webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of April, 2018.

1.1.1.1: Fast, privacy-first consumer DNS service
April 01, 2018 (comments)
A massive content-delivery network enhances its surveillance capabilities while promising not to surveil its users. Hackernews spends two days pinging the servers, because they don't know how to run real performance tests. An argument breaks out over whether HTTPS is the correct transport for DNS. The argument is moot, because there are not any programmers left alive who can develop software that uses any other protocol. A handful of Hackernews gather for a rudimentary course on how IP addresses work, then the rest of the comments are pedantic bickering about the precise wording of the vague and unenforceable privacy policies from a faceless internet corporation.

Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel
April 02, 2018 (comments)
Apple negotiates a discount on future Intel products. Hackernews thinks Apple should make everything themselves, because Apple does everything better than everyone else. The ensuing ode to Apple contains shit-talking of any alternatives, whining about keyboard shortcuts, declaring that the dearth of software in the App Store is for your own good, reinventing package management from first principles, and linux tech support. That's one comment thread. Comment thread two is pearl-clutching about whether Adobe and Autodesk will bother to support Apple computers that don't run Intel processors, which launches a catfight about CPU benchmarks. The remaining comment threads are all remixes of the first two, except for the breathtaking quote "There are no good or bad ideas".

Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ
April 03, 2018 (comments)
A nutjob sails off the deep end. Hackernews finally notices that crazy people with guns can have a detrimental effect on worker productivity, but cautions one another not to believe anything they see, hear, or read until the event is safely in the distant past. Most of the comment threads are Hackernews linking to tweets, followed by twenty other Hackernews disbelieving the tweet or disparaging the information source. After the action slows down, the typical webshit gun debate unfolds.

Google Workers Urge C.E.O. To Pull Out of Pentagon A.I. Project
April 04, 2018 (comments)
A small band of Googles strongly believes that the corporation should limit itself to psychological warfare. Hackernews takes turns praising themselves for focusing on ponzi schemes and adtech, because nobody gets hurt by those. Another comment thread takes turns chanting that other engineers need enforceable ethical codes, but software engineers should be masters of their fates, because they are special. After a while the whole post degrades into trench warfare over whether and how the defense industry is responsible for Silicon Valley.

Berkeley offers its data science course online for free
April 05, 2018 (comments)
A school offers a remedial statistics class. Hackernews is pissed that schools keep offering classes that people ask for instead of classes that Hackernews asks for. One Hackernews is clearly a Slashdot refugee, as this particular Hackernews dismisses the course based on its choice of package manager and text editor.

Comcast, AT&T and Verizon pose a greater surveillance risk than Facebook
April 06, 2018 (comments)
A newspaper points out that Silicon Valley surveillance corporations are not the only corporations who spy on users. Hackernews upvotes the living shit out of this story, desperate to spread the word that they're not the only ones selling humanity down the river. A few Hackernews aren't so sure that "logging DNS queries" is on the same level as "storing literally every scrap of information that can be acquired or inferred about all of humanity," but the rest of Mountain View arrives to assure them that the ISPs are way worse because the users pay them. Many Hackernews tell stories about all the terrible things that both ISPs and Silicon Valley corporations do to users, usually implemented by Hackernews.

The dots do matter: how to scam a Gmail user
April 07, 2018 (comments)
Google's shitty email service collides with Netflix's shitty account management practices. Hackernews draws battle lines over whose fault this is. The entire comment chain consists of uninteresting bickering over technical minutiae, rendered all the more meaningless because nobody involved gives enough of a shit to change anything at all. What's left is a prime example of a nerd pissing match of no consequence whatsoever.