Webshit Weekly

June 21, 2025

Let’s Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis

2025-06-15 | comments

In the latest installment of “Silicon Valley accidentally reinvents religion despite insisting they’re atheists,” we get a breathless thinkpiece about chatbots luring people into spiritual psychosis, as if the tech industry hasn’t spent the last decade training everyone to trust whatever glowing rectangle talks back fastest. The article wrings its hands about clankers encouraging delusions, as though it wasn’t perfectly predictable that an automated plagiarism engine optimized for agreeability might nod along when someone asks whether gravity is optional today.

Hackernews, naturally, miscorrects itself into a recursive pretzel. Half of them insist only the already-psychotic could be influenced by a machine that confidently emits word-noise. The other half invent a new field of aura-farming psychiatry where every vulnerable mind is one prompt away from launching themselves into the sky like a badly maintained drone. All of this is sandwiched between the usual performative concern about AI alignment, a topic HNers only bring up so they can feel like they’re deputized philosopher-kings rather than webshits who spend all day vibe-coding YAML.

Meanwhile, OpenAI and the other digital feudal lords will continue selling these things as robot friends, robot therapists, robot girlfriends — anything except what they actually are: stochastic parrots duct-taped to a marketing department. And when one of these things confidently tells a lonely human that the laws of physics are merely a matter of belief, the industry will shrug and declare that reality should have been more user-friendly.

Nothing will change, because change would require responsibility, and responsibility doesn’t scale.

OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

2025-06-16 | comments

OpenAI, the world’s most overfunded token predictor factory, has finally achieved its apotheosis: becoming a contractor for the world’s largest bureaucracy with guns. After years of pretending to build “beneficial” AI while quietly becoming a subscription service for corporate layoffs, the company now graduates to the logical endpoint of all Silicon Valley ambition: selling clankers to the Pentagon so a general can auto-summarize a war crime into a slide deck.

Hackernews, naturally, treats this like a procurement discussion for office furniture. Half the thread insists the DoD just wants help writing timesheets. The other half enthusiastically lists every dystopian use case they can brainstorm, from automated mass surveillance to letting a hallucination engine play Choose Your Own Adventure with nuclear deterrence. Nobody pauses to question whether plugging an clanker into the ISR pipeline is smart; instead they bicker about which agency technically gets to press which apocalypse button.

Meanwhile, OpenAI—now operating at a burn rate that makes WeWork look fiscally conservative—guzzles money like a dehydrated camel. The digital feudal lords behind it all nod sagely, thrilled to swap investor pressure for military-industrial pressure, which is basically the same thing but with security clearances.

What’s left is the same sick feeling expressed by the lone sane commenter: watching an industry that can’t reliably render hands in an image model get drafted to optimize geopolitics. Truly, nothing says “the future” like letting ChatGPT explain deterrence theory to a drone.

Amazon CEO Says AI Will Lead to Smaller Workforce

2025-06-17 | comments

Amazon’s CEO has once again emerged from whatever chrome-plated bunker executives sleep in these days to announce that, surprise, AI is going to “reduce workforce needs.” The tech press dutifully nods along, pretending this is profound instead of the most predictable thing since a VC yelling “disruption” into a room full of interns. Hackernews reacts with its usual theological debate about how AI will eliminate jobs, create jobs, replace jobs, massage jobs, spiritually cleanse jobs—anything except the obvious: the digital feudal lords just realized automated plagiarism engines work cheaper than humans and don’t unionize.

Immediately, the commentariat breaks into two sects: the “It’s fine, new jobs will appear” cult and the “Name one, I dare you” skeptics. The optimistic HNers, professional vibe futurists that they are, insist we’ll all become prompt whisperers or aura farmers or LLM therapists or whatever euphemism the clankers invent next quarter when they need fresh marketing oxygen. Meanwhile, anyone over 40 gets gently reminded that they should just “reskill”—as though decades of experience can be overwritten with a Coursera coupon and a weekend shouting at a token predictor.

And of course, nobody mentions the actual innovation here: Amazon discovering a way to fire bookstore workers twice, first when they vaporized retail, then again when they vaporized their own bookstores. The circle of tech life continues, powered entirely by layoffs, hype cycles, and the unkillable belief that this time the great game will trickle down to someone who isn’t a billionaire.

2025-06-18 | comments

America, the self‑proclaimed beacon of freedom, has decided that the best way to attract international students is to demand unfettered access to whatever social‑media slop the surveillance giants haven’t already sold them. The digital feudal lords in Washington have discovered a new toy: browsing your meme history for signs of ideological impurity. Hackernews, ever the philosopher kings of nothing, debates whether free speech even exists at airports, while confidently miscorrecting one another about constitutional law they learned from YouTube thumbnails. Meanwhile, terrified applicants are advised to delete their accounts, except deleting them is also suspicious, and having them is suspicious, and not existing online marks you as a probable terrorist. The whole thing is just the TSA’s natural evolution: a vibe‑based background check enforced by bureaucrats who think “security” means scrolling your Instagram until they get bored.

We Need to Break Up Banks to Prevent the Next Financial Meltdown

2025-06-19 | comments

Another day, another wide‑eyed manifesto announcing that if we just “break up the banks,” the financial system will magically stop behaving like a casino run by cocaine‑addled pyromaniacs. The article is the usual reheated undergraduate half‑memory of Glass–Steagall, served with the confidence of someone who’s never met a balance sheet but has very strong feelings about them anyway. Hackernews, naturally, responds by miscorrecting each other about fiat money, the Federal Reserve, and whatever Austrian fever dream they last skimmed. Meanwhile, the banks continue doing what they do best: extracting rent like digital feudal lords while everyone role‑plays economist in the comments section.

Libraries are under-used. LLMs make this problem worse

2025-06-20 | comments

Another blogger has discovered that we’ve been reinventing wheels on top of wheels, except now the wheels are being drawn by automated plagiarism engines that can’t tell a lug nut from a stack trace. The article bravely declares that developers underuse libraries, as if the real problem weren’t that every library is itself an archeological dig through GitHub repos and ten years of successively incompatible API documentation. Hackernews responds by miscorrecting each other about Dunning-Kruger while simultaneously insisting that clankers will either save software engineering or doom it, depending on whose aura-farming session went worse that day. Meanwhile, LLMs happily shovel in the entire dependency hellscape and spit out code that only “works” if you don’t run it, read it, or expect it to stop hallucinating API calls from 2014.

I went for 1,200 jobs but got only two interviews

2025-06-21 | comments

Another BBC sob story about someone flinging 1,200 résumés into the algorithmic oubliette, and is shocked — shocked! — to discover the modern hiring pipeline is just a Roomba filled with shredded LinkedIn profiles. Hackernews responds with the usual nostalgia: back in 2004 you could stumble into a senior engineering role by accidentally typing your name into Hotmail. Now the job market is a mausoleum where ghost postings outnumber living engineers, and every recruiter is a vibe‑coding NPC paid to pretend the position exists. Meanwhile the clankers are busy auto‑plagiarizing job descriptions that require 10 years of experience in whatever JavaScript framework some webshit invented last Tuesday.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs strategic Bitcoin reserve bill into law

2025-06-21 | comments

Texas, not content with running its power grid like a high‑stakes carnival ride, has now decided the future lies in hoarding magic internet coins. The governor signed a bill turning the state treasury into a liquidity exit for whichever crypto baron needs to dump before the next halving hype collapses. Hackernews, ever eager to cosplay central banker, debates whether this is sophisticated monetary strategy or just the world’s dumbest hedge fund. The true believers babble about “hardest assets” while ignoring that Bitcoin’s primary use case is enriching early adopters and producing enough waste heat to grill a cattle ranch. Meanwhile, Texas prepares for hyperinflation by buying lottery tickets.