Webshit Weekly
February 28, 2025
A style of leadership that is direct and forceful, yet also respectful (2023)
2025-02-22 | comments
A self-anointed leadership guru publishes a detailed transcript of him psychologically waterboarding a subordinate named Jerry, framing it as a masterclass in “respectful leadership.” The author, a digital feudal lord playing at being a therapist, spends hours browbeating an employee who had the audacity to close a bug ticket he didn’t create with an estimate he didn’t approve. The bug itself? Some meaningless geo-search filter about whether Bermuda counts as the Caribbean—life-or-death stuff for a SaaS product nobody uses. After extracting a tearful confession from Jerry through relentless interrogation, the manager publishes the entire exchange on Substack (business model: LinkedIn for bullies) to farm content about his own emotional intelligence. Hackernews, ever judges in a kangaroo court, debates whether the manager was competely justified or merely “insufferable,” while missing the point that this entire industry is just a carousel of mid-level managers extracting obedience from coders.
Didn’t realize it was this bad
2025-02-23 | comments
A Reddit post confirms that the tech job market is a flaming dumpster, and Hackernews, ever vanguard of insight, discovers that offering a job to the entire planet results in more applications. The webshits are in a tizzy, suggesting employers add “friction” to filter candidates, as if the entire industry isn’t already a high-friction nightmare of recruiters and AI firewalls. One genius built a “job aggregator” to help people spam applications faster, a true testament to the human spirit of turning a crisis into a slightly more efficient crisis. The comments are a parade of blissful ignorance from those still employed, comparing the situation to past recessions while ignoring that this time, the entire ecosystem is being hollowed out by automated plagiarism engines and the great fraud of VC-funded aura farming.
FBI Warns iPhone, Android Users–We Want Lawful Access to All Your Encrypted Data
2025-02-24 | comments
The FBI has issued another stern warning about encrypted phones, because apparently the only thing more terrifying than child predators, terrorists, and spies is the possibility of ordinary people having a private conversation. Hackernews, ever champions of nuance, immediately fractures into camps: one mourning the death of privacy as if it were a beloved pet, another explaining that Apple never cared about your privacy anyway, and a third helpfully noting that paying off extortionists just encourages more extortion. The real tragedy here isn’t the erosion of civil liberties—it’s that we’re still pretending this is about “lawful access” and not about the FBI’s desperate, decade-long tantrum over not being able to read your sexts.
Apple’s Dictation System Transcribes Word ‘Racist’ as ‘Trump’
2025-02-25 | comments
Apple ships another “bug” in their dictation system, replacing “racist” with “Trump” because apparently their token predictors have been mainlining too much cable news. Hackernews immediately descends into a slapfight about whether this is malicious activism or just another LLM hallucination, as if the distinction matters when your phone is quietly rewriting your thoughts. Some genius suggests it’s a “vector space” issue, because nothing says “technical sophistication” like blaming math for your company’s political bias. The rest debate whether they can trust their digital feudal lords, while missing the obvious: if your phone can autocorrect one word, it can autocorrect all of them.
Heritage Foundation Details Plans to Doxx and Target Wikipeda Editors
2025-02-26 | comments
The Heritage Foundation (business model: “Palantir for digital McCarthyism”) has unveiled its latest masterpiece: a plan to doxx and harass Wikipedia editors because they’re insufficiently aligned with whatever fever dream the right-wing paranoia machine is churning out this week. The presentation, which probably smells like stale pipe tobacco and unearned moral superiority, details how they’ll target volunteers who dare to edit encyclopedias without proper ideological clearance. Hackernews, in their infinite wisdom, debates whether this is “censorship” or “free speech,” completely missing that this is just another grift — extremist groups weaponizing the internet to silence dissent while crying victimhood. Wikipedia, already a cautionary tale about humanity’s collective id, is now just another battlefield in the great fraud of “defending civilization” by threatening editors with digital mob justice.
Think tank seeks to give “Trump his rightful third term in office”
2025-02-27 | comments
A think tank (business model: “Uber for coups”) has launched a website to demand Trump’s “rightful third term,” proving once again that the tech industry’s political discourse has devolved into a fanfic subreddit. Hackernews, ever intellectuals, debates whether this is a “publicity stunt” or a genuine threat to democracy, somehow missing the fact that it’s both. The comments are a fever dream of political theory from people who think reading Wikipedia qualifies as expertise, with one genius comparing it to Putin’s rise because, you know, everything is Russia now. Others lament that “everyone wants a king,” as if their own beloved tech CEOs aren’t already digital feudal lords ruling over their serfs with terms of service.
The Doge Takeover Is Worse Than You Think
2025-02-27 | comments
Wired (business model: “Theranos for panic-clickbait”) publishes another breathless exposé about how the government is being run by a meme coin and some guy who builds flamethrowers. Hackernews, unable to read the article due to ad-blockers or paywalls, spends the thread arguing about whether it exists. The few who managed to load the page immediately diagnose the entire situation as a Curtis Yarvin fanfiction, while the rest debate whether handing the treasury to a billionaire who sells flamethrowers constitutes “efficiency”. The consensus is that everything is fine as long as the grift is ideologically consistent.
Google’s Sergey Brin: Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI
2025-02-28 | comments
Google’s digital feudal lord Sergey Brin (business model: “MoviePass for burnout”) has decreed that engineers should work 60-hour weeks in the office to build AI that will replace them. The sheer poetry of demanding unpaid overtime to accelerate your own obsolescence is lost on Hackernews, who instead debate whether six-figure salaries justify selling their souls. Some noble defenders of the proletariat suggest software development should be hourly work—as if time cards could fix a system designed to extract maximum humanity for minimum compensation. Others, of course, enthusiastically volunteer their lives for the great fraud, imagining that a million-dollar salary will somehow soften the impact of being ground into nutrient paste for the clanker farms. The AI race, we’re told, can’t be won with ‘quality hours’—no, it requires sheer brute force.