learn more about this approach.
How To Fire Your Boss | IWW Ireland
IWW IrelandBredroll
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to Bredroll • • •@Bredroll you know, a lot of people say "agile" and they don't know what it means. If you want to do agile correctly, you really need to make sure every member of the team is trained. There's a lot of terminology, and you really need to use is totally correctly so no one is confused. If people don't know what it means, they really need training.
Some people pick and choose between bits of agile and bits of XP. That really means you need to know both, inside and out, in order to keep doing waterfall with a Kanban board correctly.
AniMerrill, a.k.a. Ethan Merrill
in reply to hex • • •hex
in reply to AniMerrill, a.k.a. Ethan Merrill • • •@AniMerrill there are open LLMs and closed ones. The open ones you can run locally and you can know how they work (given enough knowledge). The closed ones are black boxes, so you can never know or trust what they're doing.
Some LLMs, like Gemini, seem to isolate sessions so they couldn't leak data to other sessions. But there's no real way of knowing unless you're reverse engineering them. It's valuable to use human feedback to improve responses, so there are incentives to do things that would leak data. And, of course, all questions are monitored and, I assume, given directly to law enforcement if anything unusual is detected.
Basically, don't put anything into an LLM that you don't want to be made public.
hex
in reply to hex • • •AniMerrill, a.k.a. Ethan Merrill
in reply to hex • • •en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini…
Is this the LLM you're referring to? If so I'm definitely looking forward to reading more when I'm less tired
family of language models by Google DeepMind
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)hex
in reply to AniMerrill, a.k.a. Ethan Merrill • • •Mathaetaes
in reply to hex • • •okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin
in reply to hex • • •It would be fairly trivial to, for example, run a one line "for/do" loop with an awk/sed command to remove all comments in all files in a directory.
Or fuck it, just run an unattended dist-upgrade on every production system. "Just doing my job, man.".
hex
in reply to okanogen VerminEnemyFromWithin • • •@Okanogen DOGE is a bit different though. Only congress has the legal authority to create something like DOGE, so all operations are illegal. DOGE is a coup with no legal backing. Even the illusion of compliance is bad.
The only correct response to DOGE is"fuck you, make me!" Make them find someone with a gun, then follow this advice *only* if they can.
booyaahedron 🆗
in reply to hex • • •szakib
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