webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of May, 2021.
Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)
May 15, 2021
(comments)
A webshit digests some changelogs. Hackernews argues about whether webshit is "simple," and the answer seems to depend on whether you have ever experienced anything else. Later, Hackernews argues about whether webshit is the best possible solution to all problems, or better constrained to the specific hell world that spawned it. That answer is universal: everything should be written in javascript, and any deficiencies in that language are deliberately put there so you can feel smart for having worked around them.
Observing my cellphone switch towers
May 16, 2021
(comments)
In a startling reversal of fortune, an Internet surveills a smartphone. Hackernews trades ghost stories about telephones, then spends the rest of the evening incorrecting one another about modern telephony, timezones, and law enforcement.
Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
May 17, 2021
(comments)
The answer is "because Israel likes it that way," but a couple of BBC writers managed to drag that information out into a full-length article. Hackernews discusses other shitty maps. Another Hackernews questions the population density in Gaza, which turns into your average web forum slap fight about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Hall Monitor shows up to force some racists to create new accounts. The fight does not slow down.
Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
May 18, 2021
(comments)
A subsidiary of Bitcoin Idiots, LLC brag about only having been an ecological disaster for a little while; thanks to diligence and hard work, they will in the future be merely an idiotic waste of time. A Hackernews brings receipts about the futility of trusting any of the people involved, and a massive nerd fight erupts. It's clear that one side or the other is extremely wrong, but because the topic they're debating is about as grounded in reality as a treatise on Babylon 5 spaceship engineering, most of the words they use don't actually mean anything, and it doesn't matter who wins. The few people capable of extracting money from this garbage fire will continue to do so, and the vast majority of the human race will continue to ignore these morons.
A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
May 19, 2021
(comments)
An Internet tells us the story of discovering white collar jobs. Hackernews lines up, because each of them has a story to tell about the day they realized they weren't ever going to do anything to earn their paychecks.
Sublime Text 4
May 20, 2021
(comments)
A new version of an old text editor is released. Among the features listed is GPU-accelerated text rendering, which is presented as an optimization, instead of an embarassment. One of the programmers who worked on it arrives in the comment thread to answer questions, but all of the questions are feature requests intended to turn it into VS Code. Later, Hackernews start arguing about which text editor starts the fastest, whether it's worth buying a more powerful computer so that your text editor starts faster, and other questions that only meaningfully affect Mac users.
Learn CSS
May 21, 2021
(comments)
Google decides the best format for teaching web layout and visual styling is a podcast. Fortunately, the podcast is accompanied by more useful media as well. A Google shows up and assumes anyone cares who rewrote the CSS documentation for the six thousandth time. Hackernews bikedheds the podcast, then links to the other six thousand regurgitations of the content.