webshit weekly

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

Facebook is a monopoly that buys, copies, kills competitors: antitrust committee
October 08, 2020 (comments)
The House Judiciary Committee drops some serious hints that it would like extra gold bars in Candy Crush. Hackernews doesn't like the hypercentralization of the web but isn't really convinced there's anything to be done about it. A debate breaks out regarding whether Microsoft are still assholes.

ProtonMail CEO calls Apple's forced in-app purchases 'Mafia extortion'
October 09, 2020 (comments)
A security theater stage manager wants to sling on Apple's block without paying tribute. Hackernews recognizes a turf scuffle when they see one, but they split up to root for opposite sides, depending on whether they're happier with Apple's refund policy or their bank's chargeback procedures.

Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus
October 10, 2020 (comments)
Apple joins the war against the Belarusian populace. Their opening salvo: helping police evade responsibility for their actions. Hackernews once again struggles to resolve an essential dichotomy; on the one hand, vicious oppression is bad optics, but on the other hand, nobody on Earth should be allowed to criticize tech companies. A "Hacker" "News" hall monitor arrives to make one thing absolutely clear: the chat app in question has been banned wholesale from submission to "Hacker" "News" because some of its content requires logging in to access, sort of like "Hacker" "News" comments from people who criticize tech companies.

The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux Kernel
October 11, 2020 (comments)
AMD's graphics drivers weigh in at approximately three hundred lines of code per transistor. Hackernews makes excuses so that we can pretend this is reasonable, then shifts back to bitching about Nvidia not sharing their source code.

The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
October 12, 2020 (comments)
The actual headline is "Why the Serverless Revolution Has Stalled," but the article body sadly does not just contain the text "504 Gateway Timeout." Hackernews is composed of people who grew up accustomed to treating AWS outages as catastrophic weather events, and people who grew up learning how to mitigate problems. The risk-assessment chasm between these two groups is demonstrated in the comments to be unbridgeable, but in the process Hackernews executes some kind of asymptotic approach to understanding the benefits of publicly-developed standards for interoperability -- they edge ever closer, but never quite reach the finish line.

2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read
October 13, 2020 (comments)
A lone hero singlehandedly deals a major setback to Google's war against their own users. Hackernews tries to figure out why the dirty words are censored, then talks the hero into uncensoring them. One Hackernews struggles to understand how communication was possible on the internet without the involvement of HTTP. Other Hackernews invent obvious lies in which they pretend that there has ever been anything but REST APIs.

Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time
October 14, 2020 (comments)
Some scientists achieve superconductivity, but the preconditions required are still extreme, so Hackernews' response is ... lukewarm. Most of the comments involve Hackernews trying to fit this article into the rest of the pop science they read today, in order to perform innovation-like text output via some kind of manual Markov chain process.