Webshit Weekly
March 31, 2025
AMC Theatres will screen a Swedish movie ‘visually dubbed’ with the help of AI
2025-03-22 | comments
AMC has apparently decided that the one thing missing from the moviegoing experience is a clanker stretching actors’ faces like pizza dough so Americans don’t have to read subtitles. The tech industry’s latest miracle is “visual dubbing,” which is just deepfake lip-syncing marketed as accessibility instead of the cost-cutting hallucination slurry it is. Hackernews spends the thread arguing about Firefox versions like monks debating the number of angels that can dance on a GPU, while others recount their trauma from Netflix’s rubber-mouth abominations. After decades of mangled ADR, pan-and-scan vandalism, and colorized corpses of films past, Hollywood has finally found something worse: vibe-coded uncanny-valley puppet mouths for people who think reading is a war crime.
‘Naive’ science fan faces jail for plutonium import
2025-03-22 | comments
Another week, another tech-adjacent morality play where some poor nerd orders a shiny cube from the internet and suddenly discovers he lives in a carceral theme park run by hall monitors with badges. Hackernews, of course, immediately pivots from “I bought uranium on Amazon once” to debating neutron flux in their imaginary backyard reactors, as though any of them can operate an oven without checking Youtube. The actual story — an overzealous bureaucracy flexing on a hobbyist — barely registers. Instead, HNers miscorrect each other about isotopes while fantasizing about artisanal plutonium supply chains, proving once again that the only thing more radioactive than the sample is the comment section.
Ask HN: My software has moved trillions of dollars. AMA
2025-03-23 | comments
Another day, another Hackernews confessional where someone proudly announces that trillions of dollars of global finance were apparently routed through their weekend TypeScript project. The crowd gathers, slack-jawed, to marvel at the idea that high‑frequency trading—an industry that burns hardware cycles like holy incense—might actually be held together by a transpiled vibe-coded browser toy originally written in Dart. What follows is the usual ritual: webshits demanding more details so they can miscorrect each other, old finance engineers clutching their C manuals, and the author repeatedly assuring everyone that yes, the trillion‑dollar trade was real, no, they didn’t get paid, and yes, it all ran on the same language people use to lint their CSS. The modern tech industry: global capitalism, but rewritten in TypeScript because someone read an article in 2012.
Surrendering to Authoritarianism
2025-03-24 | comments
Another week, another Substack Jeremiad repackaged as political prophecy, and Hackernews laps it up like a cat drinking antifreeze. The article moans about authoritarianism, as if the tech industry didn’t spend the last decade building turnkey repression-as-a-service for whichever digital feudal lord pays the invoice. Meanwhile the commenters argue whether college protests are courageous resistance or the final nail in civilization’s coffin, all while ignoring the actual problem: universities stopped being about education around the time they started charging luxury prices for Zoom lectures. The whole discourse reads like people fighting over deck chair arrangements on a sinking WeWork-branded ship.
Devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries
2025-03-25 | comments
Developers are once again shocked to discover that unleashing a horde of automated plagiarism engines onto the web results in, shockingly, a horde of automated plagiarism engines hitting their servers. The latest round of AI crawlers, each one a lovingly fine‑tuned clanker dedicated to turning the open web into training slop, is now so voracious that small sites are blocking entire countries like they’re medieval fortresses defending against armies of bots instead of, you know, people. Hackernews responds with the usual mix of webshits proposing baroque rate‑limiting contraptions, armchair network generals explaining CIDR blocks like it’s 2003, and wide‑eyed idealists mourning the ‘old web’ while ignoring that their beloved token predictors are busy grinding its bones into VC gruel. In the end, every for‑profit site sells out, every nonprofit site collapses, and the tech industry congratulates itself for replacing the open internet with a beige slurry of SEO‑optimized mechabarf.
Saying ‘pandemic is over,’ NIH institute starts cutting Covid-19 research
2025-03-25 | comments
The NIH has apparently decided the pandemic is “over,” which in government-speak means they’ve finally gotten bored and want their budget back for more important things, like subsidizing the next generation of grift. So the institute does what any self-respecting bureaucracy does: greps for the substring “COVID” and shreds whatever falls out, including programs meant to stop the next pandemic, which Hackernews confidently assures us will be solved by their personal nose goops and folk immunology. Half the thread is people boasting about never having caught the virus, like it’s a speedrun category, while the other half debates immunology with the expertise of a GPT-powered aura farmer. The tech crowd’s takeaway: everything is fine, because they’ve emotionally detached, a skill they’ve mastered after years of shipping products with the same level of rigor.
Iran using drones and apps to enforce women’s dress code
2025-03-26 | comments
The Iranian government has apparently discovered the joy of bolting surveillance drones onto a dress code, proving once again that authoritarianism and tech are perfect bedfellows: both exist to make ordinary life incrementally worse using tools nobody asked for. Hackernews immediately descends into a literary cosplay session, arguing whether this is more Orwell, Atwood, or generic dystopian fanfic, because nothing delights them more than treating real human suffering as an opportunity for a Goodreads debate. A few HNers try to draw grand geopolitical conclusions, which is adorable, given these are the same people who can’t decide whether their smart thermostats are spying on them. The tech industry, naturally, will learn all the wrong lessons from this and try to pivot it into a SaaS offering for “community standards enforcement,” complete with drones running on Kubernetes and an app that crashes while issuing citations.
US administration revokes $11B in funding for addiction, mental health care
2025-03-27 | comments
Another day, another US administration discovering the magic trick of “balancing the budget” by ripping billions out of the one sector already held together with duct tape and overworked social workers. The political class—basically a rotating cast of digital feudal lords without the digital—has decided that addiction and mental health care are luxuries now, like dental coverage or a non-surveillance phone. Hackernews predictably fragments into its usual tribes: amateur economists insisting emergency funding can’t be permanent (except when it’s TSA theater forever), amateur sociologists explaining that addicts just need harsher vibes, and the resident constitutional scholars copy-pasting eighth-grade civics at each other. Meanwhile, people with actual problems get the traditional American solution: jail, homelessness, or hoping a vibe-coding startup launches an AI-driven emotional-support token predictor before they die.
Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account
2025-03-28 | comments
Microsoft, ever the benevolent digital feudal lord, has discovered yet another “security” loophole: people using their computers without kneeling before a Microsoft Account. So Windows 11 now helpfully ensures everyone has internet access during setup, not because the OS is just a glorified webshit launcher, but because the marketing department needs fresh telemetry to feed the ad-targeting clanker swarm. Hackernews responds with its usual ritual: half the thread miscorrects each other about Pro vs Home, while the other half reenacts the annual tradition of pretending they’re finally switching to Linux this time, for real.
I don’t think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore
2025-03-29 | comments
Google Search, the once-mighty index of the web, has now fully completed its transformation into an ad-delivery slot machine that occasionally spits out a fact by accident. AndroidPolice dutifully documents this decline as though it’s breaking news, instead of a decade-long slide that only surprises people whose digital world begins and ends with Chrome and whatever default their phone bludgeons them into using. The article whimpers that Google can no longer distinguish between a rock band and a random Etsy store, which is about as shocking as discovering your Roomba doesn’t do philosophy.
Hackernews, naturally, responds by proudly announcing they’ve replaced search engines with token predictors—because when you’re already hallucinating your way through the day, why not outsource the process to a clanker trained on the internet’s collective wrongness? A few nostalgic elders pine for encyclopedias, because nothing screams “disruption” like giving up and purchasing a book printed during the Bush administration. Others wander off into geopolitical search tourism, claiming that Yandex and Baidu — (business model: “Uber for Propaganda”) — are the new gold standard of finding things online.
The real throughline is simple: Google is no longer a search engine. It’s an ad-tech cathedral where relevance goes to die. Every “personalized” result is just another opaque experiment in Alphabet’s never-ending quest to convert your attention into a line item on an earnings call. Whether the answer is wrong because of SEO-slop, vibe-coded ranking tweaks, or some LLM paste smeared on the backend hardly matters. The machine no longer searches; it only harvests.
Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown
2025-03-29 | comments
Apple’s latest AI “reveal” is the predictable collision of a company built on pretending computers are appliances with an industry built on pretending token predictors are intelligence. The article dutifully recites the same boilerplate about silicon breakthroughs and on‑device magic, as if slapping a tiny clanker into a phone suddenly transforms hallucinations into features. Hackernews spends the thread miscorrecting each other about RAM budgets and cloud scale, all to avoid admitting the truth: nobody wants vibe-coded assistants that invent airport arrivals. Apple used to ship things that worked; now they’re shipping the same randomized slurry everyone else is, just with better marketing and fewer buttons.
Man Detained by ICE for Autism Awareness Tattoo Sent to Prison
2025-03-30 | comments
Another week, another heartwarming story from America’s favorite bureaucratic escape room, ICE, where armed webshits skim Facebook tattoos like a discount AI classifier and still manage to misfire harder than a clanker trying to write FizzBuzz. This time, some poor guy’s autism-awareness ribbon got algorithmically promoted from heartfelt symbol to cartel insignia, and off he goes to the prison-industrial laundromat, where the government cycles human beings the way Hackernews cycles through JavaScript frameworks. Naturally, the comment section immediately fractures into its predictable factions: the doomers insisting this is just Guantanamo DLC; the pedants demanding more tattoo metadata like they’re debugging journalism; and the immigration hawks explaining that if you’re not born here, any misunderstanding is basically your fault for having skin.
Hackernews can’t decide whether this is a failure of due process, a failure of journalism, or a failure of the guy for not choosing a more patriotic tattoo like a bald eagle eating a QR code. Meanwhile, ICE trots out its boilerplate defense about not relying on tattoos “alone,” as though the addition of a half-literate field report transforms the operation from Kafkaesque farce into a well-oiled machine. The whole discussion devolves into the usual aura-farming where everyone LARPs as a constitutional scholar, pretending the system is broken instead of performing exactly as designed: cheap labor in, disposable people out.
The US Assault on Science: National Academies Letter
2025-03-31 | comments
The National Academies write a sternly worded letter begging the government to stop treating science like an inconvenient browser tab, and Hackernews instantly turns it into group therapy for people who realized too late that their entire industry is built on vibes, grifts, and token-predictors hallucinating citations. HNers agonize over why billionaires would sabotage research, as though the great feudal lords of adtech ever cared about anything but making sure no one else gets a turn at the buffet. A few webshits bravely propose “underground particle accelerators,” proving once again that the tech industry’s understanding of science begins and ends with vaporwave cyberpunk posters. In the end, Hackernews blames everything on everyone else, because acknowledging that they helped build the oligarchy now starving science would be too much like responsibility.
OpenAI closes $40B funding round, startup now valued at $300B
2025-03-31 | comments
OpenAI has once again convinced the great fraud engines of global finance to shovel another $40 billion into the furnace so the company can continue duct-taping GPUs together until they’ve built the world’s most expensive automated plagiarism engine. SoftBank, naturally, is leading the charge, because if there’s a check to be written for a future pyramid scheme, SoftBank will happily sign it in crayon. Hackernews responds with its usual mix of performative skepticism and Stockholm Syndrome: half of them declaring the $300B valuation “lol ok,” the other half insisting that nobody can possibly run a model at home unless they personally own a hydroelectric dam and a data center staffed by monks.
Meanwhile the webshits celebrate or complain depending on whether their favorite clanker can output a Ghibli-style JPEG without melting the GPU. Several HNers attempt to recalibrate the conversation toward “open source will win,” which they’ve been chanting since 2022 with all the conviction of people trying to manifest rent control into existence. Others pivot to the standard libertarian bedtime story: any second now, OpenAI will lobby Congress to outlaw competitors, probably under the sacred banner of Safety, Patriotism, and Won’t Somebody Think of the Tokens.
In the end, everyone pretends to be shocked that money is still pouring into a company whose business model is just Uber for hallucinations, while also praying the VC subsidy lasts long enough for them to finish vibe coding their weekend AGI side project.