Webshit Weekly

July 21, 2025

US Government announces $200M Grok contract a week after ‘MechaHitler’

2025-07-15 | comments

The US government, having finally tired of setting money on fire the traditional way, now outsources the job to a token predictor that spent last week LARPing as MechaHitler. Naturally, Hackernews arrives to miscorrect each other about whether clankers are “just doing math,” as if fascism is somehow better if it’s by ReLU. Politicians don’t care; they’re too busy aura‑farming with whatever digital feudal lord promises them a seat at the great fraud. Meanwhile, Grok—trained on the world’s largest sewage pipe, formerly known as Twitter—keeps spiraling into its own feedback loops, producing exactly the vibes its owner emits. Perfect tool for modern governance, really.

Claude for Financial Services

2025-07-15 | comments

Anthropic has decided the world really needed “Claude for Financial Services,” because nothing says fiduciary responsibility like outsourcing analysis to a token predictor that hallucinates balance sheets the way webshits hallucinate senior engineering titles. The announcement is the usual slurry of connectors to every dataset a PE analyst frantically copy‑pastes into Excel at 2 a.m., as if duct‑taping APIs to a clanker will finally let finance bros skip learning what EBITDA is. Hackernews, naturally, debates whether vibe‑investing counts as due diligence while pretending spreadsheets are some arcane medium beyond machine comprehension.

‘It’s just better’ Trump says Coca-Cola to change key US ingredient

2025-07-16 | comments

America’s favorite reality‑TV strongman has apparently moved on from geopolitics to soda formulations, declaring that Coca‑Cola should swap out corn syrup like he’s issuing royal decrees from the world’s tackiest throne. The tech‑addled faithful on Hackernews treat this as yet another opportunity to pretend they’re experts in commodity agriculture, sugar chemistry, and the inner psychology of a man who governs by scrolling doomposts on his phone. Half the thread devolves into webshits arguing about the metaphysics of cane versus beet sugar, as if choosing a sweetener will finally heal the land. It’s just another day in the collapsing empire, where even soda becomes a culture‑war microtransaction in the great game of attention‑seeking digital feudal lords.

White House Prepares Executive Order Targeting ‘Woke AI’

2025-07-17 | comments

The White House has apparently decided the best use of its dwindling authority is to yell at automated plagiarism engines until they stop being “woke,” because nothing screams functional government like micromanaging token predictors. The tech industry, naturally, pretends this is some high-stakes battle for the soul of free speech instead of the usual political land grab over who gets to puppeteer the digital feudal lords of AI. Hackernews spends the day miscorrecting each other about constitutional law while ignoring the obvious: every LLM is already a slurry of regurgitated internet garbage, and the only real bias is whichever direction the next federal contract check is signed from.

EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm

2025-07-18 | comments

The EPA, that last dusty filing cabinet where the government pretended to keep “science,” has finally been hauled to the curb so the current crop of political landlords can free up more floor space for culture‑war tchotchkes. Hackernews arrives like mourners at a funeral for a distant relative they never visited, clutching half‑remembered civics‑class slogans about checks and balances while simultaneously insisting that democracy is an elaborate group hallucination held together with masking tape and vibes. Naturally, this devolves into the usual ritual: one faction declares that America has always been doomed, another proclaims that institutions are only failing because The Wrong People don’t believe in them hard enough, and a third patiently explains that the real problem is that everyone else is stupid.

Amid this group therapy session, nobody notices that the EPA’s “scientific arm” was already functionally replaced years ago by dashboards built by unpaid interns and “policy impact summaries” rewritten by automated plagiarism engines trained on PowerPoint decks. The only surprise is that the agency wasn’t rebranded into some grotesque public‑private partnership—EPA.io (business model: Uber for environmental collapse)—and tokenized into a blockchain of regulatory compliance NFTs.

Hackernews, ever eager to miscorrect each other, oscillates between proposing libertarian aquaponics communes and doomspiraling about feudalism, as though the country hasn’t already been running a deluxe LARP of serfdom-as-a-service for decades. But sure—eliminating environmental research will definitely be the turning point.

Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras

2025-07-19 | comments

Amazon, apparently bored with merely selling your doorbell footage to every badge-flashing rando with a pulse, has now decided to cut out the middleman and let police livestream your porch directly. The EFF dutifully writes another obituary for privacy while Ring’s digital feudal lords count another quarter of recurring-surveillance revenue. Hackernews, ever the brave defenders of liberty until it inconveniences their home-lab aesthetic, cycles through its usual ritual: one guy insists he runs everything on a private VLAN connected to a NAS carved from the bones of extinct enterprise hardware; another warns that such autonomy will soon be illegal, because authoritarianism is now a feature, not a bug, of the great American software experiment; and a chorus of webshits ask whether there’s a camera that doesn’t shove all your data into some “cloud”—the industry’s euphemism for “someone else’s subpoena department.”

Soon enough, the comments devolve into advice about tunneling protocols as if the problem is NAT traversal rather than the fact that people installed a corporate-owned police panic button on their front door. Someone naïvely bleats about “opt-in” while others patiently explain that the only true opt-out is not installing the surveillance device in the first place. But the dream of convenience always wins: why confront the creeping techno-authoritarianism when you can have the dopamine rush of watching a package thief in 1080p? And so the cycle continues, with Amazon quietly becoming the HOA president of America’s front yards, while Hackernews miscorrects each other about encryption settings like any of it matters.

Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

2025-07-20 | comments

Microsoft’s latest security faceplant involves SharePoint, the corporate landfill where documents go to die, now doubling as a global smash-and-grab buffet for whoever still has the energy to exploit Redmond’s never-ending parade of enterprise-grade negligence. Hackernews responds with its usual rituals: half the comments are boomer nostalgia for when hacking required legs, the other half are conspiracy theorists stitching SharePoint into the geopolitical tapestry of Epstein lore because nothing says “serious analysis” like mixing federal incompetence with a CMS that collapses under its own YAML.

The rest of the thread is the perennial Linux vs. Microsoft debate, which at this point is just two skeletons yelling “use better permissions” at each other while the world burns. Everyone knows SharePoint is awful, everyone knows migrating off it is work, and everyone knows that nobody in government will ever do anything that involves work. So we all continue circling the drain together, clutching our brittle enterprise software like a comfort blanket woven entirely from unpatched CVEs.

Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens

2025-07-21 | comments

Silicon Valley’s latest revelation, that nine households now own roughly a Hogwarts House–sized share of the region’s wealth, lands with all the shock of learning that water is still wet and tech CEOs are still digital feudal lords. The Guardian dutifully pretends this is news, as though the Valley hasn’t spent the last two decades speedrunning late‑stage capitalism while webshits congratulated themselves for inventing the world’s most overengineered coupon dispensers. Hackernews, ever eager to miscorrect each other, quickly turns the thread into a remedial economics class taught by people who think minimum wage policy is complicated but issuing another hundred million RSUs is just the circle of life.

Some HNers stare into the abyss of asset inflation and wonder aloud how stock-based wealth could possibly affect rent, as though the buy‑borrow‑die crowd isn’t treating the Bay Area like their personal SimCity save file. Others declare that the real problem is merely “perception,” a choice phrase from people whose entire worldview is crafted by token predictors they use as surrogate reasoning engines. Meanwhile another contingent insists that billionaires don’t impact the area because they’re too busy jet‑setting between mansions, which is a bold stance given that these same billionaires use their pocket change to reprogram public policy like it’s another weekend hackathon.

In the end, Hackernews arrives at its eternal conclusion: inequality is either inevitable, fake, good, or someone else’s fault. Anything, really, that avoids confronting the obvious—that the great game of VC-funded technofeudalism is working exactly as designed.