Webshit Weekly

June 14, 2025

Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn’t good for democracy

2025-06-08 | comments

Another week, another essay where a think‑tank adjacent Substack oracle warns that maybe handing trillion‑parameter clankers and nation‑sized GPU farms to the local strongman isn’t the express lane to democratic flourishing. In response, Hackernews performs its usual ritual: half the comments insist that dictatorship is inevitable because someone once used stylometry in a paper; the other half loudly explain that it doesn’t matter because authoritarians don’t need accuracy when they already have prisons. Meanwhile a small but vocal contingent insists anonymity will save them, apparently unaware that the average webshit can’t keep track of their own password manager, let alone their “operational security.”

The thread then degenerates into the predictable civics‑101‑as‑interpreted‑by‑LinkedIn debate about whether it’s OpenAI’s job to decide who’s a “good guy” or whether we should outsource all moral reasoning to the State Department, which has historically been a real lighthouse of ethical clarity. Others cite Pinochet as though he’s a minor API quirk rather than a century‑long pattern of the US eagerly propping up whichever autocrat signs the invoice.

Finally, the econ‑brain crowd chimes in to remind everyone that democracy is irrelevant because the real “race” is about monetizing GPU heat output quickly enough to justify another VC round in the great game of vaporware capitalism. If you squint, you can almost see the digital feudal lords rubbing their hands as we argue over which flavor of authoritarianism our automated plagiarism engines should serve first.

The National Guard Deployment in LA Is a Threat to Democracy

2025-06-09 | comments

Another Bloomberg op-ed shrieking that democracy has finally, officially died, as though it hadn’t been rotting on the stoop since the first time a tech CEO discovered they could buy a senator cheaper than a Kubernetes consultant. Hackernews responds by performing its usual political science LARP, miscorrecting each other about constitutional law they skimmed from Reddit while insisting that biotech billionaires are the true fragile victims here. The whole thread reads like a support group for people who think watching Andor qualifies as civic engagement. Meanwhile, the National Guard is deployed, and our brave webshits bravely refresh the page.

Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

2025-06-09 | comments

The president is again testing whether the Constitution is more of a suggestion than a rule, and Hackernews reacts with its usual mix of civics cosplay and historical LARPing. CNN reports that the White House has decided the best response to protests in Los Angeles is to toss a few hundred Marines into the mix, because when you’re running low on legitimacy, the obvious next step is to import some. The article is the usual slurry of quotes from officials pretending this is all routine, like deploying combat troops to handle domestic unrest is just another line item between pothole repair and DMV budget overruns.

Hackernews, naturally, treats this as an opportunity to demonstrate their encyclopedic grasp of every vaguely related legal doctrine they skimmed on Wikipedia in 2008. We get the obligatory Posse Comitatus recital from people who definitely pronounce it like a Harry Potter spell, followed by the standard Kent State omens from commenters who haven’t been outside since Java 1.6. Half of them insist civil war is imminent, the other half are convinced the real problem is that blue states don’t own enough rifles. Everyone agrees that someone else should do something.

It’s all very on brand: a tech industry that can’t ship a login form without three outages lecturing the country on state violence and constitutional order. The same people who panic when GitHub goes down for an hour now confidently outline urban insurgency strategies between standup meetings. The Marines won’t fix anything, but at least they’re not posting about it.

Chatbots are replacing Google’s search, devastating traffic for some publishers

2025-06-10 | comments

Google, the web’s aging landlord, has finally stopped pretending that search results are anything but bait for its newest token-predictor slurry fountains. The Wall Street Journal dutifully reports that publishers are shocked — shocked! — that the same company that spent two decades methodically grinding their revenue into artisanal compost is now replacing links entirely with hallucinated news soup spit out by a corporate plagiarism engine. Truly, who could have foreseen this, except anyone conscious since 2001.

Hackernews lurches into the thread like a pack of stunned webshits emerging from a cave, performing the ritual debate dance: should politicians have rescued media companies, should media companies have rescued themselves, should anyone rescue anything, or should we all simply accept that we now get our “news” from a stochastic parrot trained on the exhaust fumes of ten million listicles? Opinions are exchanged, miscorrected, and re-miscorrected until the circle of ignorance closes.

Meanwhile, a subset of HNers rediscover that news is hard to search because it involves events in the actual world, not SEO-chum designed to answer the immortal question “what time is the super bowl.” Others fret about whether clankers can summarize reputable experts without laundering their credibility into paste—a charmingly quaint concern given that Google’s entire strategy is to replace reading with vibe absorption.

Publishers will continue dying, Google will continue feeding, and users will continue congratulating themselves for outsourcing cognition to a machine whose only talent is confidently making things up.

SF Housing Madness. Tired of Screaming into the Void

2025-06-10 | comments

Another week, another Hackernews group therapy session where everyone pretends to be shocked that San Francisco housing costs more than the GDP of a small country. The thread quickly turns into a contest of who can deliver the most somber TED Talk about “market fundamentals” while casually mentioning their $6M liquid net worth, like they’re discussing the weather. A parade of webshits insists that anyone who can’t afford a broom closet with ocean fog access should simply warp themselves to “somewhere cheaper,” as if jobs, community, and basic human connection are optional DLCs. Meanwhile, investment groups treat entire neighborhoods like Fortnite loot drops, and the city continues its long-running experiment in converting generational homes into asset-backed trading cards for the tech feudal class. But don’t worry—Hackernews has decided the real problem is that the poor aren’t teleporting out fast enough.

2025-06-11 | comments

Hackernews has once again discovered the subscription economy, as though it didn’t already spend the last decade auto-renewing itself into financial ruin. The thread begins with someone performing a Fermi estimate, which is always HN-speak for “I am about to confidently guess my way into an economic theory.” Predictably, they conclude that the average human can afford exactly one $10 subscription, because apparently the entire consumer economy is now measured in units of Netflix. From there, the webshits chime in, wailing about how startups — those tireless artisans of disposable SaaS — will suffer. Yes, truly, the digital landlords selling Uber-for-checklists and Human-Centipede-for-SEO-slop might struggle to charge people ten bucks for the privilege of forgetting to cancel. A tragedy.

Meanwhile the clanker-industrial complex looms overhead, because even the $10 Copilot-for-Toasters startups have to pay tribute to the LLM token-predictor megacorps. This leads to speculation about whether AI API fees will crush the ecosystem, as if the ecosystem wasn’t already just a landfill of vibe-coded apps whose entire business model is hoping someone hits the wrong button at the end of a free trial.

HNers miscorrect each other about “value,” but none can articulate why their hobby budgeting app deserves recurring revenue beyond “I like it.” In the end, everyone shrugs and repeats the ancient mantra: “Vote with your wallet” — as though any of them have seen their bank statements since 2014.

A dark adtech empire fed by fake CAPTCHAs

2025-06-12 | comments

Another week, another exposé revealing that the modern web has fully embraced its destiny as a haunted carnival run by adtech goblins. Krebs digs up a “dark adtech empire” powered by fake CAPTCHAs, which is just a polite way of saying the internet is now a Skinner Box where confused grandparents click buttons until a JavaScript cryptomancer gains OS-level notification privileges. Hackernews responds with its usual chorus of webshits miscorrecting each other about which browser preferences menu will temporarily delay the inevitable. Meanwhile, every browser vendor races to see who can turn the open web into a more perfect attack surface, all in service of the great game: monetizing human bewilderment.

Wing and Walmart are bringing drone delivery to 100 new stores

2025-06-13 | comments

Walmart, the benevolent digital feudal lord of rollback pricing, has decided the future of logistics is filling the sky with glorified electric leaf blowers carrying Pop-Tarts. Wing, Alphabet’s token-predictor-assisted drone boutique, happily straps in, because nothing says innovation like recreating the mosquito problem at industrial scale. Hackernews spends the day reverse‑engineering fictional delivery economics, confidently explaining how drones will totally replace trucks, drivers, sidewalks, physics, Segways, and common sense, any minute now, once the VC subsidies finish laundering themselves into “R&D.” Meanwhile, normal people contemplate a future where every suburban yard becomes an unofficial helipad for convenience junk. Progress.

Ask HN: Do you think there’s censorship on HN?

2025-06-14 | comments

Hackernews, that carefully manicured bonsai garden of tech monoculture, is once again clutching its pearls over “censorship,” as though the digital feudal lords of YC would ever allow their prized aura farm to be contaminated with anything resembling real-world complexity. The same users who spend all day flagging each other for insufficient enthusiasm about clankers now perform shocked theatrics that posts about wars, politics, or anything not involving yet another Python REPL clone mysteriously vanish. Half insist it’s government psyops, half insist it’s good hygiene, and all of them miss the point: the site is moderated exactly the way its users behave—fearfully, blandly, and with the intellectual courage of a wet sock.