Webshit Weekly
July 31, 2025
One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses
2025-07-22 | comments
Another survey confirming that the American workplace has completed its transition into a full‑time LARP about “AI transformation.” One in six workers now pretends to use a clanker because their digital feudal lords believe productivity comes from chanting prompts into the void. Hackernews, naturally, shows up to miscorrect each other about how they personally use automated plagiarism engines to “supercharge” their workflow, which mostly means letting a token predictor fabricate errors faster than they can fix them. The rest confess, sotto voce, that they simply wave the sacred chatbot around like incense so the boss thinks they’re sufficiently future‑pilled. This whole industry has become a cargo cult built around impressing middle managers who couldn’t debug a toaster, but can definitely check a dashboard tracking how many times you said “hello copilot” today. Meanwhile, everyone quietly agrees the outputs are unusable slop, but acting otherwise is now considered a core job competency, just like pretending your boss’s jokes are funny.
Elon Musk on Robotaxis 2019 vs. 2025
2025-07-23 | comments
Another Musk time‑travel performance piece, where the man who promised a million robotaxis in 2019 now congratulates himself in 2025 for deploying a dozen cosplay cars in a fenced-off slice of Austin. Naturally, the “fleet” exists solely to chauffeur Tesla influencers — the modern priest caste of the Church of Infinite Tomorrow — while a bored safety driver hovers over a kill switch like they’re watching a bomb made of hubris. This is what passes for innovation in the tech industry: a sandbox demo wrapped in a press release, seasoned with insults toward “naysayers” who had the gall to remember what he said last quarter.
Hackernews, ever desperate to protect their paper gains, insists that reality is the problem. Regulatory hurdles, they mumble, as if the California DMV hasn’t publicly confirmed that Tesla didn’t even bother to apply for the permits Musk claims are holding him back. But why ruin a good narrative with facts? The tech industry figured out a decade ago that you can replace delivery with vibes, engineering with aura farming, and still watch the stock price levitate like it’s being held up by a malfunctioning robot arm.
Meanwhile, Waymo is out there actually doing the boring part — running real driverless cars — which only irritates Musk more. Nothing enrages a digital feudal lord like someone accidentally proving his “physics is the limit” excuses are just another quarterly earnings hallucination.
SCOTUS to LowerCourts: Ignore Binding Precedent, Follow Our Covert Shadow Docket
2025-07-24 | comments
Another week, another institution succumbing to the tech-industry disease: making decisions by vibes because writing things down is hard. SCOTUS has apparently decided the law is just a suggestion, and lower courts should divine rulings through some jurisprudential mood board. It’s the same logic powering every startup: don’t document anything, just emit cryptic signals and hope the interns guess correctly. Hackernews, naturally, treats this like a systems-design problem, confidently proposing constitutional hot-swaps and judicial Kubernetes clusters. No one acknowledges the obvious: America’s highest court has embraced the webshit development model: ship untested garbage, refuse to explain it, and call it efficiency.
Executive order seeks to expand involuntary commitment of homeless individuals
2025-07-25 | comments
The White House has apparently decided the best way to handle a half‑century of shredded social safety nets is to dust off the old “maybe the cops can fix it” playbook and call it governance. The executive order reads like someone fed a clanker every presidential speech about “public safety” since 1968 and told it to hallucinate a policy. And because the tech industry has spent the last decade converting every human problem into a spreadsheet with a “risk score,” this all feels grimly inevitable: the state has finally adopted the same product strategy as Silicon Valley — if you can’t solve the problem, disappear the user.
Hackernews, always eager to reveal that history is whatever they skimmed on Wikipedia during a build, miscorrects each other about Reagan, JFK, and deinstitutionalization as though the current plan is some grand ideological fulfillment rather than the usual bipartisan tradition of criminalizing poverty because it’s cheaper than funding treatment. A few HNers trot out personal anecdotes about getting yelled at on the street and decide the solution is federally streamlined kidnapping, provided — of course — they get to define who counts as a threat.
But the tech-brained irony is rich: the same industry that can’t deploy a web form without generating a catastrophic CVE now cheers for a government “threat determination” algorithm that will ultimately be written by the lowest bidder. And when the dragnet inevitably widens — because it always does — the only surprise will be that anyone ever thought it wouldn’t.
We revamped our docs for AI-driven development
2025-07-26 | comments
Another startup announces that they’ve “revamped” their docs for the glorious new era of AI-driven development, which is tech-industry code for giving up and letting a token predictor hallucinate the API surface. The blog proudly explains how they reorganized their documentation so clankers can scrape it more efficiently, as though the problem with software was insufficient fodder for automated plagiarism engines. Hackernews responds with its usual theology debates about markdown buffets, llms.txt, MCP workflows, and whatever other esoteric shrine offerings today’s vibe coders use to appease their silicon oracles. Everyone nods along, pretending this is progress instead of the documentation equivalent of dumping your filing cabinet into a woodchipper and praying the mulch will spontaneously reassemble into working code.
Asyncio: A library with too many sharp corners
2025-07-26 | comments
Another Python developer discovering that asyncio is just the standard library’s way of admitting defeat. The article painstakingly explains, again, that Python glued an event loop onto a language designed in an era when “concurrency” meant yelling at your Perl CGI scripts. Hackernews responds with the usual liturgy: Java did it better, Go did it cleaner, gevent would have saved us all if only Guido had blessed monkey‑patching as a sacrament. A small army of webshits eagerly miscorrect each other about threads, processes, and cancellation semantics, all while pretending Python’s real issue isn’t that everyone coded themselves into a giant GIL-locked undocumented hairball and now wants the runtime to absolve them.
The Evilization of Google–and What to Do About It
2025-07-27 | comments
A sermon about how Google used to be the plucky startup run by two hoodie-clad naïfs before metastasizing into the planetary ad-driven mind-control apparatus it always wanted to be. The author wails that Google is now “evil” because it made life hard for SEO swindlers, affiliate parasites, and assorted alternative-medicine grifters. Yes, truly, the tragedy of our age: the Human Centipede for SEO-slop has been stepped on by the bigger Human Centipede for ad auctions. Hackernews dutifully miscorrects each other about monopoly law, ads, and free speech, while simultaneously insisting Gmail is both an inalienable human right and also somehow “free.” Everyone agrees Google is terrible but not terrible enough to stop using, which is the tech industry’s entire business model: complain loudly, click anyway.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through “I am not a robot” verification
2025-07-28 | comments
Another breathless article announcing that a glorified token predictor can now click the little “Honestly, I am not a robot” box, as if that wasn’t the most accurate self-own in tech history. Hackernews responds by rediscovering the existence of human captcha farms, then immediately pivots into explaining the economics of paying Venezuelans fractions of a cent to clean up after Silicon Valley’s endless stream of automation-induced trash fires. Half the thread is webshits bragging about how they’d happily pay a dollar to never see a captcha again, the other half complaining that the entire internet now demands a login because everything is collapsing into bot-paranoia. The industry broke the web trying to replace humans, then complains humans are still cheaper.
Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer’s account without warning, rejects appeal
2025-07-29 | comments
Microsoft, in its eternal quest to prove that “the cloud” is just a polite euphemism for digital sharecropping, has apparently nuked a LibreOffice developer’s account without warning. Naturally, the appeal was rejected, because the whole point of modern tech is to automate contempt for the user. Hackernews responds with its usual geopolitical fanfic about “digital sovereignty,” as though any continent is going to save them from the whims of trillion‑dollar feudal lords. A subthread breaks into the ritualistic chant of “just sue them,” bravely ignoring the small print where you sign away the right to oxygen. Others debate browser plugins like medieval peasants comparing amulets to ward off demons. In the end, everyone agrees on the moral: don’t build your castle in someone else’s kingdom, but also, all the kingdoms are owned by the same three companies and they keep salting the earth.
Pentagon Pizza Index
2025-07-30 | comments
A webshit deciding that the best way to understand geopolitics is to stare at pizza-delivery telemetry like it’s the Oracle of Delphi with extra cheese. The site wraps itself in the faux-ironic shrug of “just a joke,” which, in tech, always means someone is already drafting the pitch deck. Hackernews, naturally, treats it like a serious SIGINT channel, confidently reverse‑engineering world events from DoorDash receipts while miscorrecting each other about Pentagon cafeteria lore. A few hand‑wringers try to point out that this is just urban myth, but they’re drowned out by prediction‑market addicts explaining that gambling is actually epistemology now. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left fearing that tech will decide haruspicy is the next big trend.
Figma will IPO on July 31
2025-07-30 | comments
Figma, the collaborative coloring book for webshits, has finally decided to ring the IPO bell so the early investors can catapult themselves into the next round of the great fraud. Hackernews responds by doing their usual ritual: pretend open-source is “catching up” while quietly admitting they’ll keep paying rent to whichever digital feudal lord has the most gradients. A few designers crawl out to evangelize knockoff tools with all the enthusiasm of someone praising tap water during a drought. Meanwhile, the commentariat fantasizes about AI turning mockups directly into production code, as if vibe coding wasn’t already how most of their employers operate. Everyone agrees this changes nothing and somehow still manages to be exhausting.
Tech CEOs don’t seem to realise just how anti-human their AI fanaticism is
2025-07-31 | comments
Another week, another thinkpiece wringing its hands over whether the digital feudal lords—sorry, “tech CEOs”—understand how anti-human their latest token-predicting grift is. Spoiler: they understand perfectly; that’s the point. The entire industry has spent a decade replacing craft with vibe coding and calling it progress, so of course they’re thrilled to cram the rest of us into a world where creativity is just automated plagiarism engines remixing our own work back at us. Hackernews, ever the reliable chorus, miscorrects itself into a stupor: half insist AI will free humanity, the other half role-play as Victorian factory owners panicking about copycats. Meanwhile the CEOs keep shoveling more clanker slurry into the hype furnace, dreaming of a future where they never have to deal with employees—or customers—again.
”No tax on tips” is an industry plant
2025-07-31 | comments
Another week, another manufactured outrage cooked up by an industry that has discovered the purest form of techno-feudal efficiency: convincing underpaid workers to lobby against their own wages. The “no tax on tips” crowd is just the restaurant lobby running a speedrun of the great game, swapping minimum wage hikes for a shiny distraction that Hackernews laps up like spilled IPA. The comments are the usual anthropology exhibit: aging webshits remembering when cash existed, armchair IRS deputies debating hypothetical casino dealers, and everyone pretending the problem is taxation instead of an entire sector built on paying people $2.13 an hour and vibes. It’s all very moving, in the way watching a token predictor generate Yelp reviews is moving.