webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of January, 2020.

Mozilla lays off 70
January 15, 2020 (comments)
Mozilla successfully defends its title as only unprofitable major web browser vendor. The company remains certain that money will begin to flow from its new product, which promises to hide all your web traffic from everyone except Mozilla's primary funding source. Several unemployed Hackernews show up in the comments to tell us they are not angry about being shitcanned with no warning. Another Hackernews thread focuses on the fact that high-paid executives are treated better by the company than people who primarily interact with text editors. Whether this is some kind of class warfare or the Invisible Hand high-fiving the important people comprises the rest of the discussion. The team responsible for the continued functionality of the Beacon API are safe forever.

Unofficial Apple Archive
January 16, 2020 (comments)
Apple's equivalent of SeaOrg catalogues decades of corporate propaganda. Some Hackernews try to decide if Apple made better shit Back In The Goodle Days or if they're just stuck in a nostalgia fog. Other Hackernews gleefully recount their experiences as minor cogs in a massive machine. The rest of the comments are links to other fansites and arguments about which OS X widget theme was correct.

A Sad Day for Rust
January 17, 2020 (comments)
The Rust Evanglism Strike Force regretfully informs us of the excommunication of the author of one of the six Rust programs anyone actually uses. Veterans of the First Webshit Incursion sagely point out that this day was inevitable from the moment the author made use of certain features that are built into the core language but regarded as unclean by the clergy. Other Hackernews chime in to point out the necessity of being extremely polite and receptive to every single message received from anyone with a Github account. Within days, development of the condemned code resumes and the twelve websites which depend on the software do not notice anything happened.

Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
January 18, 2020 (comments)
A German correctly assesses an engineering problem. Hackernews is convinced that they know better, because a nontrivial percentage of them receive paychecks from companies that have incorrectly assessed the engineering problem, and the rest of them because they personally cannot correctly assess any engineering problem. Half of the almost nine hundred comments are in one thread which consists entirely of arguments between people who drive Teslas once in a while in fair weather and everyone else on Earth.

My FOSS Story
January 19, 2020 (comments)
An Internet struggles to be extremely polite and receptive to every single message received from anyone with a Github account. The article contains a shitload of whining interspersed with, and followed by, admonitions that this shitty situation is in everybody's best interest. Hackernews agrees, and praises the author for arguing with people on the internet. Some Hackernews briefly experiment with the idea that Github pull requests are not the most important webshit technology ever developed, but since all the software that permits disabling them are not Github, no progress is made.

Immune discovery 'may treat all cancer'
January 20, 2020 (comments)
The British Broadcasting Coöperative weasel-words a scientific discovery into clickbait. Hackernews, in between seeing the headline and clicking on the link, sprouts several medical research doctorates and weighs in with sober analysis and whatever medical facts they remember reading recently. Later, Hackernews lists every malady that should be cured. One Hackernews thinks maybe scientific research would work better if it somehow involved pull requests from Hackernews. Even Hackernews thinks this is a terrible idea, but is insufficiently scornful to the originating idiot.

Every Google result now looks like an ad
January 21, 2020 (comments)
An advertising company blurs the line between the dumb shit you searched for and the extremely important and well-targeted information you need. Hackernews doesn't like it, which leads to the same debate Hackernews always has when Google iteratively befucks its search product: "use this other search engine!" "but that is not Google" "no, but you can make it redirect to Google." This is followed, in accordance with Hackernews tradition, by a litany of complaints about other things Google is doing to fuck the internet up for everybody; as it turns out, literally everything Google does is by now aimed at fucking the internet up.