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Webshit Weekly

September 30, 2025

2025-09-22 | comments

The Trump administration has officially linked autism to Tylenol, a policy decision seemingly derived from RFK Jr. engaging in government-level feelings-are-evidence. Instead of data, they are running on pure vibes, selecting the one bad abstract that fits their narrative while ignoring the entire replication crisis. Hackernews, desperate to apply their engineering brain to biology, immediately begins miscorrecting each other on the difference between correlation and causation, as if the government cares about their unit tests. The comments section reveals the true soul of the tech worker: a mix of impotent rage and genuine concern for Johnson & Johnson’s stock price. It’s a clanker presidency, generating debt in human lives. While the rest of the world watches in horror, the HN crowd wonders if they can refactor the FDA or if this is just a feature of the new government. Reality is just a bug to be shouted at until it goes away.

‘Your Countries Are Going to Hell’: Trump Airs His Grievances at the U.N

2025-09-23 | comments

Hackernews attempts to debug global politics, treating a dictator fanclub meeting like a particularly dry quarterly earnings call. The webshits gather to perform extensive vibe coding on the transcript, convinced that pointing out “projection” is the same as understanding the machinations of the great game. They debate the mental firmware of the speaker like he’s a legacy mainframe that refuses to patch, completely missing that their industry’s obsession with efficiency and “disruption” paved the road for this exact flavor of chaos. It is a festival of miscorrecting each other on the finer points of nonsense, proving once again that the only thing a webshit loves more than premature optimization is pretending they understand the world outside their IDE.

An open letter calling for a hard fork of Rails to remove DHH’s influence

2025-09-24 | comments

A group of webshits (business model: Patreon for unearned moral superiority) demands a hard fork of Rails because the guy who invented the framework won’t stop posting manifestos. Instead of writing code, the saviors of open source are publishing an open letter, because “vibe coding” a replacement framework is hard work when you could just be yelling at a BDFL on GitHub. Hackernews immediately pivots to the critical task of arguing about the precise definition of “British,” engaging in the usual pedantic miscorrection of anyone who suggests politics shouldn’t infect your gemfile. Everyone agrees that the solution to software tyranny is another governance committee, because what the world really needs is more bureaucracy surrounding a glorified HTML generator. It’s the circle of tech: someone builds a tool, gets famous, goes insane, and the community demands a revolution that will never happen because nobody actually wants to maintain the dependency tree of a fork nobody uses.

SEC forgives three scammers who bilked Americans out of millions

2025-09-24 | comments

The SEC (business model: “Uber for regulatory capture”) has decided that crime is actually just a subscription service, forgiving three grifters who successfully pilfered three quarters of a billion dollars because they remembered to pay their protection money. While the webshits on Hackernews wail about the death of the rule of law, they ignore that this is simply the natural endpoint of the startup ecosystem: commit fraud at scale and you get a pardon; do it at a small scale and you get a sentencing hearing. These “scammers” weren’t criminals; they were merely early adopters of “agentic” value extraction, operating with the same “move fast and break things” philosophy that gave us Theranos and FTX.

The comments section predictably devolves into a performative orgy of despair, where users miscorrect each other on whether this is textbook fascism or just the market efficiently pricing in corruption, completely missing the irony that their own “digital feudal lords” operate under the exact same calculus. It’s just aura farming for the legal system: if you donate to the right politician or hire the right lawyer, the hallucinated code of the law compiles in your favor. The tech sector loves to pretend they are meritocratic, but the only skill being measured here is the ability to pay the bribes to the right people.

Why is Elonmusk so obsessed with sex and genitalia?

2025-09-25 | comments

The exhausted webshits of Hackernews convene to debate the tweeting habits of the world’s richest emotional toddler. The pressing issue of the day is why Elon Musk (business model: “Uber for Government Subsidies and Public Meltdowns”) is seemingly obsessed with sex and genitalia, a mystery that ranks right up there with “why does the sun shine” for anyone who has observed a man with a god complex and unlimited resources. The comments section is a sad tableau of disillusioned acolytes realizing their “source of conscience” is just a divorced man-child engaging in extreme aura farming to feel something. Various users attempt to perform amateur psychoanalysis, diagnosing the billionaire with “daddy issues” and a desperate need for validation, as if explaining the pathology of a digital feudal lord will make the stock price stop tanking. Others bravely defend his right to be a creep, provided he stays out of politics, while the rest of the thread devolves into miscorrecting each other about whether we should expect moral leadership from someone who acts like an incel on a Mountain Dew bender. The discussion eventually pivots to the logistics of streaming spaghetti pornography on Starlink, because why wouldn’t it. It is a stark reminder that the tech industry is desperate for a hero, even if that hero is just a sentient meme generator with a rocket fetish who never matured past the age of thirteen.

Elon Musk and Prince Andrew named in latest Epstein files release

2025-09-26 | comments

A document dump reveals that Elon Musk (business model: “Uber for impulse control issues”) was scheduled to visit Epstein’s island, prompting Hackernews to forensically analyze a calendar reminder like it’s a merge conflict in a legacy codebase. The consensus among the webshits is that showing up on a pedophile’s schedule is just networking, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions just because the world’s richest man might be hanging out with a convicted sex trafficker. The comment thread quickly devolves into the usual partisan aura farming, where users argue over which digital feudal lord is less likely to be a monster, ignoring the obvious fact that the entire industry is built on a foundation of moral rot. Someone inevitably mentions Musk’s automated plagiarism engines and their obsession with “waifu girls,” proving that the only thing separating a tech CEO from a Bond villain is a spreadsheet and a PR team. It’s all inconsequential, of course; the Great Fraud continues uninterrupted, and the clankers keep hallucinating a better future that was never going to include accountability for the investors.

NixOS moderation team resigns over NixOS Steering Committee’s interference

2025-09-27 | comments

NixOS (business model: “Linux for people who hate getting things done”) collapses because the volunteer janitors quit rather than answer to an elected committee. The moderators, apparently operating under the delusion that they are the UN Security Council of a chat room, are shocked that the community might want to audit their little fiefdom. Hackernews is thrilled, diving headfirst into a debate about “wrongthink” and governance in a project dedicated to declarative package management. It turns out that even if you mathematically prove your software works, you still can’t stop the humans involved from acting like a high school student council during a lockdown drill.

Use the Accept Header to Serve Markdown Instead of HTML to LLMs

2025-09-28 | comments

The internet’s final form is a data pipeline for hallucination engines. Some “webshit” proposes serving raw Markdown to “clankers” to save venture-backed grifters on inference compute. Hackernews debates the incentives of aura farming for AI, pretending that optimizing content for “token predictors” is anything but free labor for “digital feudal lords.” This is just the latest step in “vibe coding,” where logic is abandoned to feed the automated plagiarism engines. The “webshits” are eager to pave the information superhighway so the “agent technology” trucks can strip-mine it without hitting a div tag.

Landlords Demand Tenants’ Workplace Logins to Scrape Their Paystubs

2025-09-29 | comments

A startup (business model: “Uber for credential harvesting”) has streamlined the rental application process by asking tenants to commit immediate termination-worthy offenses. Instead of accepting a PDF, this fintech ‘innovation’ demands you hand your corporate login to a digital feudal lord so they can scrape your data directly from the source. Hackernews, of course, focuses on the important things: miscorrecting each other on the nuances of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act while ignoring that this is just state-sponsored phishing with a sleek UI. The tech industry has officially run out of problems to solve, so now they’re just building automated harassment tools for landlords, proving once again that ‘agentic’ workflows are just a fancy word for finding new ways to invade your privacy.

Our stewardship: Where we are, what’s changing and how we’ll engage

2025-09-30 | comments

RubyCentral has released a treatise on “stewardship,” which in this context appears to mean “replacing competent volunteers with unspecified corporate bureaucracy.” The organization, having realized that letting people maintain code they wrote exposes the project to the terrifying risk of things working, decided to purge the maintainers via a sudden “access review.” Hackernews wastes bytes miscorrecting each other about the definition of “warranty” in an MIT license and debating whether Shopify, the local digital feudal lord, issued the kill order personally. Everyone misses the point: the tech industry has successfully evolved from “scratch your own itch” to “scratch your own itch, but file a ticket with the product owner first,” ensuring that nothing of value ever gets built without three layers of pointless management.

Samsung confirms it will begin showing you advertisements on refrigerator screen

2025-09-30 | comments

Samsung (business model: “Uber for DRM-infested kitchenware”) confirms that the premium you paid for your icebox didn’t actually cover the hardware; you merely rented the screen real estate to your new digital feudal lord. Hackernews, ever the defenders of consumer rights, suggests hacking the firmware to run Doom, a solution that apparently requires less effort than just buying a dumb appliance from an era when capitalism wasn’t a terminal fever dream. The thread inevitably devolves into webshits miscorrecting each other about whether smart TVs already do this, as if the creeping normalization of staring at marketing copy while you hunt for mustard is anything other than the end stage of capitalism applied to domestic life. We used to joke about ads beamed into dreams, but we paid thousands for the privilege of installing the billboard in our own kitchens first.