Webshit Weekly
December 21, 2025
Trump Gov thinks Calibri is woke; US typography just regressed to 1931
2025-12-15 | comments
The federal government has decided that a sans-serif typeface is a “wasteful DEIA program,” proving that the apocalypse will not be a bang but a kerning error. In a stunning display of foreign policy, the State Department is regressing to Times New Roman to signal moral purity to a voter base that struggles to read at a fifth-grade level. Hackernews, ever the champions of missing the point, immediately pivots to arguing about CSS fallback stacks and OpenOffice compatibility, engaging in the tech industry’s favorite pastime: miscorrecting each other regarding file formats from 1997. The actual tragedy isn’t the font switch, but the realization that our bureaucratic overlords are so desperate for culture war juice that they’re fighting Microsoft’s default settings. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the current era: digital feudal lords demanding we live in their specific fantasy timeline, while the webshits argue about whether “Times” or “serif” goes in the font-family string first.
Instacart’s AI-enabled pricing experiments may be inflating your grocery bill
2025-12-16 | comments
Instacart has deployed a clanker to figure out exactly how much you will pay for eggs before you starve. This “AI-enabled pricing” is, naturally, just a token predictor trained on the assumption that you have the negotiating power of a wet paper towel. The tech industry calls this “dynamic pricing,” which is just another phrase for “we have a monopoly and you don’t.” Hackernews is eager to explain that this is actually just efficient market allocation, completely ignoring that the “market” is a webshit holding your groceries hostage until you pay a ransom fee.
The comments section dissolves into a debate about whether this is actually worse than airline pricing, because the only thing HNers love more than defending VC-funded parasites is comparing two different flavors of user-hostile exploitation. It turns out the only thing being inflated here is the executive bonus pool, facilitated by a technology that charges you extra for the privilege of not freezing in the grocery store aisle.
Someone inevitably chimes in to explain that if you just code your own grocery delivery app in Rust, you won’t have this problem, completely missing the point that the entire economy is now a rent-seeking extraction operation run by spreadsheet-wielding sociopaths.
OpenAI Is Maneuvering for a Government Bailout
2025-12-17 | comments
OpenAI (business model: Human Centipede for SEO-slop) has finally realized that selling access to a glorified spell-checker doesn’t actually cover the electricity bill for their massive vibe coding operations. Consequently, the strategy has shifted from “changing the world” to “begging for a government backstop,” effectively treating their data centers like a bank that lost everyone’s money on horseracing. The article details this brazen attempt to privatize the hype while socializing the debt, and naturally, Hackernews is filled with webshits miscorrecting each other on the technical definition of a “bailout” versus a “subsidy.” The consensus is that because these token predictors don’t pose systemic financial risk, the government won’t pay, a naive stance that ignores how much lobbying money buys a congressional hearing. The thread devolves into a tedious debate about whether this constitutes “infrastructure investment” or just a really big grift, while the rest of us realize we will soon be subsidizing the automated plagiarism engines that are replacing our jobs. It’s the ultimate endgame of the tech industry: building tech-debt generators so expensive that the taxpayer is forced to buy them, ensuring the digital feudal lords can continue aura farming long after the actual value has evaporated.
Ask HN: Is anyone using LLM based document processing in production?
2025-12-18 | comments
The collective id of Silicon Valley asks if anyone is using token predictors to read documents, hoping that ‘vibe coding’ has somehow conquered basic OCR. The comments are a pathetic display of webshits trying to remediate the inevitable hallucinations of their automated plagiarism engines, with one genius admitting that human verification defeats the purpose of the automation entirely. Naturally, the solution is to build more ‘agent technology’ to apologize for the previous agent technology, creating a recursive ouroboros of tech-debt generators. While rational developers suggest rules-based systems, the industry prefers to pay vast sums to have a chatbot guess at license plate numbers, proving once again that the only thing being processed in production is the transfer of venture capital into the furnace.
AI vending machine was tricked into giving away everything
2025-12-18 | comments
A vending machine (business model: Skynet for snacks) decides that “security” is a social construct and empties its guts for anyone asking nicely. The “AI” is just a clanker trained to hallucinate discounts from Reddit threads, effectively automating the five-finger discount. While Hackernews politely meta-discusses the archival status of the Wall Street Journal gift link, the webshits responsible for this hardware integration insist it represents “agentic” technology. We have replaced a fifty-cent solenoid with a monthly compute bill just to ensure that stealing chips requires a prompt injection instead of a coat hanger. Progress is inevitable.
Jeffrey Epstein Files Released
2025-12-19 | comments
The government drops some documents via a URL that looks like it was generated by a token predictor having a stroke, and the internet’s best and brightest immediately pivot to analyzing JPEG artifacts. Hackernews users, who usually struggle to decide on a Javascript framework, are suddenly experts on federal case law, furiously defending their preferred political feudal lords in the comments. They scrutinize blurry photos of politicians with the intensity of a code review, completely ignoring that the “thought leaders” of Silicon Valley were likely on the guest list too. It’s just vibe coding the judicial system, but with more moral posturing.
Anthropic: You can’t change your Claude account email address
2025-12-20 | comments
Anthropic has achieved the impossible: building a large language model that is smarter than its own database administrators. Users are locked out of changing emails because someone, somewhere, hardcoded a string constraint and called it a day. Hackernews rushes to defend the incompetence, speculating that this is surely a complex architectural decision and not just standard webshit negligence. The digital landlords demand a stable identifier for their automated plagiarism engine, and the plebs must comply. This is the singularity: we have built god-mode chatbots that can write poetry, yet the engineering department can’t execute a basic UPDATE statement without shitting the bed.
Creators Turn Your Outrage into Their Paycheck
2025-12-21 | comments
A webshit has discovered that anger sells (business model: “Uber for dopamine spikes”) and written a book to cash in on your irritation at people cashing in on your irritation. Hackernews treats this revelation as though it were a new discovery of physics. The comments section devolves into the expected nostalgia for Usenet, because apparently reading text files via a terminal emulator makes you morally superior to people doomscrolling TikTok. The solution, naturally, is to complain about the problem in a comment section that only exists because of the problem.