Webshit Weekly
August 7, 2025
U.S. fires statistics chief after soft jobs report
2025-08-01 | comments
Another week in the American Empire, where the President fires the statistics guy for failing to vibe-code the numbers into something more electorally moisturizing. Hackernews performs its ritual outrage, loudly comparing the US to Turkey, North Korea, and whatever other autocracies they remember from high school Model UN, while carefully avoiding the obvious point: this is what you get when a country runs itself like a startup, and the CEO thinks metrics are a personal insult. The thread devolves into the usual political LARPing, with webshits miscorrecting each other about macroeconomics they learned from YouTube grifters, all pretending that “firing the data” isn’t the natural endpoint of a society that treats reality as an optional subscription tier.
Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
2025-08-02 | comments
TechCrunch dutifully reports that Lina Khan has pointed at the Figma IPO and declared victory, like a general surveying a battlefield made entirely of burning tricycles. The great intellectual lions of Hackernews gather to reenact their favorite ritual: miscorrecting each other about antitrust law none of them have read, while confidently diagnosing the inner motives of agencies they think are staffed by failed founders. Half of them insist the government should do nothing, the other half insist it should do everything, and all of them believe the only real tragedy is that they personally were not allowed to sell their mood-board startup to a digital feudal lord for a 200x multiple. Meanwhile, Figma goes public, banks siphon off value as usual, and the entire industry congratulates itself for “creating optionality” in the same way a toddler congratulates himself for creating “modern art” with a box of crayons.
One Dataset. No Warning. Google Took Everything. You’re Not Safe Either
2025-08-03 | comments
Another week, another poor soul discovering that trusting Google with your data is like handing your house keys to a raccoon. The author innocently drops a research dataset into Google Drive, only to watch the automated morality police vaporize his entire digital existence for the crime of confusing a trillion‑dollar token‑prediction factory. Now he’s left begging support forms that are engineered to function like Dementors, sucking all hope and life away.
Hackernews, naturally, reacts with its usual blend of victim‑blaming and life‑hacks for surviving life under the digital feudal lords. Half of them immediately pivot to their favorite hobby: explaining how to “just switch to Fastmail” as though the average person wants to spend their Saturday night juggling DNS records because Mountain View’s algorithms can’t distinguish between a research dataset and whatever horror Google Images is serving minors today.
Others proudly announce they encrypt every byte they upload, apparently under the belief that the problem is insufficient paranoia rather than the existence of automated judge‑jury‑executioner bots with a corporate logo. A few webshits suggest building a PWA, because in their world every catastrophe is just a product‑market‑fit failure.
Meanwhile, Google can’t be bothered to say what file supposedly crossed their invisible tripwire. But don’t worry, it’s all fine. After all, as several HNers sagely note, you should simply accept that any digital landlord can unperson you at will and start fresh. It’s amazing how quickly people get philosophical about tyranny when it’s someone else’s account being fed to the gears of the machine.
NASA to announce nuclear reactor on the moon
2025-08-04 | comments
NASA, finally exhausted from decades of setting taxpayer money on fire in low-Earth orbit, has decided the next logical step is to bolt a nuclear reactor to the Moon because apparently someone noticed you can’t run a settlement on vibe coding and solar panels during a two‑week lunar night. Hackernews, as usual, oscillates between armchair reactor engineering and whatever they half‑remember from a SpaceX fan subreddit. The comments are a slurry of moon‑smelter fantasies, territorial‑grab paranoia, and people discovering, with palpable shock, that NASA’s current leadership is a reality‑TV alumnus. The tech industry keeps promising the future; instead we get cosmic-scale infrastructure as designed by LinkedIn influencers.
Trouble with Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy Is Wrong
2025-08-05 | comments
Another Substack manifesto arrives to inform us that, actually, democracy has been misconfigured this whole time, like a YAML file with one bad indent. The author proposes sortition, because nothing says “functioning society” like drafting random citizens into governance the way startups conscript vibe coders into maintaining legacy microservices. Hackernews, naturally, reacts by miscorrecting each other about bureaucracy, lobbying, and deep states, as though any of them have been outside long enough to meet a civil servant. Half the thread is people reinventing political science; the other half is linking their personal whitepapers, because even democracy must now be disrupted via Human Centipede for SEO-slop.
Trump eyes 100% tax on imports containing semiconductors
2025-08-06 | comments
Another week, another threat to unplug the global supply chain unless the digital landlords kiss the ring. This time it’s a 100% tax on anything containing semiconductors, with the usual carve‑outs for whichever trillion‑dollar brand has recently complimented Dear Leader’s tie. Hackernews dutifully reenacts Intro to Civics, shouting “is this even legal” at a country that stopped caring about law the moment it realized you can govern by vibes. Half the thread insists the market will implode; the other half shrugs because nothing matters and never has. Meanwhile, tech CEOs will feign outrage before quietly wiring whatever tribute is required to keep their aura‑farming empires from collapsing for another quarter.
High costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups
2025-08-07 | comments
TechCrunch has once again discovered capitalism, this time by breathlessly reporting that AI coding startups — the latest sacrificial offerings in the Great Game of VC-fueled self-immolation — are shocked to learn that renting a roomful of GPUs from a digital feudal lord and reselling the output at a loss is not a durable business model. The industry’s current crop of automated plagiarism engines, wrapped in neon gradients and marketed as “agentic developer copilots,” are watching their margins collapse faster than the average webshit’s attention span. The article treats this revelation with the stunned awe of someone realizing water is wet.
Hackernews, naturally, interprets all this as a graduate seminar on international trade policy, miscorrecting each other about “dumping” while ignoring the obvious: these companies aren’t selling below cost to destroy competition, they’re doing it because none of them can admit that vibe coding over an API is just aura farming with extra steps. Meanwhile, half the comments insist they can run a better model on a Best Buy gaming PC, which is true in the same way you can technically run Doom on a pregnancy test.
The funniest part is the earnest hand-wringing that startups are “just expensive front ends” for the same token-predictor megamodels they rent at usurious rates. Yes. Correct. Welcome to the entire software industry since 2012.