webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the third week of July, 2021.

Valve Steam Deck
July 15, 2021 (comments)
Valve (business model: "Uber for Gamestop") leads the latest attempt to inflict Linux on unwitting consumers. The story gets one of the highest vote counts of the year and sixteen hundred comments of Hackernews bickering about all of the other hardware devices Valve has introduced and then abandoned. Someone finds out that the device is built to run Arch Linux, and that comment thread immediately turns into a Slashdot re-enactment. The rest of the comments are either Javascript programmers with strong opinions on laptop hardware or people who seem to think Valve is attempting to bolster the production of native games for Linux, which is the opposite of what Proton in fact does.

Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”
July 16, 2021 (comments)
A Hackernews submits Google's support documentation as something to bitch about. The scare quotes around "misleading content" signify that the submitter considers permission to lie to you to be more important than living in a functioning society. Hackernews are libertarians until corporate policy conflicts with their immediate goals, at which time they fervently support nationalizing, you know, whatever is inconveniencing them. The "Hacker" "News" moderator steps in a couple times to remind people not to be impolite to shitposters.

Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with native performance
July 17, 2021 (comments)
Some Internets like video games, but not enough to run them in the correct operating system. Hackernews is unfamiliar with virtualization technology that isn't subject to Amazon Web Services billing practices, and the resulting comment threads constitute several requests for features that have been reliable and mature for years, and are univerally inferior to just running the supported configuration.

Assange case: Key witness admits he lied
July 18, 2021 (comments)
Hackernews chews on some propaganda, which is focused on the misapprehension that anyone in the United States justice system gives a fuck what Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson has to say about anything. Hackernews is mostly convinced that there's a sinister global conspiracy to silence a brave hero who did nothing at all to anyone except encourage an emotionally unstable foreign intelligence operative to commit treason for his own personal gain. As this behavior remains illegal, the United States remains interested in discouraging it.

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
July 19, 2021 (comments)
Hackernews gleefully converges on an opinion article from a respected medical publisher which gives them an excuse to disregard medical research journals. The comments focus on all the times that scientists did something to piss off Hackernews, to which experiences the only resonable response appears to be utterly discounting all formal research which is not directly funded by Google or SpaceX. Hackernews declares that medical research is mired in a sea of distractions from financiers and overhyped fads, which doesn't affect the crucial cryptocurrency and machine learning research coming out of the computer science fields.

Our lawsuit against ChessBase
July 20, 2021 (comments)
A business fights another business about copyright violations. Hackernews copyright cultists are excited about it.

Kubernetes is our generation's Multics
July 21, 2021 (comments)
An Internet doesn't like some of the currently popular job control software. Hackernews does, for the most part, and the ones who don't can't really imagine any other approaches. As a result, most of the comments are discussions about which AWS services should be replaced with which other AWS services.