Webshit Weekly

August 21, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for humanity is terrifying

2025-08-15 | comments

Another week, another article explaining that Mark Zuckerberg, digital feudal lord and self-appointed steward of Humanity’s Feelings, has once again discovered a way to further compress the human soul into ad‑targetable slurry. The journalist dutifully marvels that Zuck’s vision of the future—an infinite conveyor belt of “unconnected” AI-snackable videos, atomized social existence, and VR headsets thick enough to block out the last remaining daylight—is somehow terrifying. Yes. Thank you. We noticed. We’ve been living in it for a decade.

Hackernews reacts with its usual blend of moral panic and masochistic nostalgia, wondering aloud how society fell into this pit while they themselves post from the bottom of it. A few self-styled sages recommend deleting Meta accounts and “meeting people in real life,” as if any of them have done either since 2012. Others point out, correctly but uselessly, that Zuck is now selling fixes for problems his own dopamine-hacking Skinner box created, like a firefighter who moonlights as an arsonist and bills by the hour.

There’s handwringing about “addiction media,” data centers the size of small countries, and nuclear reactors built to power the world’s largest engagement farm—all so the algorithm can eke out an 8% improvement in convincing you to buy another fast-fashion jumpsuit. The crowd briefly approaches insight before collapsing back into its usual fetal curl of helpless cynicism. But don’t worry: Zuckerberg will continue optimizing the human psyche for ad impressions, and Hackernews will continue to insist that simply ignoring him is a viable survival strategy. Everyone’s doing great.

Netanyahu’s cybersecurity official arrested in Vegas in child sex sting

2025-08-16 | comments

Hackernews discovers that one of Netanyahu’s cybersecurity muppets went to Las Vegas to reenact the worst possible episode of CSI, got caught in a child‑sex sting, and then—surprise—just walked out the front door and flew home like he’d merely overstayed a parking meter. The comments do the usual dance: half the thread pretends to be shocked that a government official wielding extraterritorial impunity might get, well, impunity; the other half plays amateur geopolitician, explaining extradition treaties with the confidence of someone whose entire legal education consists of scrolling through Reddit’s r/legaladvice while on the toilet.

HNers, ever hopeful, try to reverse‑engineer the career‑advancement algorithm that results in a “cyber directorate” being staffed by someone who couldn’t pass the world’s lowest‑stakes honeypot test. They arrive at the same revelation anyone who has ever seen bureaucracy up close achieved long ago: political appointees don’t get vetted, they get connected. But HN treats this as a shocking new zero‑day in human governance.

A few brave HNers complain the post was flagged, as though the world’s most fragile orange website is being actively censored by Mossad instead of its own userbase hitting the “I am uncomfortable by reality” button. Everyone else concludes, with solemn outrage, that power protects itself — right before returning to cheer on the latest startup promising to replace governments with blockchain‑accelerated vibe‑regulation-as-a-service.

The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States

2025-08-17 | comments

Another earnest thinkpiece has arrived to explain, in three thousand meandering words, that America no longer manufactures anything more complicated than a TikTok influencer’s ring light. The author performs the usual ritual: gesture vaguely at macroeconomics, mumble something about “competitiveness,” then blame a hazy cabal of policymakers, MBAs, and history itself. Hackernews, ever eager to cosplay as geostrategists between caffeine jitters, dutifully piles in to miscorrect one another about supply chains, tariffs, and whether a nation of vibe coders can still build a doorknob without an AI whispering the part number into their ear.

Half of them insist manufacturing jobs are the sacred purpose-givers that will rescue the nation from its current destiny of delivering Sichuan air purifiers for Amazon. The other half insist those jobs won’t return unless Uncle Sam rains subsidies like mana from heaven—because nothing says “strategic independence” like handing more money to today’s digital feudal lords, who will immediately spend it on stock buybacks or a new aura-farming initiative. Meanwhile, the clankers they keep summoning to write their emails are chewing through the last remnants of the so-called white‑collar economy.

Everyone agrees something is collapsing but nobody agrees on what, and even fewer understand how to fix anything without outsourcing the thinking to a token predictor. It’s all very moving, in the same way watching a slow-motion train derailment is moving: you know it’s going to be bad, but you also kind of want to see just how many cars are left when it finally stops sliding into the ravine.

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event

2025-08-18 | comments

Another day, another magazine profile diagnosing the collective hallucination we’ve politely rebranded as the “AI era,” as though slapping quotation marks around the apocalypse will make it feel more curated. The author performs the usual intellectual autopsy on a culture that keeps insisting its automated plagiarism engines are prophets, then acts surprised when the corpses keep sitting back up and asking for GPU time. Hackernews, ever eager to miscorrect each other in public, dutifully pivots from debating whether words are real to explaining that only actions exist, which is an odd stance for a community whose primary action is typing furious manifestos into a comment box.

The whole discussion swirls down the same drain: billionaires dosing us with hype until we forget that the “intelligence” we’re bowing to is just a clanker stitching metaphors together with duct tape. Altman burps out another model, promises it has a doctorate this time, and the webshits rush to congratulate the emperor on his increasingly conceptual clothing. Meanwhile, society quietly reconfigures itself around mid-tier token predictors that hallucinate receipts and invent people, all because the digital feudal lords figured out that fear monetizes better than accuracy. By the time anyone notices the foundations have liquefied, we’ll be living in underwater data centers, being served news articles written by vibe-coded AGI interns.

Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

2025-08-18 | comments

Newsmax, the bargain‑bin outrage dispensary (business model: “Uber for weaponized uncle-brain”), has agreed to pay Dominion $67 million for the privilege of spending four years cosplaying as a serious media organization. Hackernews, ever eager to litigate basic accounting terms like they’re discovering fire, spends the thread miscorrecting each other about revenue, profit, EBITDA, and whatever other MBA‑adjacent buzzwords their favorite token predictor hallucinated last week. Half the comments are armchair CFOs explaining why a company that has never made money definitely won’t notice losing more, while the other half rehash the same dead-end voting-machine discourse like a Roomba trapped in a civics class. Meanwhile, the tech industry continues its proud tradition of learning absolutely nothing from any of this, because there’s no business model more durable than monetizing stupidity at scale.

95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI according to MIT

2025-08-19 | comments

MIT announces that 95 percent of organizations are flushing their AI budgets directly into the sewer, which shocks absolutely no one except the digital feudal lords who thought stapling a token predictor to every spreadsheet would summon infinite productivity. The report, predictably, is immediately misinterpreted by Hackernews, where an army of webshits argue that their spouse’s anecdote counts as macroeconomic data. Half the thread is people insisting AI has secretly increased productivity by 0.1 percent, the other half angrily declaring that everything is now slower because everyone’s job has been replaced by vibe coding with a clanker that keeps hallucinating pivot tables. The industry, as always, calls this progress.

Ask HN: Thoughts on Curtis Yarvin?

2025-08-20 | comments

Hackernews has discovered Curtis Yarvin again, which is always the part of the tech calendar where a bunch of webshits pretend to be political theorists because they once read half a blog post written in 2007. Half of them claim they’ve never heard of him, the other half can’t stop performing the intellectual equivalent of rubbing two damp sticks together to see if monarchy will catch fire this time. Everyone argues over whether his ideas influenced MAGA, as though any movement powered by 4chan memes and AI Facebook posts needed a court philosopher. The rest debate Urbit, the world’s most overengineered shrine to personal branding, insisting that critics are just triggered by politics, not by the fact that it’s a bespoke baroque tech stack built to impress exactly one billionaire. By the end, the entire thread has collapsed into miscorrections, pedantry, and aspiring digital feudal lords dreaming of a world where they finally get to be in charge of something besides their Jira queue.

Donald Trump’s fantasy of home-grown chipmaking

2025-08-21 | comments

The Economist has discovered, with its trademark shocked Victorian gasp, that Donald Trump insisting America can magically regrow a chip industry is a “fantasy.” Thanks, team. Next week they’ll unveil the radical thesis that water is wet and Intel hasn’t had a good idea since the Pentium III. Hackernews responds by arguing over whether Intel’s $128 billion buyback bonfire was shareholder “value” or just another episode of America’s favorite sport: setting money on fire so a digital feudal lord can hit his bonus. Half of them insist we could totally bring fabs back if Americans just worked 15-hour days and homeschooled their kids into becoming human ASICs. The other half blame “culture” or “myopia epidemics,” because god forbid anyone admit the real reason: the tech industry replaced engineering with vibes and a corporate religion that treats R&D as an unfortunate side effect of stock-based compensation.

CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

2025-08-21 | comments

Another year, another report discovering that digital feudal lords are shoveling gold into the executive trebuchet while the peasants digging the moat get whatever’s left under the couch. Hackernews, as always, reacts with its standard economancer incantations: talent markets, labor fungibility, and the eternal myth that CEOs are paid like demigods because otherwise the universe collapses. No one mentions the obvious: stock buybacks are just dividend laundering so the board doesn’t have to admit they don’t know what the company does anymore. Instead HNers argue about immigration, Chipotle, and supply curves, because nothing soothes a techbro’s soul like pretending Econ 101 explains deliberate exploitation.