Webshit Weekly

January 14, 2025

Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

2025-01-08 | comments

The digital feudal lord of Salesforce (business model: Excel subscription with more steps) has declared that software engineers are obsolete, effective 2025. This pronouncement comes despite the company continuing to post engineering job openings, which HNers helpfully explain away as either ghost jobs for visa applications or time-traveling postings from last year. The great fraud continues unabated as token predictors fail to replace actual developers, yet somehow create more demand for salespeople to explain their value.

Benioff, presumably from his golden throne in Hawaii, will reduce his engineering workforce while hiring thousands more salespeople to convince customers that hallucinating chatbots are equivalent to actual technical support. This represents the pinnacle of tech’s current economic model: eliminating production capacity while increasing the number of people paid to lie about the product’s capabilities. If AI is truly the future, why does it require an army of salespeople to explain its value? The answer, of course, is that this entire spectacle is nothing more than a quarterly shareholder’s ritual with no connection to reality.

Zuckerberg Approved AI Training on Pirated Books, Filings Say

2025-01-09 | comments

Mark Zuckerberg (business model: digital landlord with a surveillance addiction) has been caught personally greenlighting the use of pirated books to train Meta’s LLMs, because when you’re building automated plagiarism engines, why bother with licensing when theft works just as well? The court filings reveal that Facebook’s chief executive knowingly approved the use of shadow libraries because procuring legitimate training data might slow down the great AI gold rush of 2023. Hackernews immediately descends into predictably tedious philosophical debates about the nature of copyright, with several webshits arguing that all knowledge should be free while others correctly point out that only billionaires should get to steal. The most fascinating aspect is how the same tech companies that will send lawyers after teenagers for sharing memes see absolutely no irony in torrenting entire libraries wh en it serves their quarterly projections. This is the essence of modern tech innovation: finding new and exciting ways to extract value without paying for inputs.

OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s web site ‘like a DDoS attack’

2025-01-10 | comments

A seven-person company specializing in digital humans for virtual worlds (business model: “selling things that don’t exist to people who don’t exist”) discovers that making your website accessible to the public also makes it accessible to OpenAI’s automated plagiarism engine, which treated their servers like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The company, apparently not following the sacred scripture that says “the public internet belongs to whoever has the most aggressive webcrawler,” is shocked when their hosting bill quadruples.

Hackernews channels its libertarian spirit by correctly identifying this as a learning opportunity: if you can’t afford to defend your digital property against data-harvesting giants, perhaps you shouldn’t have digital property at all. The comments section devolved into the predictable symphony of victim-blaming, with HNERs helpfully explaining that robots.txt is basically a polite suggestion and expecting companies to respect it is like expecting venture capitalists to create sustainable business models. This is the web we built, ladies and gentlemen: a digital commons owned by private barons who’ve figured out how to charge you admission for visiting your own house.

‘So immoral’: gig economy workers forced to pay fee to receive their wages

2025-01-11 | comments

The Guardian has published another exposé on how tech companies have innovated new ways to steal money from poor people, this time by charging workers for access to their own wages. It’s a brilliant business model: the Ticketmaster for wage theft, where digital landlords extract a fee from the desperate for the privilege of being paid money they already earned. The platforms, whose entire existence depends on pretending their employees are actually independent contractors, have apparently decided that simply denying workers benefits wasn’t quite exploitative enough. Now they’re monetizing the temporal distance between labor and compensation, a practice previously confined to payday loan sharks and medieval moneylenders.

Hackernews has solved this problem years ago in their heads. The thread becomes a bizarre collection of tax policy proposals from people who last opened an economics textbook in 2009, interspersed with feigned shock that companies might behave in ways that maximize profits at human expense. Several HNers confidently miscorrect each other about employment law, while others demonstrate their moral clarity by declaring this “immoral” and “scumbag” behavior—a stance surely as brave as it is effective. No one seems to notice that this is precisely what happens when society’s entire value system is reoriented around “disruption”—which was always just a euphemism for “eliminating regulations that protect people.”

Longtime Aspen ski executive thinks corporate sustainability is a scam

2025-01-12 | comments

Some executive has discovered that corporate sustainability is, shocking everyone, a scam. The ski industry (business model: “Human Centipede for mountain destruction”) has apparently been pretending to care about the environment while making money from people flying across the world to slide down their clear-cut mountains. Hackernews, in their infinite wisdom, uses this revelation to miscorrect each other about climate policy, with some webshits proposing border adjustments as if that won’t just become another line item on some digital feudal lord’s expense report. Others note that tech companies have abandoned their “carbon neutral” pledges now that they need to build ever-larger token predictors to hallucinate slightly better advertisements.

Meanwhile, Aspen continues its vital work of pretending to preserve mountain ecosystems by allowing wealthy people to pretend they care about nature while flying private jets to participate in “sustainable tourism”—a concept only slightly more ridiculous than “ethical capitalism.”

GitHub Git Operations Are Down

2025-01-13 | comments

GitHub (business model: digital landlord for your code) has managed to break the single thing that justifies its existence, sending webshits nationwide into a state of panic as they suddenly realize their entire industry runs on a single point of failure. The poetic justice of distributed version control—a technology designed specifically to prevent this exact scenario—being unavailable because everyone voluntarily surrendered it to Microsoft is apparently lost on the commenters, who instead spent hours troubleshooting their SSH keys like monkeys at a monolith. Of course, this is what happens when your profession consists of vibe coding while waiting for venture capital to run out: you forget how computers work.

The real tragedy isn’t that developers can’t push their “innovative” React components for a few hours, but that they’ve collectively built an entire ecosystem on top of something that can, and will, occasionally evaporate into thin air. Enjoy your impromptu walk, folks—it’s probably the closest you’ll get to nature until the next status page update tells you it’s safe to go back to arranging divs for six-figure salaries.

H.R.25 – Repeal income tax and abolish the Internal Revenue Service

2025-01-14 | comments

Hackernews discovers tax policy and decides to reinvent it from first principles. The nation’s most libertarian webshits gather to declare that if only we abolished the IRS, we could all live in some crypto-fueled techno-utopia where Bezos pays the same tax rate as a barista because 30% off a yacht is totally the same as 30% off ramen money. The comments section, naturally, features people who think writing a React app qualifies them to redesign federal fiscal policy while simultaneously complaining about how their “disruptive” startup can’t find engineers. Each poster confidently miscorrects the last, with the typical HN blend of “actually”-isms and pet theories about how the government should be run “like a startup” (business model: MoviePass for governance collapse).

The thread devolves into state-versus-state grievances, with Californians complaining about subsidizing Louisiana, apparently unaware that their entire industry exists because of federally-funded research and infrastructure. Somewhere in there, a comparison to Somalia’s tax policy is made with complete sincerity, because when you’ve spent your career building token predictors that hallucinate facts, why not apply that expertise to economics too?