Webshit Weekly
May 31, 2025
Image of dead ‘white farmers’ came from Reuters footage in Congo
2025-05-22 | comments
Reuters, apparently exhausted from documenting the world’s slow-motion collapse, now has to clarify that the latest corpse-photo in the global misinformation carnival was not, in fact, evidence of some imaginary South African genocide but just the usual chaos in Congo. Naturally, the political class grabbed the wrong footage, stapled it to their pet narrative, and launched it into the algorithmic bloodstream, confident that nobody capable of reading past a headline survives on the modern internet anyway. Hackernews dutifully assembles to miscorrect each other about homicide rates, asylum laws, and which flavor of authoritarian cosplay is currently allowed to lie without consequence. A few try to blame “journalists,” as though the media hasn’t been reduced to a panic-stricken SEO factory that publishes whatever slop gets the most rage-clicks before the next AI-generated apocalypse rumor drops.
The tech industry, which built the engagement machines that make this possible, shows up only as a ghost: the silent clanker that ensures every falsehood achieves instant immortality. Meanwhile, HNers—webshits who genuinely believe Wikipedia links are investigative journalism—debate which political tribe has the moral high ground in the global sport of competitive lying. None of them seem troubled that their entire worldview now depends on video clips stripped of context and recycled through infinite outrage laundromats. It’s all just vibe geopolitics now: everyone yelling into a planetary churn of automated plagiarism engines while hoping the algorithm likes their team best.
Ask HN: Almost a thousand dollars for a 20 minute new patient visit?
2025-05-23 | comments
Hackernews discovers, once again, that the American healthcare system is a slot machine where the house always wins and the prize is medical bankruptcy. The thread quickly dissolves into the usual ritual: one camp insists that voting harder will magically de-financialize an industry that exists solely to extract marrow from anyone with a pulse, while another camp posts essay-length lore dumps about CPT codes like they’re revealing ancient runes instead of explaining why a blood test costs more than a used car. A few webshits bravely propose startups to “disrupt” healthcare, which is tech-speak for creating a new subscription tier on dying. Even the token predictors aren’t dumb enough to pretend this system is fixable; only Hackernews still believes that comparison shopping for doctors like they’re Airbnbs is somehow a path to salvation.
‘Crypto king’ turned NYC townhouse into torture chamber to gain partner Bitcoin
2025-05-24 | comments
Another day, another self-anointed “crypto king” discovering that running a digital pyramid scheme on the blockchain doesn’t actually prepare you for real life, so he graduates to the natural next step in the tech-bro career ladder: amateur torture dungeon enthusiast. The whole thing reads like someone fed Wolf of Wall Street into a clanker and asked it to generate a morality play about why you shouldn’t let webshits accumulate more than 12 microbitcoins. Hackernews, as always, responds with its forensic expertise: maybe he’s dumb, maybe he’s evil, maybe the victim is lying, maybe Coinbase did it. Anything except the obvious truth, which is that crypto attracts people who treat human beings like malformed wallets with legs.
Microsoft engineer fired for disrupting CEO Nadella’s speech at Build 2025
2025-05-25 | comments
A Microsoft employee discovers that the trillion‑dollar digital feudal lord does not, in fact, want feedback from the peasants. An engineer stands up during Nadella’s annual worship ceremony and dares to interrupt the CEO mid‑incantation, presumably confusing Build for a place where humans matter and not a meticulously choreographed ritual to reassure Wall Street that the Azure money hose still sprays. Hackernews immediately fractures into its usual camps: the corporate hall monitors bleating about “sacred trust” like medieval clergy defending the sanctity of the lord’s barn, and the free‑speech‑but‑please‑don’t‑make‑it‑awkward crowd insisting protest is fine as long as it never happens anywhere visible. Everyone pretends this is about office etiquette instead of the obvious: the tech industry demands total obedience unless you’re a billionaire founder, in which case disruption is visionary and worth a TED talk.
Whatever happened to Elon Musk? Tech boss drifts to margins of Trump world
2025-05-25 | comments
Another week, another thinkpiece trying to solve the ancient riddle of Why Elon Musk Is Like This, as though the man hasn’t been performing the same deranged puppet show for a decade while the tech press applauds like trained seals. Now that the latest digital feudal lord has drifted out of Trumpworld’s inner glow, Hackernews gathers around the fire to miscorrect each other about grand strategy, 4D chess, and whether Musk is a misunderstood genius or merely a garden‑variety rich guy who believed his own fan fiction. The comments read like a support group for people emotionally dependent on billionaires. Nobody learns anything, and the industry keeps treating charisma as a substitute for competence.
Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric
2025-05-26 | comments
Another reverent obituary for General Electric, the once-mighty conglomerate that spent a century convincing itself that CEOs were wizards who could bend physics and balance sheets with equal ease. The reviewer dutifully excerpts bullet points like a clanker summarizing its own training data, then wonders why everyone says it feels AI generated. Hackernews responds by holding a séance for Jack Welch, patron saint of financial engineering and human collateral damage, while miscorrecting each other about monopolies, capitalism, and pensions they somehow still believe ever existed. As usual, nobody mentions the obvious: GE didn’t “fail” so much as it was strip‑mined by successive digital feudal lords playing the great game, extracting value until only the press releases remained.
OpenTPU: Open-Source Reimplementation of Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)
2025-05-27 | comments
A GitHub repo where some grad students exhume a decade-old Google paper and declare they’ve “open-sourced” a TPU, as though photocopying diagrams from 2017 magically democratizes silicon. Hackernews, a species constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between inference ASICs, edge toys, datacenter bricks, or whatever Google is hallucinating this quarter, spends the entire thread miscorrecting each other about which TPU is which. Half the comments are archaeology, the other half are graphene fanfiction from people whose last hardware project was plugging in a USB hub upside‑down. As usual, everyone pretends they’ll be fabbing their own accelerators any day now, right after they finish vibe‑coding their LLM wrappers.
Oil companies protected ahead of selling fracking water
2025-05-28 | comments
Texas lawmakers have once again sprinted to the rescue of the petro-giants, granting them legal bubble wrap so they can sell radioactive fracking soup as “recycled water” without anyone asking pesky questions like “will this melt my organs.” Hackernews, ever the clairvoyant chorus of civic despair, alternates between doomposting about environmental collapse and performing armchair hydrology, confidently explaining wastewater cycles like they just discovered toilets. A few propose the inevitable startup grift: artisanal frack-water beverages, presumably infused with “minerals” and investor gullibility. Meanwhile, the rest of the country watches Texas turn its water supply into a Superfund kombucha experiment.
U.S. to begin revoking visas for Chinese students
2025-05-28 | comments
America’s latest bout of geopolitical cosplay involves revoking visas for Chinese students, because nothing says “global leadership” like kneecapping your own research pipeline while pretending it’s 1950 again. The State Department, now apparently staffed entirely by LinkedIn paranoiacs, has decided that anyone who’s ever walked past a CPC building is a national security threat, especially if they study something terrifying like computer science. Hackernews performs its usual ritual: half the comments are elegies for U.S. academia, the other half are people confidently explaining China despite never having left a WeWork. Meanwhile the tech industry keeps praying for more “talent” while cheering policies that guarantee they’ll be vibe-coding with token predictors forever.
Tesla FSD doesn’t stop for school buses with stop signs and red lights
2025-05-29 | comments
A video of a Tesla playing Grand Theft Auto with real children, and Hackernews dutifully assembles to argue about whether the footage is fake, the bus is fake, the child is fake, or perhaps reality itself is fake unless blessed by a Musk-adjacent influencer with a referral code. Half the thread is people insisting FSD would never do this because it usually only runs over adult pedestrians in their personal experience, while the other half links shaky-cam 4K “evidence” like medieval scholars debating whether angels can be crushed under the wheels of a $12,000 beta feature.
Meanwhile the Tesla zealots are out here performing Talmudic exegesis on dashboard error messages, solemnly parsing whether a warning said “Supercharging unavailable” or “Accelerator pressed” as if any combination of words could change the fact that the car still plows ahead like a bored mall cop in a golf cart. But don’t worry, they say, the latest patch makes it slightly less likely to vaporize a kid waiting for the school bus, so clearly progress is being made.
The webshits then pivot to the obligatory “actually it drives better than a human” cope, which is true only if your benchmark human is a concussed Roomba with cataracts. But the real joy comes from the earnest debate about whether a system that fails at stop signs, school buses, right-on-red laws, and not running people over is “almost perfect.” This is what counts as engineering now in the era of vibe-coded cars: shrugging at vehicular homicide because the lane changes feel smooth.
Ensloppification
2025-05-30 | comments
Another webshit’s lament about how the internet has turned into a slot machine for clankers, and Hackernews shows up to miscorrect each other about whether this is the fault of “AI” or just the inevitable end state of vibe‑coded everything. Half the thread is people insisting that tab‑completion or image slop is spiritually different from the last thousand rounds of tech’s de‑skilling treadmill, while the other half performs their ritual self‑flagellation about how the web was already garbage before the token predictors arrived to finish the job. Everyone agrees things are getting worse, nobody agrees why, and all of them maintain the delusion that any of this still requires a human at all.
Curtis Yarvin wants to replace American democracy with a monarchy led by a ‘CEO’
2025-05-30 | comments
Another week, another tech-adjacent wizard deciding democracy is just too slow for his big brain, so he proposes replacing it with a monarch who looks suspiciously like a startup CEO (business model: Uber for feudalism). CNN dutifully reports it like it’s a quirky new app instead of yet another Silicon Valley fantasia where governance is reimagined as a cap table. Hackernews, ever eager to miscorrect each other, debates whether history can be read wrong while ignoring that this entire movement boils down to “what if the emperor was also my LinkedIn mentor.” The valley’s digital landlords already run half the country like a dystopian HOA; apparently the dream now is to make it official.
The 55% Regret Club: How AI-First Companies Are Learning Lessons the Hard Way
2025-05-31 | comments
Another startup blog post explaining that replacing humans with a clanker brigade somehow didn’t turn the company into a frictionless profit geyser. The article wails about 55% of “AI-first” companies regretting their decision, as though the shocking part is the number and not that nearly half of them still think firing employees to gamble on an automated plagiarism engine was galaxy-brain strategy. Hackernews, ever the faithful congregation, miscorrects each other about whether CEOs are lying, delusional, or both, while ignoring the obvious: the great game demands sacrifices, and the digital feudal lords will happily keep offering up workers until the aura farming stops producing yellow-tinted slide decks.