webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of August, 2020.

Apple takes legal action against small company with pear logo
August 08, 2020 (comments)
A small business makes more noise than usual as the thresher consumes it. Hackernews relays a handful of examples of similar innovative and courageous takedowns, then discusses which laws should be changed to prevent money from being the deciding factor in all legislative questions. Hackernews' preferred answer is apparently "more money."

I want to have an AWS region where everything breaks with high frequency
August 09, 2020 (comments)
Wishes do come true. Hackernews complains that Amazon's cloud shit is too kind to failure, and dreams of a programmatic way to abuse computers. Other Hackernews sagely inform us that this will never happen, because people are morons and it is Amazon's job to protect them from themselves. Or something.

Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
August 09, 2020 (comments)
Some webshit grifters post an ad for a rich person's book. Hackernews almost completely ignores this obvious spam in their absolute panic to explain to anyone who will listen that it is simply not possible for computer programmers to take any responsibility whatsoever for anything that they do because they are helpless children who have been completely stripped of agency by project managers or executives or whoever happened to be passing by. It is so important, in fact, to make clear the entirety of their impotence, that there are more comments than votes on the story.

Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees
August 10, 2020 (comments)
Uber (business model: "Uber for cars") and Lyft (business model: "Uber for people with low-rated Uber profiles") finally receive word that laws indeed apply to their company policies after all. Hackernews tries to decide whether they should accuse all jitney wheelers of poverty or focus more on whatabouting Californian law. The rest of the comments are spent relitigating the court case, often verbatim.

Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
August 11, 2020 (comments)
Mozilla continues the war against its own users, this time adopting scorched-earth tactics. Some of the surviving Mozillas show up to chastise us for daring to question the edicts of the people who (for now) still sign their paychecks. Most Hackernews are operating under the delusion that Mozilla exists to do anything but carry Google's water, so there are lots of arguments about which slightly-different approaches to bureaucracy will Save the Internet. Grimly and with little relish, the Rust Evangelism Strike Force marches into the fray to declare that their savior will live through the fall of the empire that spawned it, because every other programming language ever conceived is a crime in the eyes of the Lord. It was worth it all, we are told, for the code that was writ in the tongue of the Heavens is secure, and will dwell in eternity, yea though the hand that hath typed it is shitcanned.

Mozilla Lifeboat
August 12, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits band together after Mozilla throws them off the ship. Representatives from various better companies arrive in the comments to throw lifelines or condolences to the victims. Every single one of them is rewarded with a string of Hackernews bitching about their products. The rest of the comments repeat the previous days' ranting, except less focused and more confident.

Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
August 13, 2020 (comments)
TenCent retaliates against Executive Order 13943. The "Hacker" "News" hall monitors want us to know that there are multiple pages of comments, even though they're all basically identical: armchair economics, geopolitical posturing, technolibertarian cheerleading, and the never-ending struggle to decide whether Apple's mobile App Store is unrepentant villainy or simple grandmotherly kindness. The answer, as usual, depends on whether you think you're smart enough to manage your own computers or whether no mortal human can be trusted with this power.

Factorio 1.0
August 14, 2020 (comments)
A video game, comprised of tedious busywork in the pursuit of constructing increasingly-complex Rube Goldberg machines that are nominally productive while pointlessly consuming every available resource as the player experiences accomplishment in the same sense an amputee experiences a phantom limb, deeply appeals to Hackernews' professional pride.