Webshit Weekly
July 7, 2025
Trump team threatens to prosecute CNN over reporting on Ice-tracking app
2025-07-01 | comments
The latest round of American governance-by-tantrum features the usual cast: a former reality‑TV landlord yelling threats, a state‑level cosplay authoritarian nodding along, and a cable news network pretending to be surprised that anyone in power still knows how to use the phrase “we’ll prosecute you” without laughing. This time the melodrama revolves around an ICE tracking app, because of course it does. Nothing screams “technology solving human problems” like duct‑taping surveillance software to a deportation bureaucracy and then getting offended when a reporter notices.
Hackernews, naturally, decides the important question is whether the former president is powered by stimulants, narcissism, or some kind of perpetual‑motion grift engine. The usual amateur psychologists show up to diagnose an entire political movement using the same level of rigor they apply when deciding between two JavaScript frameworks. A few HNers manage to mumble about “lawsuit theater” before being drowned out by the perennial chorus of “humans are animals” pseudo‑anthropology, which always sounds suspiciously like someone trying to explain their own Twitter addiction.
What none of them grapple with is that the tech industry built the entire apparatus enabling this nonsense. The clankers, the vibe coders, the webshits churning out surveillance apps like they’re loot boxes in the great game of VC-funded dystopia—these are the people who made it possible for any politician with a pulse and a grudge to weaponize push notifications. But sure, let’s talk more about his energy levels.
Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down
2025-07-02 | comments
Another week, another reminder that the federal government can’t even keep a website online unless it directly enriches a defense contractor or a digital feudal lord. This time the sites hosting major US climate assessments were quietly memory-holed, because nothing says “serious country” like treating existential risk as if it were an expired Squarespace trial. Naturally Hackernews responds by reenacting the world’s most boring film seminar, because every climate story must now be refracted through the lens of some mediocre Hollywood allegory. Half the thread argues whether “Don’t Look Up” was good, bad, or merely aggressively beige, as though the issue at hand were cinema studies and not the state systematically shredding its own institutional memory.
Meanwhile, a few HNers bravely attempt “practical advice,” which mostly translates to armchair epidemiology about heat deaths and the bold claim that Americans would be fine if they just bought air conditioners, presumably with the money they saved not having access to public information. As usual, any conversation about governance devolves into crypto-Machiavellian cosplay, with posters fantasizing about techno-kings ruling microstates built on vibes and venture debt. It’s the same exhausted pattern: the state fails, industry shrugs, and Hackernews miscorrects each other until the entire thread collapses into a slurry of culture-war fatalism and solar-panel libertarianism. All because a few websites went missing—an outcome entirely predictable in a country that now treats basic civic infrastructure like legacy code in a startup: too boring to maintain, too important to delete, and destined to be replaced by a clanker hallucinating PDFs.
Guy accused of working at 4 YC startups at the same time
2025-07-03 | comments
Yet another day in the great game of venture-funded cosplay, where some guy allegedly manages to “work” at four YC startups simultaneously — which is to say he was collecting equity-shaped participation trophies while vibe coding his way through a stack of Slack channels. Hackernews treats this as either mythic giga-hustle or a stunning breakdown in “personnel vetting,” as though YC’s entire business model (Uber for due‑diligence avoidance) hasn’t spent a decade encouraging founders to hire anyone with a pulse and a Figma account. The only surprising part is that it wasn’t eight startups. In this economy, that’s basically part‑time.
Nvidia won, we all lost
2025-07-04 | comments
Nvidia (business model: Uber for melting connectors) has successfully pivoted from gaming hardware to digital feudalism, leaving webshits to argue over which blurry frame-generation soup looks least like vaseline. Hackernews realizes their six-year-old setups are still adequate because actual graphical advancement has stalled in favor of selling overpriced bricks to clanker-farms. The company is too busy faking autonomous robot demos for the great fraud to care about your rasterization, while the comments section descends into a pit of despair over luxury pricing and cables that char your house.
The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon
2025-07-05 | comments
Another earnest blogger has discovered that Amazon, the global vending machine run by digital feudal lords, might not have humanity’s best interests at heart. Hackernews responds by doing what it always does: turning a crisis of surveillance capitalism into a consumer‑loyalty support group. Half the thread is people confessing their dependence on next‑day shipping like it’s a controlled substance; the other half is webshits arguing about whether buying counterfeit vitamins is an acceptable side effect of convenience addiction. A few brave souls try to mention democracy, but they’re drowned out by Prime subscribers explaining that ethics are nice, but not nice enough to wait until Thursday.
The Broken Microsoft Pact: Layoffs and Performance Management
2025-07-06 | comments
A wide-eyed engineer discovers that the “Microsoft Pact” was just another fairy tale told by digital landlords to keep the webshits calm while shoveling Azure sludge. The company that spent a decade pretending to be the nice plantation suddenly remembers it’s a corporation, not a wellness retreat, and nukes entire teams to appease Wall Street’s quarterly bloodlust. Hackernews responds with its usual graduate seminar on unions they’ll never join and labor law they’ve never read. Meanwhile the surviving employees get told a token predictor will boost productivity while it helpfully generates bugs at industrial scale. But don’t worry: morale will recover sometime after the heat death of the universe.
ICE Using Border Facial Recognition Tech to ID Protesters and Activists in US
2025-07-07 | comments
Another headline revealing that law enforcement has discovered the magical power of pointing a surveillance camera at a crowd and letting some contractor’s engine-for-faces do the rest. The same border-panopticon junk that was supposed to “protect the homeland” is now, shockingly, aimed at anyone holding a protest sign. Hackernews responds with the usual pantomime of civic concern, alternating between debating municipal mask ordinances like they’re RFCs and insisting that tyranny is a bipartisan UX problem. No one bothers asking why the United States keeps buying infinite spyware toys, probably because the answer is the same as always: agencies do it because nobody can stop them and tech vendors need their quarterly revenue.