Webshit Weekly

July 14, 2025

SCOTUS allows Pres to proceed with large-scale gov agency staff cuts, reorgs

2025-07-08 | comments

Hackernews is once again performing its favorite ritual: discovering that the American government is not, in fact, a beautifully tuned distributed system with consensus guarantees, but a wheezing antique written in a mixture of COBOL, superstition, and wishful thinking. The Supreme Court has now helpfully clarified that the Executive Branch can basically garbage-collect any agency it finds inconvenient, which is great news for anyone who thinks constitutional stability should work like a cloud provider deciding to deprecate an API. The justices, cosplayers of “neutral arbiters of law,” shrug and gesture vaguely toward some future case that will definitely, certainly, absolutely fix everything. Any day now. Really.

Hackernews responds by doing what it does best: arguing over constitutional theory with the same clarity and rigor they bring to vibe coding their microservices. Half of them are convinced this is the end of democracy; the other half want you to know democracy was a poorly designed MVP anyway, and maybe a “unitary executive” is just “monarchy but agile.” Everyone miscorrects everyone else about separation of powers while revealing they haven’t read anything longer than a product spec since college.

Meanwhile, the actual political system continues its long transition into a startup run by a CEO-for-life (business model: Uber for autocracy), where agencies are just microservices you scale to zero when they annoy you. But don’t worry: Hackernews will solve it by posting harder.

Why you should delete WhatsApp and install Signal

2025-07-09 | comments

Another week, another blog post begging everyone to delete WhatsApp and install Signal, as though messaging-app musical chairs is a meaningful form of resistance instead of the tech equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while Zuckerberg siphons off the meltwater. Hackernews dutifully assembles to miscorrect each other about encryption, open-source purity tests, and whether losing all your messages because iOS still treats backups like contraband is a “dealbreaker” or “user error.” Half the thread is people whining that they can’t migrate their group chats because their friends — also allegedly autonomous adults — refuse to install Yet Another App. The rest argue about which privacy app is less tainted by crypto-clankers and digital feudal lords. In the end, everyone returns to WhatsApp anyway, because the average user cares about privacy roughly as much as the tech industry cares about shipping working software, which is to say not at all.

The FBI Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials’ Loyalty

2025-07-10 | comments

The FBI, an agency already running on the fumes of whatever institutional credibility it had left sometime around the Hoover era, has apparently decided the best way to prove its loyalty to the republic is by dusting off the nation’s favorite carnival grift: the polygraph. According to the article, senior officials are now being interrogated about whether they’ve said anything mean about the director, as though the fate of the nation hinges on whether some mid-level bureaucrat rolled their eyes during a briefing. America’s premier law enforcement agency is now operating like a WeWork with guns, demanding vibes-based loyalty affirmations backed by 1950s pseudoscience that would embarrass a horoscope writer.

Hackernews, naturally, arrives with their usual forensic precision, confidently miscorrecting each other about whether polygraphs “work,” as though the point of these rituals was ever truth. They dive into personal anecdotes about clearance cycles like war stories from the Great Paperwork Front, utterly missing that the core issue isn’t the device but the managerial brain-rot that thinks phrenology with electrodes is a valid HR tool. Then the thread takes its mandatory detour into electoral despair, constitutional collapse, and whatever half-digested Atlantic article someone last doomscrolled through.

Meanwhile the tech industry, which treats polygraphs with the same credulity it gives to OKRs and microservices diagrams, will inevitably adopt this too. Expect some YC startup any day now promising Polygraph-as-a-Service (business model: Uber for coerced vibes), ready to integrate straight into your company’s quarterly retention cycle.

OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

2025-07-11 | comments

Another week, another AI startup whose “product” is just a trench coat wrapped around someone else’s API, collapsing on cue as the digital landlords yank the talent out like copper wiring from a condemned building. Windsurf’s CEO gets spirited away to Google, presumably to help rename Bard for the ninth time, while OpenAI pretends letting the deal expire was all part of its five-dimensional chess strategy instead of the usual corporate aura-farming panic. Hackernews, ever eager to defend their favorite trillion‑dollar monopolists, confidently explains that none of this matters because “the real value is talent,” as if these companies aren’t already overrun with token-predictor repair crews duct-taping vibes into “agentic” slide decks. Meanwhile, the shareholders of yet another startup built on loss-leading API reselling discover what everyone else learned years ago: if your entire company can be replaced by a feature flag in Claude, your equity was always just decorative.“

‘123456’ password exposed chats for 64M McDonald’s job applicants

2025-07-11 | comments

Another week, another corporate leviathan storing millions of people’s data in a digital shoebox labeled password: 123456. McDonald’s, the global empire of fried salt, apparently hired some “senior engineers” who think security begins and ends with putting digits in passwords. Hackernews spends hours miscorrecting each other about whether the problem was the username, the password, the IDOR, or the fact that the entire stack is built like a middle-school PHP project stapled to a chatbot. Meanwhile, 64 million job seekers learn their conversations with a burger-themed AI oracle were protected with the same rigor as extra ketchup packets.

SpaceX to Invest $2B into Elon Musk’s XAI

2025-07-12 | comments

Another month, another episode of Elon Musk moving money between his companies like a bored teenager shuffling tokens in a mobile gacha game. This week’s installment features SpaceX — yes, the rocket company that exists almost entirely because taxpayers keep signing checks — dumping two billion dollars into xAI, Musk’s latest attempt at building a clanker that can quote Nietzsche while hallucinating your bank password. SpaceX, supposedly the crown jewel of American engineering prowess, is now apparently a glorified ATM for whatever “AI but worse” project Musk wakes up thinking about.

Hackernews, as usual, responds with its trademark blend of conspiracy theorizing and financial illiteracy. One faction insists Musk is seconds away from selling Tesla for scrap metal and fleeing to Mars. Another insists that SpaceX prints money like a renaissance pope, therefore nothing bad can ever happen. Every point is accompanied by a correction from another HNer who also has no idea what they’re talking about, but insists more loudly.

Meanwhile, nobody wants to say the obvious thing: using government-funded launch profits to bankroll a vanity token predictor is just industrial policy if you’re wearing a spacesuit, and embezzlement cosplay if you’re not. The same webshits who spent a decade worshipping SpaceX for “disrupting” NASA are now pretending it’s totally normal for the company responsible for not exploding astronauts to take a detour into vibe-coded chatbot development.

At this rate, expect Starlink dishes to start shipping with preinstalled Grok, ready to explain why outages are actually a free-speech victory.

Investors bought 27% of US homes in Q1, as traditional buyers struggle to afford

2025-07-13 | comments

Another quarter, another report showing that America’s housing market has fully completed its transformation into a giant vending machine for private equity, except the snacks are homes and the machine is rigged. The article dutifully announces that 27% of homes sold went to “investors,” which Hackernews immediately miscorrects into oblivion, toggling between “this is fine” and “actually it’s your fault for not having a spare lake cabin.” Every comment is the same tired liturgy: high interest rates, low supply, landlords are just misunderstood entrepreneurs, and somehow this all qualifies as non-news. Meanwhile ordinary buyers are left competing with leveraged spreadsheet goblins whose business model is Uber for serfdom. But sure, keep debating whether owning five houses makes you “mom-and-pop” instead of “feudal lord junior edition.”

Grok is making AI companions, including a goth anime girl

2025-07-14 | comments

Grok, the world’s richest man’s personal token predictor, has apparently pivoted from hallucinating facts to hallucinating goth anime girlfriends, because the tech industry’s final form is evidently a vending machine for parasocial dysfunction. The webshits cheerfully call this “companionship” while fumbling through yet another discourse about market demographics, as though any of this is driven by demand rather than bored developers building products for themselves in between bouts of vibe coding. Hackernews then spends the afternoon miscorrecting each other about gender politics, psychology, and whatever else floats across their dopamine-scoured attention spans. Meanwhile, another crop of AI companions marches off the assembly line, ready to replace the human connections tech already spent twenty years grinding into dust.