webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of November, 2020.

Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
November 01, 2020 (comments)
A Broadcom factory outlet introduces a slightly bulkier model of a bad computer it already sells. Hackernews believes that this, finally, is the computer that poor people will be able to buy. The rest of the comments are nostalgic ruminations on 80s computers.

South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes
November 02, 2020 (comments)
The creators of a popular cartoon have figured out how to make another cartoon with much more realistic art. Hackernews tries to figure out if deep fake technology is the harbinger of the end of civilization or an amusing party trick that might be useful to Hollywood. Most Hackernews seem to think that the solution is more computers, which will enable people to determine if the videos on their computers have been modified by computers.

GitHub: Widespread Injection Vulnerabilities in Actions
November 03, 2020 (comments)
Security geniuses at Google determine that shell pipelines reimagined as YAML webshit are still fundamentally shell pipelines and are subject to similar unintended consequences. Neither Hackernews nor Github seem particularly surprised or interested.

Disclosure: Unlimited Chase Ultimate Rewards Points
November 04, 2020 (comments)
An Internet notices a bank's webshit is broken. The bank is a huge asshole about it. There is no recourse. Hackernews lists this sort of thing as the foremost reason they, as a matter of policy, do not help anyone with anything for any reason. It's a shame, says Hackernews, pondering the massive wave of improvement they think they could immediately unleash, if only people weren't so mean to them. The rest of the comments are an attempt to assemble a list of banks who are assholes.

Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
November 05, 2020 (comments)
The Finnish government attempts to lure unsuspecting computer nerds into an icy hellscape. Hackernews warns one another that it is more difficult to live in Finland for people who do not speak Finnish. Over two hundred comments are Hackernews helpfully informing the reader that this is true of most countries who have not yet standardized on English. The larger comment thread is Hackernews either outraged that the Finns pay half their income on taxes to provide services that cost more in America, or Hackernews arguing about who really won World War II.

Technical debt as a lack of understanding
November 06, 2020 (comments)
An apostate advocates understanding the software you work on and the reasons for its design. Hackernews spends the afternoon trying to come up with a complicated metaphor to explain this concept to people who are not software engineers, which is a tremendous waste of time, because people who are not software engineers would take it for granted that you need to understand the things you work on for a living.

Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.
November 07, 2020 (comments)
An extremely popular reality show has not been renewed for another season. Hackernews posts three and a half thousand comments in twelve hours, most of which bemoan the radicalization of American politics. The broad consensus among Hackernews is that both the extreme left and the radical right have too much power and too loud a voice, and have conspired to remove all representation of centrists like Donald Trump. This is, depending on which Hackernews is currently frothing, either the fault of the anti-white-male Big Tech companies who want to use diversity hiring goals to establish a Stalinist global regime, or else it's the fault of the white male Big Tech CEOs who want to establish Mad-Max-Style libertarian nation-states hell-bent on defacing the United States Constitution. Either position is fine, say the moderators of "Hacker" "News", so long as there is no name-calling. All comments follow the standard format, which begins with "So you admit" or an incorrect rephrasing of the parent comment, followed by an attack on that rephrasing. At some point, the assholes who think democracy is a bad idea start popping up, and their opinions are given careful consideration. This is easily the worst thread in the history of "Hacker" "News." Absolutely no technology is discussed.