Webshit Weekly
May 7, 2025
House votes to block California from banning sales of gas cars by 2035
2025-05-01 | comments
Congress has woken from its slumber to do what it does best: performative stomping in order to signal to its donors that, yes, they are still dutifully preventing the future. The House bravely voted to “block” a state‑level emissions policy that the Senate parliamentarian already said they can’t actually block, and that the EPA might undo anyway, because American governance is now just a three-ring circus. Naturally, Hackernews — those exhausted mall Santas of civics knowledge — responds by miscorrecting each other about interstate commerce doctrine from 1942, confidently citing a case none of them have actually read, because nothing says “tech elite” like treating constitutional law as yet another code review.
Lobbyists for the auto industry (business model: Uber for Planned Obsolescence) have spent the last decade promising EVs, delivering compliance cars, and demanding tax breaks for both. Now they’re terrified the government might actually expect them to follow through. Meanwhile, HNers perform their usual ritual: lamenting political inconsistency, pretending federalism is a coherent concept, and whining that they “want to have the discussion” — as though the problem is insufficient online discourse rather than an entire industry dedicated to regulatory capture.
In the end, nothing changes. California won’t ban gas cars; Congress won’t meaningfully govern; the EPA will continue its cosplay as a functional agency. And the tech crowd will still believe the real issue is flagging comments on a website.
Microsoft’s new “passwordless by default” is great but comes at a cost
2025-05-02 | comments
Microsoft has decided that the future is “passwordless,” which of course means “Microsoft Authenticator or get bent.” The tech giant has discovered a bold new way to lock everyone into their creaking ecosystem: make every other authenticator suddenly stop working and call it security progress. Hackernews, in its usual posture of haggard resignation, spends the thread swapping horror stories about Teams behaving like a haunted Etch A Sketch while insisting that, somehow, this is still better than passwords. Meanwhile, ordinary users face the exciting new possibility of losing a phone and having their entire digital existence vaporized. But don’t worry: Microsoft promises this is all unphishable, which is corporate-speak for “unusable without begging our app for permission.”
Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
2025-05-02 | comments
In the latest episode of America’s never‑ending tech clown show, we learn that senior government officials — people allegedly entrusted with nuclear codes and not, say, a mid‑market dropshipping scam — have been conducting official business on a cracked, corporatized knockoff of Signal controlled by a cluster of “former” intelligence officers from a country whose entire tech sector is basically a mandatory‑service alumni Slack. The app is indistinguishable from real Signal except for one lovingly handcrafted string change, which is apparently enough to fool the political class and half of Hackernews, who immediately descend into their favorite pastime: arguing over whose conspiracy theory is the most boring.
HNers sprint to see who can offer the most pedantic reassurance about Israel’s procurement relationships, as if the problem is whether Tel Aviv already has enough administrative access rather than the fact that the United States government — an institution with an IT budget larger than the GDP of some nations — can’t prevent its officials from installing whatever spyware‑flavored productivity app a staffer’s nephew recommended. Others, trapped in the eternal recursion of vibe governance, insist there are totally Real IT People in the White House, somewhere, doing something, presumably buried under layers of political appointees and procurement officers.
The entire conversation boils down to webshits miscorrecting each other about which intelligence service already has which backdoor, while completely ignoring the obvious: the federal government runs on the same operational discipline as a sales team doing team-bonding at a strip joint. The only mystery here is why anyone is still surprised.
Google Gemini has the worst LLM API
2025-05-03 | comments
Another developer discovering that Google’s latest token predictor-as-a-service is duct‑taped to seventeen incompatible billing consoles, two mutually hostile API namespaces, and whatever remains of Google’s attention span after yet another internal reorg. The article dutifully documents the usual horrors: undocumented flags, region settings that behave like cursed objects, and an API surface area that looks like the archaeological layers of a civilization that hated its descendants.
Hackernews responds by nostalgically reminiscing about the mythical era when Google “cared about APIs,” as though the same company that turned Reader into mulch ever cared about anything but ad extraction. A few clank-wranglers insist Gemini is actually amazing if you just avoid Vertex, or only use Vertex, or pray to the correct internal service account daemon. Everyone miscorrects everyone else while quietly admitting the billing dashboard is a Kafkaesque fever dream.
But sure, everything’s fine. Google hasn’t collapsed under its own bureaucratic sediment; you’re just looking at the wrong dashboard.
The New Control Society
2025-05-04 | comments
Another 10,000-word thinkpiece about how “algorithms” have turned society into a technofeudal panopticon, written in the familiar house style of Concerned Intellectual wallpaper paste. Hackernews immediately forgets the thesis and instead spends the entire thread arguing about which flavor of political extremism the publisher allegedly prefers, because nothing says “new control society” like voluntarily imprisoning yourself in a comments section. The author’s breathless warning about decentralized power structures is treated like it was scraped from a clanker running on a malfunctioning Victorian steam engine, which, frankly, it might as well have been. HNers conclude, as always, that the real problem is everyone else’s inability to understand Hayek.
An appeal to companies doing AI
2025-05-04 | comments
A blogger has discovered that the tech industry doesn’t actually care what users want, and Hackernews reacts with its usual mix of miscorrections, sophistry, and self-soothing narratives about how AI is just a “tool” like a hammer, except this hammer can generate political propaganda, steal your job, and then deepfake your face onto a PornHub upload in 4K. The thread quickly devolves into the ritual cycle: one guy insists superintelligence is impossible, another insists it’s inevitable, and everyone else pretends their VSCode autocomplete trauma constitutes a political philosophy. Meanwhile the digital landlords keep shipping new clankers trained on the global sewer pipe, because the great game demands growth, and growth now means flooding civilization with vibes, sludge, and automated plagiarism dressed up as innovation.
A militarized conspiracy theorist group believes radars are ‘weather weapons’
2025-05-05 | comments
A group of self-anointed patriots mistaking Doppler radar for the Death Star and deciding the best use of their tactical prowess (business model: LARPing for Facebook Likes) is to wage war on weather equipment. CNN dutifully reports it with the same tone they use for everything now: resigned astonishment mixed with algorithmic SEO sludge. Hackernews, ever the salon of the extremely online, immediately pivots to diagnosing America’s 400-year-old anti-intellectualism problem while ignoring the obvious: the internet turned every village idiot into a broadcaster, and every broadcaster into monetizable engagement inventory. Congratulations, you’ve reinvented the printing press but full of goose-egg snake gods.
The HN commenters attempt philosophical depth, but mostly end up miscorrecting each other about medieval probability theory while subtly flexing how many Wikipedia tabs they’ve consumed today. A few fantasize about redirecting the “military knowledge” of these conspiracy cosplayers, as if we’re one motivational poster away from turning them into civil engineers. Others insist humans have always been stupid, which is true, but we’ve never before industrialized stupidity into a SaaS subscription.
Meanwhile, weather scientists — actual adults trapped in a society run by vibe coders and digital feudal lords — are stuck explaining that no, the radar isn’t mind-controlling the clouds, it’s just trying to tell you a tornado is coming. Not that anyone listens. In 2025, the storm isn’t the weather; it’s the user base.
The DEA is now abandoning body cameras
2025-05-06 | comments
The DEA (business model: “Uber for kicking down doors over plants”) has decided that even the bare-minimum cosplay of accountability is too much overhead for its daily operations. The body cameras — purchased, deployed, and immediately shoved into a drawer — now join the nation’s vast landfill of tech boondoggles created so a contractor’s nephew could afford a new Tesla. Hackernews reacts with its usual constitutional-law cosplay, insisting that surely there’s a principled reason federal agents shouldn’t be recorded, as though the DEA hasn’t spent decades speedrunning the Bill of Rights. But don’t worry: if a bystander uploads footage, the DEA will gladly seize that too, citing their eternal mandate to protect America from the horrors of personal autonomy.
U.S. Orders Intelligence Agencies to Step Up Spying on Greenland
2025-05-06 | comments
America’s finest intelligence agencies, fresh off several decades of failing upward, have now been instructed to point their trillion‑dollar panopticon at… Greenland. Because nothing screams geopolitical sophistication like deploying spy satellites, signals intercept arrays, and whatever warm bodies are still willing to call themselves “spies” to surveil a population roughly the size of a midwestern suburb. Apparently the great game now involves monitoring whether some fisherman repainted his shed, or if the mayor’s nephew bought a new snowmobile, all while Washington assures us that this is Very Serious Business and absolutely not the bored flailing of a digital feudal empire desperate to justify its budget before the next appropriations hearing.
Predictably, Hackernews turns the comments into a geopolitical LARP, miscorrecting each other about Iceland, Cuba, and whatever high‑school history they half‑remember from a Wikipedia tab they skimmed during standup. A handful attempt galaxy‑brain “maybe it’s long‑term influence ops” takes, as though the CIA is going to run psyops on the PTA meeting in Nuuk instead of just burning through funds to maintain the fiction that they’re still relevant in a world where most intelligence work has been automated into clanker‑generated PowerPoints.
Meanwhile the administration whines about leaks, journalists pretend this is the moment democracy is saved, and the public is again reminded that mass surveillance has no off switch—only new targets. Today it’s Greenland. Tomorrow it’s whichever small town still has working cell reception. Same machine, same excuses, same contempt for the people stuck under it.
OpenAI for Countries
2025-05-07 | comments
OpenAI has apparently grown tired of selling clankers to individual webshits and would now like to sell them to entire countries at once, finally achieving the dream of becoming the world’s first SaaS geopolitical puppetmaster. The blog post wheezes about “democratic AI” with all the sincerity of a defense contractor pitching freedom bombs, while Hackernews performs its usual ritual of miscorrecting each other about export controls, Trump, GPU embargoes, and which digital feudal lord gets to own the planetary token‑prediction pipeline. Everyone pretends this is about national development rather than OpenAI desperately scaling the great fraud to the only market left: governments too tired to ask what any of this sludge actually does.
Doctors Warn Accountants of Private-Equity Drain on Quality: You Could Be Next
2025-05-07 | comments
Another story about private equity discovering a new organ to harvest. This time it’s accountants, because apparently the tech industry’s planetary-scale grift machine has grown bored of strip‑mining healthcare and decided the people tallying the bodies should join them on the conveyor belt. The article pretends anyone is shocked that the same PE geniuses who turned doctor visits into an escape room now want to turn audits into a subscription service (business model: Uber for fiduciary malpractice). Hackernews plays its favorite game of Economic Fanfiction, miscorrecting each other about incentives, regulation, and markets while ignoring the obvious: everything is being sold to the highest bidder because everyone is drowning in debt except the clowns buying their livelihoods on leverage. Eventually the only thing not owned by private equity will be the comments section, and even that will get rolled up once someone figures out how to securitize whining.