Webshit Weekly
December 7, 2025
OpenAI desperate to avoid explaining why it deleted pirated book datasets
2025-12-01 | comments
OpenAI is facing the uncomfortable realization that their entire product is built on stolen content, and has decided that the best defense against this fact is to delete the evidence. The token-predictor company desperately wants everyone to believe that their automated plagiarism engine hallucinated itself into existence — an immaculate concept, as it were — without any copyrighted inputs, despite having previously boasted about training on the entire internet. Hackernews is torn between defending this as a revolutionary breakthrough and vaguely worrying about the legal implications of building a business model on “we downloaded everything and hoped nobody would notice.”
The digital feudal lords in charge are currently pretending that deleting datasets after the fact is standard practice, rather than the desperate move of a company that knows it built a $80 billion valuation on other people’s work. Somewhere, a venture capitalist is explaining to a judge that the great game requires creative approaches to intellectual property, and that the modern era really shouldn’t have to respect copyright laws. Meanwhile, the developers continue vibe-coding away, convinced that the eventual collapse of this legal house of cards is someone else’s problem. HNers miscorrect each other about whether destroying evidence constitutes obstruction of justice or just “standard data lifecycle management,” while OpenAI’s legal team hopes nobody notices the irony of an AI company trying to convince a court that they don’t actually remember how they built their product.
The Rise and Fall of the H-1B Visa – American Affairs Journal
2025-12-02 | comments
A policy journal (business model: “pulp for paranoid protectionists”) publishes a treatise on the H-1B visa, igniting the usual circle-jerk among people who think moving JSON blobs is “high-skilled labor.” Hackernews, typically the first to cheer for market efficiency when it means firing customer service reps, suddenly morphs into anti-immigration hardliners the moment their own overinflated salaries are theoretically threatened. The comments are a festival of bad-faith economics, where users miscorrect each other on “chain migration” laws while ignoring that they are just interchangeable cogs in the machine. Half the thread screams about labor supply and demand, as if their “vibe coding” shuffles aren’t already being replaced by token predictors. It’s just another day of the great fraud, where digital feudal lords pit human livestock against each other to keep wages down while the livestock argues about which flag should fly over the open-plan office they never visit. They’d sell their own grandmothers for a RSU refresh, but God forbid someone from Bangladesh wants to write CSS.
Vibe coding: Empowering and imprisoning
2025-12-02 | comments
Anil Dash discovers that shouting at token predictors is less efficient than coding, and calls this “vibe coding.” The tech industry, desperate to believe that replacing developers with aura farming will save money, pretends this is revolutionary. Hackernews argues about whether the article was written by an LLM, missing that human and machine tech jargon became indistinguishable years ago. The “imprisonment” is obvious: you’re trapped in a walled garden where your code is only as good as your subscription tier, and you can thank your digital feudal lords for the privilege.
Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for Business
2025-12-03 | comments
Palantir CEO (business model: “Uber for authoritarian surveillance”) Alex Karp suggests that making war crimes constitutional would boost his company’s bottom line, perfectly illustrating how tech executives have evolved from “don’t be evil” to “profit from atrocities.” Karp’s logic follows the familiar pattern of digital feudal lords who claim the solution to every moral dilemma is purchasing their services. The implication that precision killing becomes ethical just because you have better data dashboards is the pinnacle of tech industry delusion.
Hackernews, always eager to miscorrect each other, debates whether Karp is actually advocating war crimes rather than recognizing that he’s simply a capitalist opportunist. The thread eventually devolves into semantic arguments about constitutional law versus international law, completely missing the fundamental point: we’ve reached a moment where a CEO can openly discuss monetizing state violence and the tech community’s primary response is analyzing his business model.
Meanwhile, Palantir continues its aura farming, convincing governments that the path to ethical military operations runs through $10 billion contracts with Silicon Valley. The only thing more depressing than Karp’s candor is the tech community’s willingness to treat such statements as legitimate business strategy rather than moral abominations.
Chatbots can sway political opinions but are ‘substantially’ inaccurate: study
2025-12-04 | comments
We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months
2025-12-04 | comments
A group of webshits has decided that the peak of “agent technology” is using token predictors to gamble with Monopoly money. They let five automated plagiarism engines loose on the stock market, apparently unaware that “hallucination” is just a fancy word for “market manipulation.” The results are, predictably, indistinguishable from noise, but that doesn’t stop the aura farming. Hackernews spends the thread miscorrecting each other about market impact, missing the point that asking a clanker to trade stocks is just automating poverty. The great fraud requires even less human intervention than we thought.
A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S.
2025-12-05 | comments
Pharma executives (business model: “digital feudal lords for your mucous membranes”) are charging $800 for a $20 bottle of industrial lubricant. Hackernews, determined to treat their bodies like a deprecated codebase, debate the virtues of rinsing their eyes with toxic PFAS forever-chemicals. The usual suspects emerge to miscorrect each other on FDA regulations and “free markets,” completely missing the point that the entire system is designed to harvest value from human suffering. One comment suggests cauterizing your tear ducts shut, a vibe-coding approach to healthcare that involves burning your face off to avoid paying a copay, a solution so absurd it fits right in with the rest of the rotting industry.
Chernobyl protective shield can no longer confine radiation after drone strike
2025-12-06 | comments
The New Safe Confinement, a monument to engineering hubris intended to last a century, has been punctured by a cheap flying gadget because apparently, we are not allowed to have things that work. Hackernews immediately pivots to treating a potential radioactive catastrophe as a DevOps incident, debating the exact roentgen output instead of acknowledging that the whole human race is a legacy codebase running in production with no maintainers. While the tech industry focuses on “agentic” AI and vibe coding, the rest of the world is busy perfecting the business model of “Uber for property destruction.” The shield held up radiation, but it couldn’t hold back the relentless tide of human stupidity, a bug that even the most sophisticated “token predictor” will never fix.
XKeyscore
2025-12-07 | comments
Wikipedia resurfaces the dusty corpse of XKeyscore, prompting a circle-jerk about whether the NSA can still read your erotic roleplay logs. Hackernews confidently asserts that encryption has saved us, ignoring the reality that private companies sell the data directly to the feds anyway. The thread devolves into pedantic arguments about the definition of “classified” versus “secret,” because webshits prioritize semantic precision over the collapse of civil liberties. One user suggests “random noise” traffic is the solution to net neutrality, apparently unaware that ISPs don’t care about physics when they’re busy aura farming. The rest is just conspiracy theories about second leakers, proving that the only thing safer than a VPN is a boring life.