Site currently has one hit counter, zero tests, and a security posture its creator describes as “ironic, on purpose, mostly.”
Pictured: a fake "Employee of the Month" plaque, for an employee with no face, made by a man with fewer employers than he had this time last month.
A former senior engineer, terminated in July as part of what his old employer called a “strategic efficiency realignment” and what he calls “getting replaced by the thing I was asked to build,” has spent the past three weeks building a satirical news site mocking AI executives, using the same AI tools that arguably cost him his job.
“There’s something poetic about it,” he said, describing a workflow in which he pastes a headline idea into a chat window, gets back a fully formed article in nine seconds, and does not read it closely before publishing. “I used to spend four days on a pull request. Now I generate an entire fake newspaper before my coffee’s cold. I don’t know if that’s satire or just, like, my actual life now.”
The site, which the founder describes as “The Onion if The Onion had no runway and a grudge,” currently runs on a single unreviewed HTML file, has never been penetration tested, and stores its one admin password in what he called “a text file, don’t worry about it.” Asked whether this concerned him, given that his signature bit is mocking AI companies for exactly this kind of security negligence, he said, “I’m aware of the irony. I’ve chosen to monetize it instead of fixing it.”
“I’m aware of the irony. I’ve chosen to monetize it instead of fixing it.”
Early headlines include “Tech CEO Calls Layoffs ‘Right-Sizing,’ Calls Yacht ‘Right-Sizing Reward,’” and “Local Man Discovers He Can Say Anything He Wants Now That Nobody’s Paying Him Not To.” The founder says the second one is not a metaphor.
Former coworkers describe the site as “extremely accurate” and “concerning, in that he seems fine.” His former manager, reached for comment, said the company “wishes him well in his next chapter” and asked, off the record, whether the site was hiring.
The founder insists the project isn’t about revenge. “It’s about closure,” he said, before adding that closure, in this case, is hosted on a free tier, backed by a domain he got on sale, and updated at 2 a.m. using a chatbot he refers to, without apparent irony, as “my new boss, but this one actually listens to me.”
At press time, he was three energy drinks into building a fake “employee of the month” plaque for an AI that does not have a face, using a tool built by a company that, coincidentally, also does not have a face he can complain to.