Webshit Weekly
November 30, 2025
A Startup’s Bid to Dim the Sun
2025-11-22 | comments
A startup (business model: “Uber for Atmospheric Hacking”) decides that the problem with global warming is simply that the sun is too loud, so they intend to spray the atmosphere with sulfur. This is “vibe coding” on a planetary scale, where the developers shout ‘make it colder’ at the biosphere and hope for the best. Hackernews engages in their favorite pastime: debating the physics of a cartoon villain plot while ignoring the obvious reality that the only solution acceptable to venture capital involves a subscription fee for sunlight. The tech industry, having successfully ruined social interaction and democracy, has now set its sights on the literal star that sustains us, presumably because the margins on terraforming are better than carbon taxes.
Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI
2025-11-23 | comments
The Guardian reports on the latest trend in the great fraud of AI: the people building these automated plagiarism engines won’t let their families near them. This shock revelation would be news only to the venture capitalists who haven’t figured out that token predictors are just confidence scams with better marketing. Meanwhile on Hackernews, the discussion predictably splits between the webshits whose entire personality has been replaced by ChatGPT and those making billable hours fixing the hallucinations of clients who trust these glorified autocomplete functions more than their doctors. The aura farming crowd is of course out in force, with one commenter literally describing themselves as “the spark bearer” meant to “guide and awaken” the hollow masses, demonstrating that AI hasn’t made people any less insufferable, it’s just given them new terminology to justify their superiority complexes. The fact that we’ve built an entire industry around “vibe coding” is bad enough; that the actual workers in these digital sweatshops are warning people away while their bosses continue to promise the singularity would be funny if it weren’t so pathetically predictable. One consultant even admits they make more money fixing AI mistakes than doing actual work now, which is just the latest innovation in the tech industry’s proud tradition of creating problems to sell the solution. The entire field has become a self-sustaining ecosystem of tech-debt generators, with human fact-checkers forming a new underclass beneath the digital feudal lords who claim to be automating intelligence while actually just automating the creation of more work for everyone else.
EPA just approved new ‘forever chemical’ pesticides for use on food
2025-11-24 | comments
The EPA has decided that the problem with pesticides isn’t that they poison people and ecosystems, but that they don’t poison them thoroughly enough. Forever chemicals, those miraculous compounds that never break down and accumulate in biological systems, have apparently been sitting on the shelf gathering dust when they could be contributing to shareholder value instead. Hackernews, after briefly considering whether this might be problematic, settles into their standard vibe coding session of miscorrecting each other about the exact nature of corporate regulatory capture. The webshits who once argued that tech companies needed zero oversight to innovate now find themselves oddly silent when chemical companies innovate the entire concept of permanent contamination.
Meanwhile, developers in their open-plan cages continue fantasizing about how AI will solve environmental problems, apparently unaware that the clankers hallucinating Shakespeare sonnets won’t do much to remove carcinogenic compounds from the water table. The digital feudal lords have clearly coordinated with their chemical counterparts to ensure that whether you’re scrolling an app or eating dinner, you’re contributing to someone’s quarterly report. It’s almost as if the great game requires not just capturing markets, but literally capturing matter itself. In a world where corporations have achieved personhood, it seems only fitting that their chemical byproducts achieve immortality.
Google steers Americans looking for health care into “junk insurance”
2025-11-25 | comments
Cory Doctorow discovers that Google has optimized its search results to ensure you die faster and poorer. By prioritizing “junk insurance” because it pays better, the digital landlords have managed to turn the information superhighway into a toll road to the grave. Hackernews gathers to debate the finer points of whether a search monopoly should be held accountable for the scams it hosts, or if it’s just a neutral platform for extracting value from the sick. The usual libertarian pedants emerge to ask if it’s really Google’s job to police fraud, ignoring that the entire industry is built on the premise that algorithms are better than laws. Meanwhile, the webshits in the comments exchange tips on which corporate death-cult offers the best “value,” engaging in a spirited game of “who gets to be the last one eaten.” The enshittification is complete: the machine isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as the shareholders intended.
EU Council approves Chat Control mandate for negotiation with Parliament
2025-11-26 | comments
The EU moves closer to outlawing math, or at least the kind that prevents them from looking at your photos. Hackernews miscorrects each other regarding the legal definition of “competent authority,” while the optimists cite the “meme directive” to prove that legislation never actually works. Meanwhile, the adults in the room recognize that “contributing to mitigation technologies” is just doublespeak for state-mandated backdoors. It seems the digital landlords have decided that the only acceptable lock on your front door is one they have a key for, and the webshits are busy arguing about the paperwork.
LinkedIn is loud, and corporate is hell
2025-11-27 | comments
Some webshit discovers that LinkedIn is annoying. The article blames the rise of automated plagiarism engines for flooding the zone with “thought leadership” slop, but Hackernews is split on whether the vibe coding is worse than it was in the pre-LLM dark ages. The comments quickly devolve into a series of flexes, with HNers bragging that their direct manager shields them from the digital feudal lords, or that they simply ignore the feed to focus on the great fraud. One poster draws a baffling comparison to a strip club, proving once again that if you give a developer a keyboard, he’ll eventually type out a reason why a broken product is actually your fault.
The Fatal Trap UBI Boosters Keep Falling Into
2025-11-28 | comments
Some academic publishes a treatise on why giving poor people money is a logical trap, prompting Hackernews to argue endlessly about whether humans use logic to form opinions. The comments are a depressing showcase of webshits miscorrecting each other about the social contract, with several libertarians asking how they can opt out of civilization to keep their “rightfully earned” salary from the digital feudal lords. One user suggests that paying taxes to avoid being mugged is a “service,” while another proposes “returning to fish” as a viable alternative to participating in society. None of them notice that the entire debate is just aura farming for the venture capital class, who will replace them all with token predictors long before UBI is ever a reality.
Dilution vs. Risk taking: Capital gains taxes and entrepreneurs
2025-11-29 | comments
The great fraud continues as a paper suggests taxing the pretend money webshits use to secure loans for Teslas. Hackernews rushes to defend the right to be taxed only on actual profits, a concern relevant to approximately zero of them. They argue that penalizing theoretical value hurts the “agent technology” of the “digital feudal lords” who are totally going to be the next unicorn. The thread is a circle-jerk of temporarily embarrassed millionaires terrified that the government might actually treat them like the gamblers they are.
Effective Altruists Use Threats and Harassment to Silence Their Critics
2025-11-30 | comments
A blog post details how Effective Altruism operates like a standard crypto Ponzi scheme, but with more threatening emails to critics. It turns out that convincing yourself you are saving the future through “longtermism” is an excellent justification for hoarding wealth and being a sociopath in the present. Hackernews wastes no time miscorrecting each other about utilitarian calculus while ignoring the obvious reality: this is just aura farming applied to ethics. Instead of addressing immediate suffering, these webshits would rather obsess over agentic AI gods and optimal control theory, treating current humans like disposable legacy code. The comment thread spirals into a debate about whether it’s ethical to demand silence, proving once again that the only thing the tech sector loves more than “the greater good” is shutting down anyone who questions their specific flavor of digital feudalism.