webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of June, 2020.

I Am Deleting the Blog
June 22, 2020 (comments)
A pseudointellectual shuts down an empathy-removal training camp to deter the likelihood of spilling compromising information to detractors and ethics committees. Hackernews, many of whom took their first steps toward absolutely dehumanizing the Other in this very camp, sadly reminisces about the particular word salads that first showed them their own inherent greatness. Hackernews segments into several work crews: one to explain why all journalists should be exiled to outer space, one to make guesses about the 'real reason' the training camp was evacuated, one to bemoan the difficulty of maintaining anonymity in the face of highly-profitable shitposting under two-thirds of your actual name, and one to remind us that taking responsibility for the things we do and say is a wasteful hobby for stupid babies.

I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors
June 23, 2020 (comments)
A webshit single-handedly invents a completely novel method of monetizing software development: charging money for it and including documentation. This results in a fully-illustrated two-thousand-word explanation of the miraculous revelation, of which Hackernews is equal parts derisive (because the webshit is insufficiently rich as a result of this effort) and overtly contemptuous (because receiving money in exchange for labor is some kind of sucker's game). The pictures are pretty, though, so Hackernews votes for the article anyway.

iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes
June 24, 2020 (comments)
Apple accidentally dimes out one of their biggest customers. The resulting furor makes everyone mad at the customer. Hackernews is upset less by the fact that TikTok (business model: "Uber for Vine") is collecting scads of information it doesn't need and more by the fact that other companies Hackernews actually likes are doing the same thing. As for Apple, Hackernews can't figure out why they would enable this obviously shitty behavior, until clarity is finally reached: Apple is shipping all your shit to the central government of a genocidal dictatorship* so that you'll get mad at software, which Apple can then beat up on your behalf.

When you type realty.com into Safari it takes you to realtor.com
June 25, 2020 (comments)
A webshit is mad that Apple is redirecting people from some parasitic intercessor to an actual trade association. Hackernews lists about twelve million similar niche search terms which Apple incorrects for them, then spends a couple hundred comments crowdsourcing a lead on which side of some terrible neural network A/B test they're on. Some Apples show up in the comment to explain that nobody cares unless you sign up for a developer account.

Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first
June 26, 2020 (comments)
A town removes some flawed tools from the hands of its police, on the mistaken assumption that police racism is somehow externally motivated. Hackernews can't decide if fixing problems is something that humanity should be wasting time on, when we could just kill all the people The Algorithm doesn't like and move on with typing javascript into computer keyboards. Anyone caught arguing for the 'maybe the cops should be less terrible' side of the discussion is considered a helpless naïf who cannot fathom the world, and anyone seen arguing for the 'maybe the cops should be less racist' side of the discussion is sternly informed that the real problem to be solved is blue-on-white violence, which is more important by volume.

Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development
June 27, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits are excited that someone gave money to Indistinguishable Web Forum Software Package number 16,939,392. Hackernews debates whether this will attract really shitty people of the sort who are famous for getting their Reddit forums closed. It won't, because those people just move to different Reddit forums with slightly different names until the next time a news outlet realizes what a horrific nightmare farm Reddit is. Most of the remaining comments are specific complaints about Reddit or links to other Indistinguishable Web Forum Software Packages nobody uses either.

Textures.js is a JavaScript library for creating SVG patterns
June 28, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits take an existing webshit graphics library and extend it to produce even worse output involving XML. Hackernews enjoys the needlessly-constrained retro vibe of the results, notices that it works slightly better for people who cannot distinguish colors (but would continue to do so without rubbing XML all over it), and has absolutely nothing else to say on the matter.

India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps
June 29, 2020 (comments)
The government of India shits upon Chinese cyberwarfare assets from a great height. Hackernews is perplexed as to why a government would consider China (a nuclear power bent on ethnic cleansing, territory expansion, and absolute totalitarianism) would be regarded as a threat, while large corporations (international clubs of people who enjoy money) would not, despite those two things being, to Hackernews, indistinguishable. What follows is a slow-motion meltdown as half of Hackernews tries to explain to the other half of Hackernews that 'morality' is a concept that can exist independently of key performance indicators, strategic directives, sprint goals, or initial coin offerings. The message does not sink in.

The End of the Redis Adventure
June 30, 2020 (comments)
An Internet steps away from the helm of a popular malware vector library. Hackernews is not sure that the software can survive in the face of consensus-based leadership, not sure that the software in question should currently exist, and not sure the software in question should ever have existed, but is absolutely positive that they have seen the word 'Redis' somewhere and so this story gets a vote. Later, Hackernews debates whether software engineering as a discipline can continue to exist since Those People (You Know Who) are mean to techbros on Twitter.


* China. The genocidal dictatorship is China. The government of China is violently evil, is what I'm getting at.