webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the twenty-eighth week of March, 2020.

Airline pilots landing at LAX report “a guy in jetpack” flying alongside them
September 01, 2020 (comments)
Someone discovers a flight class lower than coach. Hackernews is entirely populated with aviation experts, since the recent release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and bickers over whether air traffic controllers are more important than computer programmers.

Ninth Circuit rules NSA's bulk collection of Americans' call records was illegal
September 02, 2020 (comments)
The United States Government admits that there may in fact be a war against its own users. Hackernews blames the deep state, then sets about trying to convince everyone that the actual elected officials are not culpable for any of the things that happen as a direct result of their actions. Later, Hackernews explains that it's unreasonable, in fact, to hold anyone accountable for any actions at all.

David Graeber has died
September 03, 2020 (comments)
A teacher is gone. Hackernews' response varies according to whether they were instructed to like specific books or not.

Reddit app got 50M downloads by making mobile web experience miserable
September 04, 2020 (comments)
Some webshits build a waterslide into a surveillance cesspool. Hackernews explores the borderland between basing one's business on assholery in pursuit of revenue and building a business that sustains itself without such fuckery. The consensus emerges that being a tremendous dickhead is the only way to earn money, and if you're a big enough dickhead, you might earn enough money to subsidize something that a few people find useful.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it
September 05, 2020 (comments)
Some assholes build a waterslide into a surveillance cesspool, but people are beginning to decline free tickets. Hackernews is torn between an abiding appreciation for the needless complexity and the fact that the resulting technology kind of sucks in every possible way. If only, moans Hackernews, there were a way we could permanently ensconce forty years of Unix mistakes and still be able to scroll down without invoking thermal shutdown? Ah well, sighs Hackernews, maybe next decade.

Common color mistakes and how to avoid them
September 06, 2020 (comments)
Some Powerpoint zombies excrete Blog Lecture Nº 45,301,322 in the Pretending Color Theory Is Worth This Many Words series. Hackernews enjoys deep-dive bikeshedding about things that most people will not ever care about, but since there's so little actual content present they generally have to invent things to argue about. Everyone else on Earth continues to use the default colors of their software (or the templates provided by the corporate communications department) and it continues to work just fine.

BitTorrent v2
September 07, 2020 (comments)
Some Internets post an extremely detailed treatise regarding updates to software that do not in any meaningful way affect any users. Fortunately, the Internets in question are mostly sane, and so the new version can coexist with the old version, and users may continue not caring. Hackernews quietly observes the competence, then starts bitching about Bitcoin. Other Hackernews wish the software did more to foil the interference caused by the companies Hackernews pays every month.