webshit weekly

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

Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
June 08, 2018 (comments)
Some parasites desperately try to explain away the complete failure of their entire product segment. Hackernews bickers over whether humanity's disinterest in conversing with addled javascript-based toddlers was in any way foreseeable. Those who declare the idea obviously doomed explain to us that it's a user interface problem, and Hackernews narrates accounts of every phone call any of them have ever had. The rest of Hackernews insists that everything will be great if we could all just wait a few years and keep giving money to spammy fuckers like the authors of this article.

Why does a spray bottle work?
June 09, 2018 (comments)
A webshit gets fantastically bored. Hackernews is also bored, so they bikeshed the design of common household items for a few hours, diverting along the way to reinvent various barely-related things they saw once. Periodically, Hackernews pauses to reflect on how smart they all are.

Alternatives to Google Products
June 10, 2018 (comments)
Some well-meaning idiots recommend a pile of Android software you can install on your Android device in order to pretend that Google doesn't have your entire life in a vice. A Mozilla shows up to warn everyone that using Firefox features will probably cause websites to behave strangely, but no explanation is offered regarding how this is any different from using a Mozilla product at all. Hackernews pretends to reverse engineer the tracking methods they all create for a living, then gets angry that the idiots didn't just recommend buying Apple products instead. After a while, the Google apologists arrive to explain to everyone that it's in their best interest to relax and just let it all happen.

The Repeal of Net Neutrality Is Official
June 11, 2018 (comments)
Some bureaucrats exert the will of their masters. Hackernews is entirely populated with telecommunications policy experts, all of whose opinions are firmly rooted in the current contents of the Wikipedia article on net neutrality. Some Hackernews are outraged at the very notion that the ruling party might use executive fiat to flagrantly destroy hallowed laws of nature (installed via the previous ruling party's executive fiat). The rest are relatively collected, presumably because the Hackernews Popularity Contest finalists haven't yet issued position statements on medium.com.

Id Software
June 12, 2018 (comments)
Hackernews notices some software, and maintains a respectful reverence for the software and hardware of the respective era. Nobody misses the opportunities to rattle off the games they loved in their youth, or the computers that ran them. Absolutely none of the technical lessons available from examining any of the mentioned technology are considered or even noticed, except for one Hackernews who thinks we can build a better personal computer if we'd just leave out the CPU and connect the keyboard via gigabit Ethernet.

Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
June 13, 2018 (comments)
Some academics realize that Bitcoin Idiots, LLC can easily manipulate the pretend value of fake money. Hackernews is ecstatic that anyone is paying attention and misconstrue the bemused analysis of academia as external validation of the core concepts. Some full-on conspiracy theorists arrive, chanting the international nutjob mantra, "media narrative," not explaining what possible reason anyone in the media has to take any position at all regarding what nerds do with ASICs in the night. Most Hackernews are content merely to opine that the contents of the newspaper article and the research it describes must be wildly off-base, because Hackernews didn't write it.

Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt
June 14, 2018 (comments)
A city decides to build some infrastructure. Hackernews still has the telecommunications Wikipedia articles open from earlier in the week, so they take a day off to incorrect each other about how much it costs to dig ditches and drop cables into them. A sidebar is held for those Hackernews who are considering moving cities just to get a faster internet connection. A handful of locals whine about traffic.