webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the last week of February, 2021.
Daft Punk Break Up
February 22, 2021
(comments)
WDPK 83.7 FM, the sound of tomorrow, the music of today, signs off. Hackernews bemoans the trappings of fame.
Total Cookie Protection
February 23, 2021
(comments)
In the latest development of Mozilla's march to blanket the world in half-assed security measurements, Firefox incentivizes third-party login providers to sell tracking services. Hackernews wants to know what the rules are which govern the browser's decision to isolate (or not) specific cookies. Some Mozillas show up, but Hackernews winds up having to dig around for themselves anyway. Later, Hackernews points out that lots of webshit will still break under these rules, and arguments break out about whether the existing shit festival is preferable to any attempt at improving things.
My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies
February 24, 2021
(comments)
A student lands an internship. Everyone involved in the process arrives in the comments to congratulate one another, then Hackernews loudly proclaims that this story proves one crucial fact: schools should be camps where children are trained to perform at Silicon Valley whiteboard interviews. Elsewhere, Hackernews discusses a serious barrier to Palestinian workers getting employment in Israel: they just don't speak Hebrew well enough. Other Hackernews want to know if Gaza has electricity.
The Framework Laptop
February 25, 2021
(comments)
Framework (business model: "Uber for USB ports") would like to sell you a Macbook knockoff that literally comes apart in your hands. Hackernews spends a few thousand comments trying to ascertain what the most important quality of a laptop is, but completely fails. Nevertheless, they are positive that this machine will not have it, whatever it might be. The founder shows up to declare the opinion that consumer VR is a real thing that is popular among human beings.
Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are tracked
February 26, 2021
(comments)
The United States Government would like someone to read it the Terms of Service for Google Analytics. Since implementing user-tracking technologies is mostly Hackernews' day job, the comments are rife with pedantic definitions and re-definitions of every minute detail of this awful, parasitic drag on human progress. Other Hackernews betray themselves as ausländer by advocating for a world where corporate profit arises from markets other than those based on lying to other businesses about the efficacy of personalized advertising. Hackernews, of course, responds with hours of pedantic definitions and re-definitions of surveillance, capitalism, and surveillance capitalism.
A Vim Guide for Advanced Users
February 27, 2021
(comments)
Confusingly, this beginner's guide to vi is presented as an advanced guide for Vim. Some investigation reveals that the "intermediate" guide consists exclusively of fucking with window management, and the "beginner" guide involves literally learning how to type. Hackernews bikesheds all three for a bit, then recommends other learning resources for Vim. Nobody recommends the documentation.
How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
February 28, 2021
(comments)
An Internet gets frustrated by the longevity of a program bug. Without taking the time to A/B test the results in a production environment, Rockstar Games can have no way of knowing whether this work will increase revenue, so the bug will correctly remain unfixed. Some Hackernews are flummoxed that this sort of rank idiocy is accepted into commercial endeavor, but other Hackernews rush in to explain that programming video games is super duper hard, like you just wouldn't even believe, and we're lucky that the harried and abused video game computer programmers even managed to produce a functioning product, which is definitely something only a very few people on earth can do. The rest of the comments are various other bug reports for this and other video games, all of which reinforce the most important video game wisdom of all.
