Webshit Weekly

January 31, 2025

2025-01-22 | comments

Some webshit has reinvented China’s social credit system because they had a bad roommate. HNers, ever the vanguard of solving problems they saw on TV, debate the finer points of gamifying human existence with the solemnity of medieval theologians. The proposal, a Byzantine nightmare of “safeguards” and “context protocols,” is just vibe-coding a panopticon. The founder, having clearly learned nothing from the “Peeple” app debacle or that one “Black Mirror” episode everyone references, assures us it will be “positive.” Sure, just another automated engine for reputation, assigning lifelong numbers to people so landlords and HR departments can more efficiently prune the undesirables.

I Fired My Product Team and Replaced Them with AI

2025-01-23 | comments

Another digital feudal lord fires his serfs and replaces them with a glorified autocomplete, declaring a grand victory in the great fraud. The “product,” a 145-line shell script, was apparently produced by “vibe coding,” where the manager shouted at a token predictor until it hallucinated something deployable. Hackernews, ever the discerning court jesters, points out the usual AI-generated slop, like missing .gitignore files, proving the grand experiment is just aura farming for incompetence. This is the future of management: firing humans to pay OpenAI for sloppier work, then calling it “disruption.”

FEMA May Be Eliminated

2025-01-24 | comments

The government suggests dismantling the federal agency that handles hurricanes, which is apparently a controversial opinion among the people who live through hurricanes. Hackernews, ever the innovators, pitches this as an opportunity for “disaster relief tech startups, because nothing says ‘efficient emergency response’ like a Series A funding round and a PowerPoint deck. The thread is a masterclass in libertarian aura farming, where keyboard warriors debate whether giving California its money back is more important than, say, Florida not being underwater. The consensus is that bureaucracy is bad, but not quite as bad as letting the Gulf Coast devolve into a Mad Max sequel.

Larry Ellison: vast AI surveillance can ensure citizens are on best behavior (2024)

2025-01-25 | comments

Larry Ellison (business model: “Palantir as a Service”) has finally dropped the pretense that tech billionaires are anything besides aspiring Bond villains. The Oracle overlord is enthusiastically pitching his vision of automated monitoring of every citizen, because nothing ensures good behavior quite like constant surveillance by token predictors. Hackernews is shocked --- shocked! --- that a man who built his empire on predatory database licensing might tilt toward authoritarianism. The webshits miscorrect each other about the distinction between regular dystopia and AI-enhanced dystopia, while missing the obvious: every CEO dreams of becoming a digital landlord with total surveillance capabilities. Oracle’s probably already pricing subscription tiers for your future social credit score.

Quiet Quitting: Why Employees Are Demanding Fairness and Boundaries

2025-01-26 | comments

Forbes (business model: SEO-farming for mid-level managers) discovers that workers doing their jobs and nothing more is somehow a revolutionary concept, branding it “quiet quitting” because “reasonable boundaries” doesn’t generate as many consulting contracts. Hackernews devolves into people trying to explain that actually, some humans prefer money while others prefer not working. The entire discourse exists only because tech normalized treating employment as a personality test where answering “no” to endless unpaid overtime makes you disengaged rather than, say, a person who wants to see their children before they turn 18. Silicon Valley has somehow rebranded “not being exploited” as a movement.

Mark Zuckerberg: This Man Is a Coward

2025-01-26 | comments

The tech industry’s collective descent into performative masculinity continues with yet another article calling Mark Zuckerberg a coward for bending to political pressure, as if expecting moral consistency from a digital landlord whose business model is “surveillance capitalism with a side hobby of VR goggles.” The webshits of Hackernews predictably devolve into a philosophical debate about whether CEOs can even be cowards when their only job function is maximizing shareholder value through any means necessary. Some commenters note the irony of Zuck’s recent “masculine energy” phase while others lament his “fundamental bitchness,” missing the point entirely: these aren’t character flaws, they’re features of the venture-backed growth model. The entire spectacle resembles nothing so much as watching a room full of feudal peasants argue over whether their lord wears the appropriate codpiece while he’s quietly calculating how many more users he needs to monetize to fund his next metaverse boondoggle.

Working Americans Turn to Food Banks as Fed Inflation Battle Drags On

2025-01-27 | comments

A news article notes that people are too poor to buy food, which Hackernews recognizes as a perfect opportunity to miscorrect each other about economics. One poster bravely suggests that “Big Potato” is the culprit, a theory immediately challenged by a rival who insists that profit margins are just, like, math, man, and the real problem is probably farmers wanting new tractors. The debate circles the drain, touching on egg shortages, government subsidies, and John Deere’s business model (business model: “Ticketmaster for right-to-repair”). The consensus is that everything is very complicated and nobody’s to blame, which is convenient for the digital feudal lords who got rich dumping money into the economy and are now outsourcing the consequences to food banks.

CA, NY Attorneys General sue to resume federal funding of Medicaid, FEMA, PEPFAR

2025-01-28 | comments

As Hackernews users debate whether to “let it rip” and watch government programs fail, tech opportunists everywhere are already drafting healthcare disruption pitches (business model: Human Centipede for federal contracts). The same webshits who can’t keep their own payment systems functional will soon propose blockchain solutions for Medicaid, with venture capital insisting that only token predictors can properly route healthcare funds. While the attorneys general fight to restore funding for 85 million Americans, Silicon Valley salivates at the prospect of digitizing yet another public service, creating dependencies on proprietary systems that will inevitably fail during the next crisis. The predictable cycle continues: government dysfunction becomes justification for privatization, which then fails more spectacularly, creating demand for even more “innovation.”

I’m semi homeless and Google’s forced update on the Pixel 4a ruined it

2025-01-29 | comments

Some poor sap whose computer-brick is also their house finds that Google (business model: planned obsolescence as a service) has remotely detonated their device. The Pixel 4a, a phone for poors, received a mandatory update transforming it into a paperweight, because Google forgot to carry the one on their battery-draining algorithm. The company’s solution is a free replacement battery, a tricky proposition when they have no batteries. Hackernews, ever the helpful technofeudal vassals, advises the victim to just buy more gadgets, rewrite the OS himself, or simply take accountability for Google’s fuck-up. The digital landlord bricked your house? Have you considered being less poor?

2025-01-30 | comments

The government continues its proud tradition of making websites worse by demanding the removal of “woke” accessibility guidelines from the US Web Design System. Apparently, making forms usable for people without traditional addresses, allowing multiple languages, or not forcing gendered titles is now considered dangerously progressive. The webshits responsible for maintaining this digital slop have dutifully purged such offensive concepts as “making forms easy to complete, even in times of stress” because compassion is officially partisan now. Hackernews, as usual, misses the point entirely, debating git history preservation while ignoring that their entire industry exists to create increasingly hostile interfaces designed to harvest user data. The real joke is that corporate tech companies will continue implementing these exact same “woke” accessibility features because they’re good for conversion metrics, while publicly celebrating the return to digital dark ages for everyone else.

Elon Musk is reportedly taking control of the inner workings of US govt agencies

2025-01-31 | comments

The world’s richest manchild has apparently been given the keys to the US government because his last purchase, a microblogging site, is now worth about as much as a pack of gum. Hackernews, never ones to miss an opportunity to miscorrect each other, erupts in a frantic debate about civics, pointing out that perhaps letting a South African meme lord dismantle federal agencies without an election might be, you know, technically problematic. Others patiently explain that this is fine, actually, because he’s good at building fireworks, and legal frameworks are just suggestions when you have enough rocket money. The general consensus is that the entire system is a sham, a fact they all apparently just realized this very second.