Webshit Weekly
April 14, 2025
Trump, Doge Are Trying to Get Around Privacy Laws to Gather Your Personal Info
2025-04-08 | comments
Rolling Stone reports that the world’s most predictable grifters are once again trying to Hoover up everyone’s personal data, as though the tech industry hasn’t already strip‑mined every American down to their last expired Social Security number. Hackernews responds with its usual civics‑class cosplay, writing long essays about “rule of law” as if any digital feudal lord has ever paused a data grab because someone filed a sternly worded complaint. Other HNers derail into therapy‑session philosophizing about why voters are too stupid to agree with them. A lone commenter tries to talk about actual access controls in government IT, which guarantees nobody read it.
UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill
2025-04-09 | comments
The UK government, having apparently exhausted every other way to make life miserable, has now decided to automate suspicion itself. They’ve commissioned a “murder prediction” tool, which is exactly what it sounds like: a spreadsheet full of bureaucratic neuroses fed into a clanker that’s been trained on the usual slurry of biased policing data. The result will be yet another automated guilt generator, but with the added bonus that some digital feudal lord can tell Parliament they’ve “innovated” public safety by turning entire communities into pre-criminals.
Naturally, Hackernews is thrilled. Half the comments fantasize about using this thing as a “killer-for-hire database,” proving once again that the average HNer thinks ethics is something that happens to other people. The rest do the tired Minority Report bit like it’s a revelation instead of the most obvious comparison imaginable. A few even lurch into the thread to point out the surging levels of algorithmic bias, at which point they are immediately miscorrected by webshits insisting that “the data is neutral” because they once took a Coursera course.
Of course, the real goal isn’t safety. It’s the same technofeudal playbook as always: build a predictive policing system (business model: automated poverty criminalization), slap “AI” on it for aura farming, and then act shocked when it targets the same people the state already harasses. But don’t worry—some consultant will get a seven-figure contract out of it, and in the great game, that’s the only metric that matters.
Fintech founder charged with fraud; AI app found to be humans in the Philippines
2025-04-10 | comments
Another week, another startup CEO caught doing the industry’s favorite magic trick: stuffing a bunch of underpaid humans in a fluorescent-lit room overseas, then calling it Artificial Intelligence. This time the great fraud is a fintech “founder” who told investors his shopping app was basically a self-aware clanker god, when in reality it was a bunch of folks in the Philippines manually clicking through checkout flows like digital galley slaves. Hackernews, naturally, pretends to be shocked — shocked! — even though this playbook was old when the Turk did it. The only real crime here is failing to make investors rich enough to overlook the lie, which in Silicon Valley is considered the highest sin.
Palantir Is Helping Doge with a Massive IRS Data Project
2025-04-11 | comments
A government agency decides the best way to manage the nation’s private data is to hand it directly to Palantir, the tech industry’s answer to a vampire squid but with worse branding. This time it’s something called DOGE, because apparently the federal government now names divisions the same way webshits name their failed side projects. The plan: build a “mega API” for IRS records, because nothing says responsible stewardship of citizen data like turning it into a giant unsecured endpoint for every digital feudal lord to slurp from.
The article describes a room full of engineers wandering around aimlessly for days, which is the closest thing to an honest depiction of software development I’ve seen in years. Hackernews, naturally, splits into two camps: the ones convinced this is the end of democracy as we know it, and the ones who insist your tax data is already passed around like Halloween candy, so who cares if Palantir (business model: “Uber for paranoia”) — gets another copy.
A few HNers try to sound informed by referencing FOIA procedures, procurement processes, and Palantir’s mystical IL6 tech stack, which no one has ever actually seen but everyone repeats like scripture. The rest spiral into conspiratorial aura-farming about Thiel, Musk, Vance, and whatever other billionaire they think is secretly piloting the country. Meanwhile, the only inevitable trend is the one where public data keeps being shoveled into the maws of companies that view citizens as nothing more than row counts on a dashboard.
Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI into Operating Systems
2025-04-12 | comments
A tech pundit screaming into the void about Big Tech duct-taping yet another automated plagiarism engine into the operating system, because the digital feudal lords have decided that your file manager delete files based on vibes. The article politely begs the megacorps to stop shoving clankers into the OS, as though anyone steering these ad-delivery barges has listened to a user since 2009. Meanwhile Hackernews performs its usual ritual: half insist that Investors Demand AI (the great game must be fed), while the other half pretend capitalism is broken because consumers don’t want this hot garbage and yet somehow keep buying it anyway. Truly a mystery worthy of a thousand thinkpieces.
The webshits earnestly debate whether grandma wants a predictive surveillance daemon whispering sweet nothings into her taskbar, or whether maybe, just maybe, people are sick of every device turning into an IV drip for metrics harvesting. Others fantasize about “local AI,” as though strapping a GPU-heater to ls(1) will finally make computing great again. A few brave souls vow to escape the AI foistware apocalypse by using decade-old laptops until they fossilize.
What none of them acknowledge is the obvious: this isn’t about user benefit, it’s about conscripting every warm body with a CPU into unpaid labor for the next round of model training. You aren’t the customer; you’re the dataset. And the OS is no longer software. It’s just the box they ship the data vacuum in.
Microsoft Prepares for New Round of Layoffs in May 2025
2025-04-13 | comments
Microsoft, the eternal retirement home for legacy code and executive self-regard, is preparing another round of layoffs so the digital feudal lord in charge can keep collecting his performance bonus for successfully stapling Copilot onto every surface in the building. Hackernews performs its usual ritual: complain about Windows being slop, reminisce about the one version that wasn’t as slop (with fights breaking over which version that was), and then descend into a generational slap fight over which failure mode of Microsoft was their favorite. Meanwhile, the actual layoffs get hand‑waved away as “organizational efficiency,” which is HR dialect for firing people so middle managers can maintain the illusion that their empire of Jira tickets constituted productivity.
Big Tech May Have Fielded a New Weapon Against the Small Internet: AI
2025-04-14 | comments
Another month, another smolweb manifesto shrieking that Big Tech’s automated plagiarism engines are marshaling their clankers to obliterate some guy’s Gopher hole. The article imagines that Google, a digital landlord currently busy paving over the web with SEO-slop and hallucinated product pages, is secretly threatened by a protocol last used unironically during the Clinton administration. Hackernews, ever eager to miscorrect each other, can’t decide whether the smolweb is a noble resistance movement or just more webshits cosplaying as cypherpunks. Meanwhile, the real story is the same as always: the megacorps don’t know you exist, don’t care if you exist, and their vibe-coded filters will mulch your site anyway, because entropy costs less than support.