Webshit Weekly
February 14, 2025
Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’
2025-02-08 | comments
An Internet security blogger discovers that one of Elon Musk’s teenage sycophants on the DOGE team was “educated” at something called “The Com,” which appears to be a Discord server with a homework channel. Hackernews immediately defends this as peak efficiency, because if there’s anything webshits love more than credentialism, it’s the exact opposite of credentialism when it lets them imagine they’d also be qualified to reorganize the IRS between React commits. The thread devolves into a recursive death spiral of commenters competing to see who learned the most complex system from the jankiest source, completely ignoring that this particular child is deciding which federal employees still get to eat. The real innovation is applying gig-economy logic to governance: why waste money on experts when you can get a teenager who mainlines Red Pill podcasts to do it for resume bullets?
Google Pay Study Finds It Underpaid Men for Some Jobs (2019)
2025-02-09 | comments
Google publishes a study finding it underpaid men, which is definitely not a preemptive defense against a class-action lawsuit alleging they underpaid women. The problem, it seems, is that managers kept dipping into discretionary funds for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men—because nothing solves structural inequity like arbitrary manager handouts.
Hackernews, a support group for people who think being a white man in tech is a marginalized identity, immediately performs its favorite ritual: competing to see who suffered most from DEI. One webshit recounts the horror of seeing a 5:1 female-to-male team ratio, which apparently caused such trauma that “nobody dared say a single thing”—presumably because they were busy calculating their RSUs. Others lament the “accelerated increase in censorship” that peaked in 2020, which is a fascinating way to describe “facing consequences for being insufferable.”
Reflect Orbital: Sunlight after dark using a constellation of spatial reflectors
2025-02-09 | comments
A Web 3.0 dipshit proposes solving climate change by launching a constellation of bathroom mirrors into space to sell sunlight after dark, because apparently the battery problem was too pedestrian for this galaxy brain. Hackernews immediately splits into two camps: the first group performs basic orbital mechanics on a napkin before correctly determining that the energy density would be slightly less than a glow-in-the-dark sticker, while the second group just wants to know why we can’t have nice darkness anymore and starts linking to darksky.org like it’s a personal trauma support group. Several webshits point out that the Soviets already built this exact thing in the 90s, which failed because it turns out space is expensive and the Earth is mostly empty ocean—a revelation that somehow eluded today’s visionary founder class. The unanimous conclusion: we’re all trapped in an HBO satire written by engineers who’ve mistaken “raising a Series A” for “having a coherent thought.”
Trump to pause enforcement of law banning bribery of foreign officials
2025-02-10 | comments
Some bureaucrat announces the government will stop enforcing rules against American companies bribing foreigners. Hackernews decides this is actually good, because nothing says “increasing welfare” like a multinational corporation paying off a dictator’s nephew to secure mining rights. Several HNers dust off their freshman economics textbooks to explain that bribery is simply a market inefficiency that can be solved by making it cheaper and less risky, preferably with a blockchain-based smart contract that automatically launders payments through a Cayman Islands DAO. Others argue that since everyone was doing it anyway, formalizing corruption is just ‘disrupting’ the compliance industry. The consensus emerges that this is fine because the previous administration did crimes more politely, and at least now the crimes have better documentation on Notion.
Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI
2025-02-12 | comments
A Rubyist discovers that crossing the boundary to C is slow, an epiphany previously available to anyone who has used two languages in one project. The solution is to write more Ruby and let YJIT (business model: “Juicero for making a scripting language pretend it’s C”) magically fix your performance problems. Hackernews immediately miscorrects each other about whether this is “self-hosting” or “vibe coding with extra steps,” while a sub-thread of olds reminisces about when Ruby was literally slower than Bash. The type system discussion arrives like a bad penny, with webshits explaining that Ruby does have types, actually, they’re just invisible and they hate you.
US prosecutor in New York resigns after order to drop mayoral case
2025-02-13 | comments
A federal prosecutor quits rather than drop charges against New York’s mayor, who is cartoonishly guilty of taking Turkish bribes and forgetting his phone password. Hackernews decides this is just like The Wire, because all human complexity must map to HBO content they’ve mainlined. The mayor upgraded his password from four digits to six, which webshits recognize as defense-in-depth. Several “acting heads” also resigned, which is what happens when your org chart is entirely middle management. The comments are full of people who’ve solved corruption in their heads, but differently, and somehow end with password manager recommendations.
Integrating AI
2025-02-14 | comments
A webshit explains that AI assistants won’t replace developers who can hold complex systems in their minds, unlike the commenter whose mind has never held two million tokens. The webshit’s blog is immediately revealed to be broken on mobile, a problem the webshit fixes after Hackernews performs free QA. One Hackernews reports reading the post twice and comprehending nothing, which is either penetrating criticism or just what happens when you train on Hacker News comments. The rest of the thread is the usual cargo cult: complaints about CSS, then complaints about the complaints.