Webshit Weekly

April 7, 2025

Tesla is sitting on $200M worth of Cybertruck inventory

2025-04-01 | comments

Tesla has apparently discovered a shocking new business model: build $200 million worth of stainless-steel doorstops and hope the faithful keep buying them “for the mission.” The Cybertruck — Elon’s high-school shop-class reinterpretation of a DeLorean — has finally completed its natural life cycle: from meme to status symbol to landfill ornament. Now it squats on lots across America like a monument to a CEO who genuinely thought bulletproof cosplay plating was a substitute for engineering.

Hackernews, doing what it does best, miscorrects one another about inventory norms while ignoring the more obvious truth: demand collapsed because the only people who wanted this thing already bought two. The rest of the market woke up from the collective hallucination and remembered they could buy trucks that actually haul things. Meanwhile, the Rivian folks quietly build vehicles that look like they were designed by adults, a competitive advantage Tesla abandoned years ago.

The HNers who aren’t busy estimating liquidation values try to console themselves with fantasies about Optimus, Tesla’s upcoming robot, which will presumably stack unsold Cybertrucks into neat pyramids for the bankruptcy auction. Until then, Tesla remains what it has become: an automaker with twice the production capacity it needs, trillions of dollars in cult energy, and a product line held together by over-the-air coping mechanisms.

Trump announces sweeping new tariffs to promote US manufacturing

2025-04-02 | comments

A fresh round of tariffs to “bring manufacturing back,” as though the last fifty years of offshoring were just a clerical error we can reverse by slapping a fee on toasters. The tech industry, which long ago pivoted from building anything tangible to vaporizing investor money through aura farming, immediately loses its mind. Hackernews does its usual interpretive dance: half of them shrieking about censorship because a thread got merged, the other half insisting that political economy is simply a series of arbitrage opportunities waiting for the right YC pitch deck.

The spectacle is depressingly familiar. Not one of these webshits has ever touched a machine more complex than a MacBook charger, but here they are confidently predicting that tariffs will either save or annihilate civilization. To them, industrial policy is just another vector for the great game: a fresh frontier for digital feudal lords to extract rents from a nation they can’t even be bothered to live in.

Meanwhile, a few exhausted refugees from running forums timidly suggest starting yet another “neutral space” for discourse, apparently unaware that the Internet has become an endless centrifuge for producing weaponized stupidity. They worry about CDNs refusing to serve their content, as though the real issue isn’t that every political conversation instantly devolves into a clanking soup of misinformation, vibes, bots, and ten-year-old libertarian talking points.

In the end, nothing changes: the tariffs won’t bring factories back, Hackernews won’t learn anything, and we’ll all still be ruled by people who think supply chains are optional.

Yann LeCun, Pioneer of AI, Thinks Today’s LLM’s Are Nearly Obsolete

2025-04-02 | comments

Another week, another aging AI warlord wandering out of his research bunker to announce that the current generation of automated-plagiarism-engines is already obsolete, a statement as bold and risky as predicting the sun will continue to shine or that VC funding will find a new way to immolate itself. Hackernews, ever desperate for a prophecy to misinterpret, spends the thread furiously correcting each other about whether token predictors are doomed because of mathematics, neuroscience, vibes, or some imaginary “system‑1 reptile‑brain module” they read about in a TED Talk. LeCun waves his JEPA pamphlet around like a street preacher proclaiming the end times, while the webshits nod sagely and pretend they aren’t just waiting for the next model upgrade to regurgitate their Medium posts for them. In the end, everyone agrees nothing works, everything is broken, and the only real innovation left in AI is inventing new ways to pretend your guess‑machine is secretly thinking.

OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules. Study suggests it isn’t waiting

2025-04-03 | comments

OpenAI (business model: “Uber for laundering other people’s work”) has decided that copyright is just another inconvenient legacy system to refactor out of existence. The Register dutifully reports that the clanker barons are now training their automated plagiarism engines on anything that has ever been typed, printed, or vaguely thought about, because apparently AGI cannot be achieved unless it can perfectly counterfeit a Studio Ghibli frame. Hackernews, eternally trapped between libertarian fan‑fiction and Cold War LARPing, insists that if America doesn’t steal everyone’s art first, China will—finally merging techno‑feudalism with kindergarten logic. Everyone pretends to be shocked, except the publishers who spent a decade evangelizing “open” everything right up until a token predictor ate their lunch and spat out SEO‑slop anime.

Microsoft blocks VSCode-derived editors (like Cursor) from using MS extensions

2025-04-04 | comments

Another week, another tech unicorn discovering that “open source” from Microsoft means exactly what it always meant: you can look at the code while they step on your throat. Cursor, fresh off its 600‑million‑dollar aura‑farming celebration round, seems shocked — shocked! — that the digital landlords in Redmond don’t want their token‑predictor‑wrapped knockoff editor siphoning value from Microsoft’s Human‑Centipede‑for‑Extensions ecosystem. Hackernews, veterans of a thousand Embrace‑Extend‑Extinguish reenactments, pretend to be surprised for about four seconds before miscorrecting each other about whether this is about the marketplace endpoint, the extension license, the phase of the moon, or whichever hallucination their clanker-of-choice generated last.

Predictably, a parade of webshits chimes in with the usual coping strategies: switch to neovim (but only after vibe‑coding 40 hours of Lua to get a text file to open); use Samsung’s debugger because apparently everything is fine if the vendor is only medium‑sized; or simply trust that Microsoft, benevolent warden of the world’s most open operating system (citation: Microsoft marketing brochure), wouldn’t possibly exploit its ecosystem for leverage.

Cursor’s founders undoubtedly knew the TOS and broke it anyway — because in the great game, rules are for the un‑funded. Now they’ve run face‑first into the part of open source where the corporation reminds you who owns the plumbing. And Hackernews, between posting about moving to Europe to escape Windows and reminiscing about real editors, collectively pretend this wasn’t utterly predictable the moment Cursor chose to build a business on someone else’s leash.

Llama 4 Now Live on Groq

2025-04-05 | comments

Another week, another startup announcing that the future of AI is finally here, available exclusively through their typo-ridden signup link and a prayer that nobody notices the whole thing is held together by overstressed LPUs wheezing like a chain-smoker jogging uphill. Groq proudly unveils its ability to run Meta’s latest token predictor faster than you can say “we stopped selling hardware because margins are hard,” and Hackernews responds by miscorrecting each other about context windows like medieval monks debating how many angels can fit on a TPU die. The company rep materializes instantly, desperate to reassure everyone that privacy is sacred, capacity is coming, and the free tier is “generous,” which in practice means you can run half a thought before the rate limits detonate. Meanwhile, some HNer fantasizes about a $3k prosumer AI supercomputer, proving once again that tech people will believe in fairy tales as long as they involve GPUs instead of dragons.

U.S. stock futures tumble indicating another plummet on Wall Street

2025-04-06 | comments

Wall Street wakes up to discover that when you spend a decade inflating asset prices with free money and startup fairy dust, eventually gravity files a bug report. Futures plunge, Hackernews gathers to perform their usual ritual: a séance of half-baked macro theories, tariff conspiracy fanfiction, and whatever an LLM spat out before its GPU overheated. Oil drops, treasury yields wobble, and every comment thread devolves into political Mad Libs and tech bros diagnosing the economy like it’s a flaky Kubernetes cluster. Everyone pretends this is shocking, as if the great game wasn’t always just musical chairs played by digital landlords with better lobbyists.

US Supreme Court backs Trump on deportations under 1798 law

2025-04-07 | comments

Hackernews spends the morning hyperventilating because the Supreme Court dusted off an 18th‑century law to help the current administration play Airport Shuffle with human beings. Reuters dutifully reports the whole thing in the tone of a bored stenographer, as if “government may disappear you to Louisiana before breakfast” were just another Tuesday. Hackernews, ever eager to cosplay constitutional scholars between bouts of vibe‑coding their startup’s fourth pivot, miscorrect each other for hours about what the ruling does or doesn’t say, while completely ignoring the obvious: none of these digital feudal lords care what the laws mean as long as the machinery keeps humming. Everyone debates theoretical habeas relief for people already on planes nobody will admit exist. It’s the same old tech‑industry libertarian fantasy: unlimited government power is bad unless it’s your guy doing it, in which case it’s a bold product innovation in human logistics.

Publishers say traffic to their sites has plummeted due to Google AI Overviews

2025-04-07 | comments

Publishers are shocked—shocked!—that the vampire squid they spent a decade feeding SEO-slop to has finally stopped pretending to send them traffic. Google, now a fully automated plagiarism engine duct-taped to an ad network, replaces the open web with a giant clanker’s improv routine, and the people whose entire business model was “pray the algorithm sneezes in our direction” feel betrayed. Hackernews responds with their usual ritual: complain about cookie banners, complain about trackers, complain about how Google is bad but also the only thing they will ever use. No one mentions the obvious: Google learned publishers were unnecessary the moment they turned every webpage into training data.