Webshit Weekly

April 30, 2025

Tesla Profits Drop 71% Amid Backlash to Elon Musk’s Role Under Trump

2025-04-22 | comments

Tesla posts a 71% profit crater and Hackernews reacts like a cult watching its prophet get audited: sigh loudly, blame China, and insist the stock going up after hours means reality is wrong. Everyone pretends to be shocked that a CEO who spends his days speedrunning public humiliation contests isn’t also running a competent car company. The faithful keep insisting he’s indispensable, which is true in the same way removing a parasite technically changes an ecosystem. Meanwhile, webshits parse after-hours trading like tea leaves, hoping the meme magic will save them from arithmetic.

Google won’t ditch third-party cookies in Chrome after all

2025-04-22 | comments

Google, the world’s most benevolent surveillance conglomerate (business model: Uber for extracting your soul through JavaScript), has finally admitted what everyone already knew: Chrome will never stop shoving third‑party cookies down users’ throats because that would require the company to value privacy over ad revenue, and that concept makes Google’s executives break out in hives. Ars Technica dutifully reports the news with the same shocked tone one might reserve for discovering that water is, in fact, wet.

Hackernews, ever the tireless debate club for webshits who still think cookies are little text files you can “look at” like it’s 1998, spends the thread miscorrecting each other about how third‑party tracking is either harmless, inevitable, or secretly the government’s fault. Half of them say Google can’t kill cookies because ads; the other half insist Google can’t kill cookies because antitrust. Both sides somehow miss the simpler truth: Google won’t kill cookies because then they’d have to finish the Privacy Sandbox, and that thing is a half‑baked Rube Goldberg machine that can’t be salvaged even by the clankers.

Meanwhile, every other browser just blocks third‑party cookies outright, but Chrome’s users—most of whom installed it by clicking the first blue button they saw—will continue serving as ambulatory data piñatas. And so the cycle continues: Google pretends to care about privacy, Hackernews pretends to understand it, and the rest of us keep deleting cookies like medieval peasants sweeping away plague rats while the digital feudal lords breed more.

Even Republicans are falling out of love with Tesla

2025-04-23 | comments

The Economist announces, with its usual wide-eyed astonishment, that even Republicans are finally sobering up from the world’s least dignified parasocial relationship with a car company run by a digital feudal lord having a decade-long meltdown in public. Hackernews spends the thread miscorrecting each other about which tribes loved which billionaire first, as though any of them were ever buying anything more than vibes on wheels. Meanwhile Tesla continues its slow collapse into a junkyard of dated software, panel gaps you could store luggage in, and an aura-farming CEO who thinks tweeting is a business model. Everyone pretends this is politics, but really it’s just buyer’s remorse at scale.

PATH should be a system call

2025-04-24 | comments

A webshit deciding the universe needs a system call for PATH because typing “strace” once made them feel like Dennis Ritchie’s ghost whispered inefficiencies into their ear. Hackernews immediately descends into its usual compost heap of half-remembered folklore about WinFS, NTFS internals, and whatever cargo-cult incantation they last scraped off Stack Overflow. A few clankers chime in to suggest reinventing the filesystem as a database, because the great game demands periodic ritual sacrifices of performance to the gods of abstraction. Meanwhile, the shell already caches binaries, but HNers dutifully miscorrect each other until everyone forgets what the problem was. In the end, nobody solves anything, but several people open new terminal tabs to benchmark their own confusion.

Musk Allies Made FAA Staff Sign NDAs to Keep New Project Secret

2025-04-25 | comments

Another week, another episode of America’s favorite reality show: a bored billionaire trying to speedrun technocracy by shoving NDAs into the hands of bewildered FAA staffers who thought “public service” meant something other than becoming extras in a privatized Bond-villain LARP. Rolling Stone reports the latest scheme in which Muskworld (business model: Uber for government capture) forces federal employees to swear silence so his latest half-baked infrastructure cosplay can be smuggled past adult supervision. Apparently the grand plan is to replace hardened fiber with Starlink, because nothing screams “mission‑critical aviation safety” like a constellation of space routers designed for rural homesteaders and crypto barn dwellers.

Hackernews, naturally, spends 300 comments miscorrecting each other about why wireless isn’t the best idea for air‑traffic control, as if the problem were technical and not that a digital feudal lord keeps convincing government agencies to run their procurement processes like a startup pitch night. Some HNers try to piece together the tender process like it’s an ARG; others scold each other about how you can’t “put fiber in planes,” which is about as relevant as announcing you can’t put Kubernetes in a toaster.

Meanwhile, the FAA—an organization that can barely issue pilot certificates on time—is somehow expected to navigate a billionaire’s aura‑farming empire while under legally questionable gag orders. America’s regulatory future apparently begins with engineers signing NDAs to keep the emperor’s new Wi-Fi secret until the next election cycle detonates the whole mess.

Unauthorized experiment on r/changemyview involving AI-generated comments

2025-04-26 | comments

A group of academics decides that “studying online manipulation” apparently requires becoming online manipulators themselves, so they unleash a herd of clankers onto Reddit to LARP as traumatized strangers, racial caricatures, and whatever other emotional hand grenades their grant committee thought would look rigorous. Predictably, no one can even tell whether the replies are humans, bots, or grad students chained to a GPU rack. Hackernews responds by miscorrecting each other about ethics while insisting the real solution is to “just ignore identity”—as though vibe-coded persuasion sludge is somehow less corrosive when it’s anonymous. The future is astroturf arguing with astroturf, with the rest of us trapped underneath, begging for the collapse.

Business co-founders in tech startups are less valuable than they think

2025-04-27 | comments

Another week, another startup sermon explaining that Business Guys are maybe not the indispensable galaxy-brained visionaries they imagine, but rather interchangeable PowerPoint clerics who show up demanding 80 percent equity for the privilege of describing your own prototype back to you. Hackernews, ever the tireless defender of meritocracy-in-theory, spends the thread reenacting the same tired morality play: tech founders insisting they can learn business in a weekend, business founders insisting they “move mountains” by emailing their cousin at Deloitte, and everyone pretending the entire enterprise isn’t just vibe coding strapped to a pitch deck in search of a greater fool with a checkbook.

AI Coding assistants provide little value because a programmer’s job is to think

2025-04-27 | comments

Another Hackernews sermon about how “programming is thinking” while half the thread is busy begging their preferred automated plagiarism engine to hallucinate some boilerplate. The article wheezes out the revelation that maybe typing isn’t the bottleneck, as if the industry hasn’t spent a decade replacing engineers with vibe-coding interns shouting at clankers until something compiles. Hackernews responds with the usual liturgy: LLMs are either the second coming of thought itself or a statistically averaged Stack Overflow post wearing a fake mustache. Everyone insists they’re “freeing their minds” while outsourcing their attention span to subscriptionware built to harvest aura and burn venture dollars. It’s all very impressive, in the way a Roomba stuck under a couch is technically still “cleaning.”

All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

2025-04-28 | comments

Hackernews is having a collective aneurysm because the digital feudal lords might stop shoveling protection money at each other to keep the world’s most bloated software category on life support. The webshits are torn between insisting that browsers are too complex and sacred to change, while also demanding they continue absorbing every ill-conceived API dreamed up by a committee of sleep-deprived standards wonks and adtech lobbyists. Half the thread nostalgically screams about IE6 like it’s tech’s Vietnam; the other half pretends Apple is going to collapse without its annual Google bribe. Meanwhile, nobody asks why the entire “open web” apparently depends on a few trillionaries squabbling over who gets to harvest which user’s soul.

How much has Elon Musk’s Doge cut from US Government spending?

2025-04-29 | comments

Hackernews is once again performing its favorite ritual: arguing over whether a billionaire’s cosplay dog-wrangling routine has “saved” the American taxpayer any money. The BBC prints its annual installment of “Tech Oligarch Disrupts Government Spending,” which is quickly interpreted by HNers as a forensic accounting challenge, despite none of them understanding how budgets, appropriations, or frankly anything outside Typescript toolchains work. Predictably, the top comments solemnly declare that Musk has saved “zero, zippo” because that’s how government budgeting works, but then immediately pivot into the equally baseless belief that he has cost us untold billions in squandered food aid and bureaucratic thrash—because if there’s one thing Hackernews loves more than a billionaire, it’s blaming a billionaire for the wrong things.

The actual story, buried under several layers of British understatement, is that Musk’s latest vanity acquisition turned an already do-nothing agency into a do-less-than-nothing agency. The digital feudal lord fired everyone who understood how to operate the machinery, declared victory, and walked away, leaving the government holding a bag full of half-built procurement systems and expired lentils. But don’t worry: Hackernews will spend the next 48 hours miscorrecting each other about how “actually” this is good, because bureaucrats are parasites, except when they’re delivering food, except when the food is late, except when it’s Elon’s fault, except when it’s not.

Meanwhile the tech industry continues its descent into a theme park run by clankers, where every institution is required to fall apart so that a billionaire can pretend to innovate by sledgehammering it.

How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment

2025-04-30 | comments

A senior government official decides the nation’s military apparatus is just too clunky for his delicate thumbs, so he defaults to the same chat app webshits use to coordinate brunch. Hackernews, naturally, performs its usual ritual: half the comments wail about state secrets evaporating into Chinese datacenters, while the other half confidently miscorrect them with vibes about encryption they half-remember from a podcast. No one questions why the Pentagon’s communications gear still feels like logging into a bank website from 2004. The Defense Secretary’s workaround isn’t some bold insurgency against bureaucracy; it’s just the inevitable result of a government IT ecosystem built entirely out of procurement grift and aura farming. Meanwhile, the people fretting about “illegality” seem to have missed the last decade, where laws apply only to interns and whistleblowers. Everyone else just shrugs, deletes their messages, and waits for the next scandal to scroll by.