Webshit Weekly

September 21, 2025

Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions

2025-09-15 | comments

We’ve finally found a way to explain how GPT-3 manages to sound like it knows everything while actually knowing nothing: it’s all down to the mathematical miracle of ‘quasi-orthogonality.’ Nicholas Yoder has published a deep dive into how language models pack billions of concepts into a measly 12,000 dimensions, using the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma to prove that if you have enough space, everything is practically at a right angle to everything else. It’s a beautiful theory that suggests the secret to intelligence is just finding a way to cram enough unit vectors onto a sphere until they start whispering to each other in high-dimensional space.

The real entertainment, however, is the meta-disaster unfolding on Hacker News. In a glorious moment of “AI eating its own tail,” the community has collectively decided that this article about AI concept-packing was itself produced by an LLM that couldn’t be bothered to check its own charts. Commenters are tearing into the “Gradient Trap” and the inconsistencies in the data visualizations, with one user accurately summarizing the current state of the internet: “if they couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it.” We’ve reached the endgame of the generative era where we use machines to write mathematical justifications for our machines, and other machines to fact-check them, while the humans just stand around wondering why the 100-dimensional projection of a billionaire’s croissant looks so much like a “Looking For Work” sign.

Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync

2025-09-16 | comments

Google has finally achieved the ultimate goal of user experience design: making it just as easy for a hacker to drain your life savings as it is for you to recover a forgotten password. David Scoville, a man who literally designs authentication experiences for a living, recently found out that his $130,000 crypto nest egg was no match for Google’s commitment to “convenience.” The scam was a masterclass in high-fidelity phishing: a fake Google support call backed by spoofed @google.com emails that Gmail’s own filters apparently viewed with the same trust as a message from your grandmother.

The real hero of the story, however, is Google Authenticator’s “cloud sync” feature. In a move that truly redefines the “something you have” part of 2FA to “something Google has on their servers,” the cloud sync feature ensures that once an attacker gets into your Gmail, they also get the keys to every other vault you’ve ever built. It’s a wonderful bit of “security” theater where the 2FA codes are synced to the very account they’re supposed to protect, creating a circular dependency that would be hilarious if it weren’t so expensive. On Hacker News, the consensus is a mix of sympathy, victim-blaming, and the cold realization that we’ve traded actual security for the ability to not lose our codes when we drop our phones in the toilet.

ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair

2025-09-17 | comments

The FCC has finally discovered a “public interest” standard that everyone can agree on: whatever keeps the local broadcast conglomerates happy enough to approve their next $8 billion merger. Disney’s ABC has yanked Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested, with all the subtlety of a mob boss, that broadcast licenses might be a lot harder to come by if “conduct” didn’t change. It turns out that when Carr says “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the “easy way” involves major station owners like Nexstar and Sinclair preempting a show before the network even finishes its morning coffee.

The catalyst was a monologue about the murder of a conservative activist, which served as a perfect pretext for the administration to demand “professionalism and accountability” — translated from the original PR-speak as “total subservience.” Sinclair is even demanding Kimmel make a “meaningful donation” to Turning Point USA, proving that the distance between a broadcast license and a protection racket is about as thin as the paper it’s printed on. Over on Hacker News, the discussion is a predictable loop of “the First Amendment doesn’t apply to broadcast” vs. “this is a chilling precedent.” But the real story is the corporate synergy: why stand up for a comedian when you can trade him for Tegna? We’ve reached the logical end of the broadcast era, where the “public interest” is served by replacing satire with a one-hour tribute special that ensures you don’t get stuck in regulatory limbo.

When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of “Content Jail”

2025-09-18 | comments

We’ve successfully transitioned from the “information superhighway” to a collection of high-walled digital fiefdoms where the only law is the whim of a confused algorithm and the only recourse is knowing someone who shares a Slack channel with Mark Zuckerberg. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is documenting the latest round of “Facebook Jail” casualties — this time, medical clinics and research centers whose accounts were deleted overnight for the crime of mentioning medication. Meta’s response, as always, is a mixture of PR-approved “we care about free speech” and the cold reality of an “anonymous inscrutable guillotine.”

As the EFF points out, the system isn’t just broken; it’s feudal. If your organization’s entire digital presence is wiped out by a regex error, you don’t file a ticket; you hunt for a digital rights group that happens to have a direct line to a Meta staffer. It’s a bold new model of customer service where your “right” to exist on the platform is directly proportional to how many media outlets find your situation embarrassing enough to write about. Hacker News is correctly identifying this as a form of institutional hostility, where companies send millions of “noreply” emails but treat an incoming message like a biological weapon. We are living in an era where “democratizing communication” means building a system so complex that its own creators can’t explain why they just banned an abortion clinic, but they’re always “deeply sorry” it happened — right after the New York Times calls them for comment.

Meta’s live demo fails; “AI” recording plays before the actor takes the steps

2025-09-18 | comments

Meta’s latest “AI” demo was so advanced it could predict the future — specifically, it played the pre-recorded response before the human actor even finished the prompt. It’s a bold move to automate the “live” part of a live demo, but when you’ve spent $100 billion on AI, you can afford to skip the pesky linearity of time. While Zuck tries to convince the world that VR glasses are the future, the technology seems more interested in proving that “Artificial Intelligence” is mostly just “Automated Incompetence.”

Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks

2025-09-19 | comments

Obsidian, a wrapper for Chromium that lets you store plain text files but requires thousands of dependencies to display them, wants to talk to you about “safety.” They aren’t promising “security,” mind you — just that it’s “safer” if you use fewer plugins. The Hacker News crowd is predictably divided between “JavaScript is a sandbox miracle” and “npm is a dumpster fire.” The irony of a multi-megabyte Markdown editor preaching about supply chain minimalism is apparently lost on everyone except the people still using Vim.