webshit weekly

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

Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020
June 15, 2020 (comments)
Adobe beats a dead horse. Hackernews spends the afternoon either eulogizing the horse or describing their horrible plans to reanimate its corpse. Since watching webshit cartoons from dying forums is the closest thing Hackernews has to a shared childhood experience, a tremendous amount of labor is wasted in pursuit of the latter. Other Hackernews prefer to pontificate on ex post facto explanations for Apple's visionary refusal to put a shitload of engineering effort into someone else's application platform. Whether the genius of Apple was deployed in pursuit of technical excellence or for the good of all mankind remains Hackernews' highest-stakes debate.

Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations
June 16, 2020 (comments)
A webshit ports traffic jams to javascript. Hackernews enjoys staring out of windows and daydreaming, and is glad they can finally do it without leaving their loft or having somewhere to go. Most of the comments are complaints of missing neighborhoods or other bikeshedding of the webshit.

Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
June 17, 2020 (comments)
A hero arrives to tell us what to buy. Hackernews agrees with the webshit's opinion, but isn't convinced by the webshit's reasoning. We're treated to a cavalcade of incredibly specific reasons that Hackernews prefers a given monitor configuration, with the only possible conclusion being that we should continue doing whatever we were doing before, with absolutely no regard to the original webshit's insistence that there is a right answer.

Mozilla VPN
June 18, 2020 (comments)
Mozilla, a company known only for producing a perennial also-ran of a web browser, continues to avoid the only task that would ever be worth their time (improving the goddamn browser) and instead builds yet another half-assed networking product that nobody asked for. It will either bankrupt the company or be shut down shortly before they get through the invite-only list of idiots who have agreed to introduce a Mozillan indirection layer to the Cloudflare DNS data collection initiative. Hackernews is desperate to give money to Mozilla, but is apparently unwilling to just donate to the nonprofit, instead demanding subpar imitations of other Google services.

You download the app and it doesn’t work
June 19, 2020 (comments)
A webshit is mad that Apple gets to do whatever the fuck it wants with its servers. Rather than just paying them, a startup decides that rules-lawyering and social media will work, and definitely will not cause Apple to play Lucy to their Charlie Brown. Hackernews is on their side but unwilling to believe there's any way to change Apple's behavior short of a government occupation of Cupertino. Here follows another twelve hours of extemporaneous play-by-plays of imaginary chess games.

Teach Yourself Computer Science
June 20, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits explain to us that advanced computer science degrees are unnecessary, and proceed to recommend reading books and watching videos produced as part of advanced computer science degree programs. We are further informed that if we absolutely require actual instruction, we may pay the webshits a chunk of money instead. Hackernews also has strong opinions regarding how people should spend their time and money, but there is one point of consensus: absolutely nothing matters except how much money someone is willing to give you when you are done. A couple of mavericks enjoy 'creating new knowledge,' but they're disregarded as irrelevant.

Bye
June 21, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits don't like email. Hackernews can't decide if they also hate email or if it's the only part of the internet worth using. Since the webshits are delivering their email-related complaints via a parody of the startup who was mad at Apple a couple days before, Hackernews upvotes the joke, but since the webshit here is almost entirely devoid of actual content, there are not many comments about it.