webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of August, 2018.

Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
August 22, 2018 (comments)
An Internet who whines about software licenses for a living whines about software licenses. Hackernews takes this trivial, meaningless event and spins it into a yarn about the impending death of an organization upon whose products almost every single major human endeavor is based. Hundreds of paragraphs of alternate-history fiction are produced to describe a reality in which there's any chance at all you can avoid giving Intel money. The majority of the escapism centers around buying the products of a competitor who sells an almost-identical product, primarily differentiated by a much smaller production capacity.

Craft: A simple Minecraft clone written in C using OpenGL shaders
August 23, 2018 (comments)
An Internet copied a game. Hackernews tries to figure out how the author produces computer software while also caring about things that are not computer software. The rest of the comments are either suggesting other copies of the game or bickering about how closely one must copy a game for the copy to be a copy.

Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System
August 24, 2018 (comments)
A computer toucher discusses working for a child. Hackernews has also worked for the child, but considers the lack of professionalism and sacrifice of dignity to have been worthwhile, because the child is very rich. Other Hackernews are taken aback by the idea that professionalism and dignity are even possible; these Hackernews are accustomed to working for children.

John McCain has died
August 25, 2018 (comments)
A politician dies. No technology is discussed.

Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning
August 26, 2018 (comments)
Some nerds program computers to resemble a stack of paper. Hackernews is desperate to cram as many context-free factoids into their brains as possible, so they are all in love with this idea. Everyone takes turns lecturing one another on the thousands of ways computers can display brief snippets of text.

Pandoc
August 27, 2018 (comments)
Flushed with exertion from yesterday's "brief snippets of text" orgy, Hackernews sets its sights on longer snippets of text. Every single markup conversion program ever written is namedropped, several new ones are postulated, and impromptu user-group meetings are held in the ensuing comment threads. The software described in the article is capable of converting almost every currently-used text representation format, but Hackernews mostly just uses markdown or latex, depending on whether the user is employed.

Go 2 Draft Designs
August 28, 2018 (comments)
Lifetime Bell Labs intern Russ Cox describes all the new shit Google wants to bolt to its pet programming language. Hackernews wavers between an instinctive drive to unconditionally praise all Google pronouncements and a conflicting reflex to decry anything made by someone else as rancid garbage. To avoid the resulting dissonance, Hackernews cleverly argues about analogous features in other, safer-to-hate programming languages. None of the described additions in any way address any of the actual failings of Google's pet programming language, but several of them introduce exciting new missteps to enjoy for years to come.

Bullshit Jobs
August 29, 2018 (comments)
A webshit is mad that other people's awful lives are slightly inconvenient. Hackernews, every single one of whom is professionally engaged in ruining society, ponders all the myriad ways that society deviates from optimal, none of which are in any way related to Hackernews. Other Hackernews take this as an opportunity to get angry at Stanford University, describe how much they hate free money, and question whether the original article was even written in good faith, even though the author stood to gain nothing from its contents.

Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking
August 30, 2018 (comments)
Mozilla assures us that they want to keep all our weird-ass internet habits a secret, so they are offering ways to protect our privacy, such as sending a complete log of all domain lookups to a third-party commercial partner. Fear not, however, as they will still by default send all of your search queries to a different third-party commercial partner, as well as asking Google (a third-party commercial partner) for permission to load every single thing you try to look at, ever. Hackernews reminisces about how bad advertising used to be on the internet, or at least how differently bad it was. Some Hackernews mourn Mozilla's failed cellphone outing, while others notice that rather than just sending your entire browsing history to Google, Mozilla has built Google's tracking software directly into Firefox.

EU to recommend that member states abolish daylight saving time
August 31, 2018 (comments)
The European Union plans to more closely align its schedule with its future headquarters in Moscow. Hackernews argues about cows, time zones, democracy, and the sun.