webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of May, 2018.

Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone
May 08, 2018 (comments)
Google, the provider of reCAPTCHA, a service designed to prevent software from pretending to be people on the internet, brags about their software that pretends to be people on the phone. Hackernews reassures everyone that this is fine, since only idiots talk on the phone. The rest of the comments are all predictions of the amazing new world ushered in by robots lying on telephones.

Seaweed in Cow Feed Reduces Methane Emissions Almost Entirely
May 09, 2018 (comments)
Some Australians feed seafood to cattle. Hackernews uses the story as an excuse to talk about the ocean off the coast of San Francisco. Every single Hackernews is an agribusiness economist.

Google YOLO clickjacking
May 10, 2018 (comments)
A webshit narrates a security flaw inherent in Google trash. Google decides they won't fix it because it would be hard. Hackernews is briefly scandalized, but then Google informs them that this security problem is only available for use by people who give Google a lot of money. Hackernews whiles away the hours by poorly reinventing every single authentication security mechanism ever used.

Pyre: Fast Type Checking for Python
May 11, 2018 (comments)
Some webshits release a toy. Hackernews spends a lot of time and energy debating whether or not it's worth knowing anything about the programming language you're using, but reach no clear conclusions. Growing uncomfortably close to realizing how ill-equipped they are to perform the work they're paid to do, they set about reëvaluating the question from a project management perspective.

Build your own X: project-based programming tutorials
May 12, 2018 (comments)
A webshit sets about creating the Encyclopedia of Wheel Reinvention. Hackernews has several editions of this work and pastes all of them into the comment box. Other Hackernews get confused between 'x' as in a variable name and 'X' as in the windowing system, but it all works out when someone links to several hand-holding resources about that too.

Make front end shit again
May 13, 2018 (comments)
A webshit shits web. The result is a Geocities homage using a mere 200kb of javascript to generate over 13kb of HTML. Even Hackernews is on the fence regarding this being a poorly-executed parody or just an honest webshit who doesn't know any better. A handful of recalcitrant Hackernews opine aloud that perhaps this shit is retarded either way, but they are swiftly beaten into a pulp by passersby. Because there are no CSS gradients, Hackernews uses the word 'brutalism' a lot.

John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Stories
May 14, 2018 (comments)
An old man rambles on Facebook. Because the topic is Apple, it sets off every Google Alert in Redwood City, and Hackernews swoops in to capitalize on the Festival of Namedropping. One Hackernews wants to know how the hell you boot a NeXT box and write software for MS-DOS, which is a totally different "operative system." The answer, of course, is javascript.