The half-life of those articles is one week or less. There are no public figures who are the source of those headlines, thus there aren't any second-order effects occurring from other media outlets running with the headline to write their own "here's our 2 cents" article for clicks and views.
Sometimes that is newsworthy though. For example, are people happy with ICE storm troopers running amok in their city and you're just the weird one not liking it, or are you one of many?
Problem is, it is often just 1-2 posts on Twitter. Maybe 5… Heck! maybe 10, but that’s it.
And it’s often people who are only superficially involved in the thing they are so expertly talking about.
Sometimes it’s teenagers who just want to troll adults, especially knowing that their posts could appear in the news. Sometimes it’s adults who want to troll other adults for the LOLs or to fulfill a particular agenda. Sometimes it’s bots, actually, usually bots. Something the posts don’t even exist.
No, but this stuff would magically stop being newsworthy if the DNC linked oligarchy couldnt or didnt want to use it as a stick to beat the RNC linked oligarchy.
It's good that this ulterior motive exists but it's not something you can rely upon.
Similarly there wouldnt have been a pushback on net neutrality if big tech didnt want it so desperately.
The thing this article does not cover is that the average journalist has no sway. Most readers don't want the opinion of some random person covering a space, so "CEO Said a Thing" is the headline that draws the reader in. Many times the journalist also is not getting paid enough to inject any sort of counterpoint or unique perspective. This just seems like the natural outcome of the click-whoring online "news" structure we've created.
I'm confident this phenomenon exists in other industries too.
Is there a term that's equivalent to "reactionary" but applies to leftist/liberal ideals or is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary" save that I apply some sort of qualifier like "leftist" or "liberal" before or afterwards?
It feels like the only reason to label one side of the political spectrum "reactionary" in this way is to poison the well for anyone responding to you.
Where as, pre-labeling things as being politically one-sided is very reactionary, and seems to be what you're doing here. It's also not limited to just one side of the political spectrum. I would argue that Conservatives tend to be even more reactionary than liberals. See: All the legislation to prevent children from eating from dog/cat bowls in schools when there's no evidence of this occurring.
I believe that the standard word for this is "radical", but standard use is sloppy enough that it's reasonable to seek a clearer term. I also think that "knee-jerk" may capture the quick reflexive nature you're thinking of.
Raymond Williams in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society:
Reactionary has become difficult because it can mean (i) opposed to reforms;
(ii) wishing to go back to some previous condition; (iii) by application, support-
ing a particular (right-wing) version of society. There are few difficulties when
all impulses to change (actions) are from the Left, and all resistance (reactions)
from the Right. But if, for example, a capitalist party is in an innovating phase, or
if a fascist party is proposing a new social order, each side can call the other reac-
tionary: (i) because capitalism and fascism are right-wing, reactionary, as such;
(ii) because resistance to particular kinds of change, and especially changes and
innovations in capitalism and capitalist society, is seen as reactionary (wishing to
preserve or restore some other condition). Thus we can be invited to identify the
reactionary Right (usually with a sense of the extreme Right, as distinguished
from progressive or reforming conservatives, as well as from Liberals and the Left)
but often, also, the reactionary Left (opposing types of change which they see as
for the worse, or relying on particular senses of the democratic or socialist tradi-
tion which they oppose to current changes of a different kind).
I don't know if this helps but there's a precedent!
I fail to see any connections between this piece and Reaction, even tenuous ones.
Also, what would define a "leftist reactionary" anyway? An opposition to social conservatism? That's already the left's stance.
> is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary"
I really don't understand what's wrong with asking journalists to do their damn jobs and spend even a tiny amount of time checking the validity of what the people they're quoting are saying. Don't remove their statement, just point at the various potential ways they're misleading/wrong.
Journalists better start doing this basic part of their job again lest you want to be ruled by shameless incompetent buffoons that go unchallenged. Oh wait...
It doesn't reveal that they have no clue of what they're talking about. They know that a good number of idiot CEOs will hear this and dictate their engineers spend more claude/codex money, which benefits them.
Jensen isn't an idiot, he's capitalizing on the market.
It doesn't reveal they don't have no clue either - the problem is that both "Doesn't actually understand" and "Does understand but saying it because they think it'll benefit their products" look exactly the same from the outside.
All we know is he's saying things that are technically incorrect. And I'm not sure where that falls on the line of "Just Acceptable Marketing BS" to "Lying to the market about a Publicly Traded company" that would fall if he does understand it.
And while true he very much had deep technical education and roles, he's been C-level for over 30 years now. And a lot can change - both in the underlying technology and an individual's technical understanding - in 30 years.
He might be, but this sounds suspiciously like "Trump is playing 4D chess and trolling the media - he would never actually do the dumb thing he just suggested he was about to do."
> They know that a good number of idiot CEOs will hear this
This is true regardless of the specific jargon used, though. Or are you saying that idiot CEOs will not be impressed by correct claims only stupid claims?
I mean you're kind of attributing this to malice when its actually incompetence. Nvidia doesn't need any shilling by its CEO to increase its sales or capitalize on the market. It's purely banter from his pov, not some super intelligence spectre ploy to sell more GPUs.
I don't know the quote you're referring to, but if there were a CEO who I think understands the technical details of his products much better than most, it would be Jensen Huang.
And there is a huge difference between a CEO having "no clue" and a CEO trying to speak in terms that laymen and the business press can understand (even if a ton gets lost in translation).
Again, I'm not familiar with the quote, nor the details of the tech behind DLSS 5.
But even just taking what you wrote, there is a huge difference between lying to the press to get positive coverage/hype and just being outright clueless, which is what the GP comment was asserting. I sincerely doubt Jensen Huang is clueless.
> Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
What he said was that if he's paying 500,000 for an engineer, he expects that engineer to spend at least 250,000 in tokens, to get the most out of those $500,000.
Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.
> Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.
That's not what he said, though. He gave a number, and that number happens to correspond to something on the order of 25 billion Opus 4.6 tokens (hard to say what input vs. output ratio is like). He also said he is currently "deeply alarmed" if his engineers don't spend that much.
"Smart" is something you do, not something you are. People with very large amounts of raw intelligence fall down some very dumb intellectual rabbit holes that its practically a meme: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Having raw intelligence doesn't help if you don't apply rigor to your thinking. I suspect that very successful people actually end up falling into habitual mental shortcuts that cause them to promote stupid things at a later time.
They very much have a clue what they are talking about. The truth of what they are saying is the problem. Their job is to say whatever makes number go up, truth has nothing to do with it.
This is so true. There is a person popular on social media for debunking health and nutrition misinformation and "wellness influencer" BS, Dr. Jessica Knurick. I think her content is great, but even she has talked about how in order for the algorithms to pick up her content, she usually highlights something idiotic that some wellness influencer or RFK Jr. is saying to debunk it (always with citations!) She's said how if she just put forward good, evidence-based health and nutrition content that she wouldn't have near the audience or exposure she does as when she highlights how some ignoramus thinks niacin fortification in grains is bad because they can't pronounce it.
I've come to the conclusion recently that if a tech CEO is pushing for something , it's probably something normal people should be fighting against. To the point where "Elon/Mark/Jensen/Peter wants society to do [thing]" is a pretty strong signal that [thing] is actually a terrible idea.
Uncritically regurgitating what sources tell you is not journalism. It's too lazy to rise to the level of propaganda. It's more like writing them a press release for free.
>I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.
Yeah, shrinking revenue, lawsuits, death threats, buyouts and takeovers, government strong-arming all contribute to not really wanting to fight the fight that they need to.
There isn't a solution to this as you can't bankroll media outlets or journalists and not expect to be considered biased. The revenue has to come from every day people. So if the revenue isn't there to pay the best people, you're simply not going to have a good, independent media industry any more. Any very-rich person bankrolling that probably also has political affiliations, which again introduces bias.
With rising cost of living, the population will clearly cut out the media subscriptions thinking that the free journalism slop is enough to keep them informed.
It's like reading dispatches from an alternate post-truth universe.
> You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).
That's the worst. It's like it's now wrong to call CEOs on their bullshit.
Yesterday I noted that Donut Labs, with their heavily promoted solid state battery, had previously announced they would be shipping in volume in Q1 2026. I wrote on HN "They have until Tuesday." That was voted down.
This is ultimately a consequence of the attention economy, which is absolutely harmful for most everyone in the long term, with the exception of, you know, Elon, Sam, Mark and the like.
Another restatement of Brandolini’s Law. The cost of parroting this kind of information is very low, while the cost of refuting it is very high. And the value an outlet can extract from its readership to fund that refutation is nowhere close to cover its outlay. Maybe a counter is the occasional take-down article can sometimes go more viral than the original claim, but chasing those is probably unprofitable too.
This is all a result of the techbro "genius" worship culture that YC & co are definitely guilty in helping to create. Writing code on a computer doesn't make anyone smarter than anyone else, and hopefully people will wake up to that fact sooner rather than later.
Like media reporting about Trump. Trump is a (mostly) fake-news generator. The problem is that the traditional media is largely structued to suit different goals, often the owner (make more money), in part to send out a certain narrative (propaganda). Or both.
I don't have a good work-around for this either. I try to gather news from different sources and use my brain, but even then my brain is influenced a lot by what information is given. Youtube is kind of great and awful here; great because you may have critical content (e. g. I like Vlad Vexler's thinking and reasoning, even if I may not always agree with the rationale, analysis, premise or outcome), but there is also soooo much propaganda on youtube. Tons of parrots repeating a certain narrative. Peter Zeihan is my personal disfavourite right now (the recent "How to Break Iran" is pure propaganda IMO) but there are so many more examples, influencers too. One day I'll need to disconnect myself from youtube (and, in the process, Google); right now I admit I am too addicted to some of it (the content, not the platform; the platform pisses me off. It is not even usable anymore without ublock origin).
It’s the only parts of his person I consider such. All other ”accomplishments” are a-dime-a-dozen for the ultra-rich. Why would it for example be remarkable that he does not seem to understand the difference between gender and sex? Or why would it be remarkable that he has an inability to keep the timelines he has made for Tesla? Well, I suppose it is remarkable (and a bit funny) that he wanted to party with Epstein and was rebuffed. I don’t think it is remarkable that he is not a good PoE player, but should I?
Closely related to “people are upset about a thing” articles which just regurgitate quotes from random people on social media.
The half-life of those articles is one week or less. There are no public figures who are the source of those headlines, thus there aren't any second-order effects occurring from other media outlets running with the headline to write their own "here's our 2 cents" article for clicks and views.
Sometimes that is newsworthy though. For example, are people happy with ICE storm troopers running amok in their city and you're just the weird one not liking it, or are you one of many?
Problem is, it is often just 1-2 posts on Twitter. Maybe 5… Heck! maybe 10, but that’s it.
And it’s often people who are only superficially involved in the thing they are so expertly talking about.
Sometimes it’s teenagers who just want to troll adults, especially knowing that their posts could appear in the news. Sometimes it’s adults who want to troll other adults for the LOLs or to fulfill a particular agenda. Sometimes it’s bots, actually, usually bots. Something the posts don’t even exist.
You can't infer anything about 3 choice Twitter quotes copied into an article, though.
No, but this stuff would magically stop being newsworthy if the DNC linked oligarchy couldnt or didnt want to use it as a stick to beat the RNC linked oligarchy.
It's good that this ulterior motive exists but it's not something you can rely upon.
Similarly there wouldnt have been a pushback on net neutrality if big tech didnt want it so desperately.
The thing this article does not cover is that the average journalist has no sway. Most readers don't want the opinion of some random person covering a space, so "CEO Said a Thing" is the headline that draws the reader in. Many times the journalist also is not getting paid enough to inject any sort of counterpoint or unique perspective. This just seems like the natural outcome of the click-whoring online "news" structure we've created.
If a journalist is not being paid enough to do journalism, what do we call their output?
Certainly not journalism.
The fairly well established term is churnalism.
Spam
clickbait
I'm confident this phenomenon exists in other industries too.
Is there a term that's equivalent to "reactionary" but applies to leftist/liberal ideals or is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary" save that I apply some sort of qualifier like "leftist" or "liberal" before or afterwards?
It feels like the only reason to label one side of the political spectrum "reactionary" in this way is to poison the well for anyone responding to you.
Where as, pre-labeling things as being politically one-sided is very reactionary, and seems to be what you're doing here. It's also not limited to just one side of the political spectrum. I would argue that Conservatives tend to be even more reactionary than liberals. See: All the legislation to prevent children from eating from dog/cat bowls in schools when there's no evidence of this occurring.
I believe that the standard word for this is "radical", but standard use is sloppy enough that it's reasonable to seek a clearer term. I also think that "knee-jerk" may capture the quick reflexive nature you're thinking of.
Yeah it feels like you're catching on to the vibe I got from this article the best.
im not sure what about this makes it left reactionary but I suppose left reactionary would be the term
The equivalent word is "radical".
Raymond Williams in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society:
I don't know if this helps but there's a precedent!Controversially, that would be ‘woke’, but obvs the term is now somewhat tarnished.
As the right has an immovable Evangelical wing, so now does the Left. A good word for such people is currently unoccupied.
I fail to see any connections between this piece and Reaction, even tenuous ones.
Also, what would define a "leftist reactionary" anyway? An opposition to social conservatism? That's already the left's stance.
> is it fine for me to start referring to this kind of writing as "reactionary"
I really don't understand what's wrong with asking journalists to do their damn jobs and spend even a tiny amount of time checking the validity of what the people they're quoting are saying. Don't remove their statement, just point at the various potential ways they're misleading/wrong.
Journalists better start doing this basic part of their job again lest you want to be ruled by shameless incompetent buffoons that go unchallenged. Oh wait...
It is at least entertaining when certain CEOs speak off-the-cuff and reveal they have no clue what they are talking about.
Jensen thinks DLSS 5 works at "the geometry level", for instance. Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
It doesn't reveal that they have no clue of what they're talking about. They know that a good number of idiot CEOs will hear this and dictate their engineers spend more claude/codex money, which benefits them.
Jensen isn't an idiot, he's capitalizing on the market.
It doesn't reveal they don't have no clue either - the problem is that both "Doesn't actually understand" and "Does understand but saying it because they think it'll benefit their products" look exactly the same from the outside.
All we know is he's saying things that are technically incorrect. And I'm not sure where that falls on the line of "Just Acceptable Marketing BS" to "Lying to the market about a Publicly Traded company" that would fall if he does understand it.
And while true he very much had deep technical education and roles, he's been C-level for over 30 years now. And a lot can change - both in the underlying technology and an individual's technical understanding - in 30 years.
He might be, but this sounds suspiciously like "Trump is playing 4D chess and trolling the media - he would never actually do the dumb thing he just suggested he was about to do."
The joke is on everyone else, our favorite leader is just pretending to be an idiot!
> They know that a good number of idiot CEOs will hear this
This is true regardless of the specific jargon used, though. Or are you saying that idiot CEOs will not be impressed by correct claims only stupid claims?
I mean you're kind of attributing this to malice when its actually incompetence. Nvidia doesn't need any shilling by its CEO to increase its sales or capitalize on the market. It's purely banter from his pov, not some super intelligence spectre ploy to sell more GPUs.
I don't know the quote you're referring to, but if there were a CEO who I think understands the technical details of his products much better than most, it would be Jensen Huang.
And there is a huge difference between a CEO having "no clue" and a CEO trying to speak in terms that laymen and the business press can understand (even if a ton gets lost in translation).
How is "the geometry level" lost in translation. It's simply a lie.
Again, I'm not familiar with the quote, nor the details of the tech behind DLSS 5.
But even just taking what you wrote, there is a huge difference between lying to the press to get positive coverage/hype and just being outright clueless, which is what the GP comment was asserting. I sincerely doubt Jensen Huang is clueless.
> Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
If a CEO wants to pay engineers $500,000 and then let them spend as much as they need on tools and services, I'm all for it.
Getting angry at a CEO for paying high compensation and also having a high tool use budget is not a take I expected on Hacker News.
250k isn't a budget. It's the minimum that he said someone _should_ spend or else he would think they're doing something wrong.
It's an insane take. Completely bone-headed. Just obvious grift.
> Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
What he said was that if he's paying 500,000 for an engineer, he expects that engineer to spend at least 250,000 in tokens, to get the most out of those $500,000.
Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.
I think he's right on this.
> Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.
That's not what he said, though. He gave a number, and that number happens to correspond to something on the order of 25 billion Opus 4.6 tokens (hard to say what input vs. output ratio is like). He also said he is currently "deeply alarmed" if his engineers don't spend that much.
So, is your position that Jensen Huang, CEO of NVDA, is an idiot?
Yes, it is very possible for someone to be smart and an idiot at the same time.
Do you think you're smart? Have you ever done something and said "man, I'm an idiot"? It's just like that.
Of course, the other explanation is that he's just grifting, which is also very possible.
"Smart" is something you do, not something you are. People with very large amounts of raw intelligence fall down some very dumb intellectual rabbit holes that its practically a meme: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Having raw intelligence doesn't help if you don't apply rigor to your thinking. I suspect that very successful people actually end up falling into habitual mental shortcuts that cause them to promote stupid things at a later time.
They very much have a clue what they are talking about. The truth of what they are saying is the problem. Their job is to say whatever makes number go up, truth has nothing to do with it.
DLSS5 is such a disaster of corporate AI slop brain. Completely replaces the artistic vision with generic AI faces: https://xcancel.com/foxygames_uk/status/2034010117851463914
Jensen Huang knows that this is a gold rush and that his job is to sell shovels.
He's not stupid.
Reaction-baiting (or -bating depending on your perspective) really has ruined most discourse. There a direct line to advertising and social media.
This is so true. There is a person popular on social media for debunking health and nutrition misinformation and "wellness influencer" BS, Dr. Jessica Knurick. I think her content is great, but even she has talked about how in order for the algorithms to pick up her content, she usually highlights something idiotic that some wellness influencer or RFK Jr. is saying to debunk it (always with citations!) She's said how if she just put forward good, evidence-based health and nutrition content that she wouldn't have near the audience or exposure she does as when she highlights how some ignoramus thinks niacin fortification in grains is bad because they can't pronounce it.
At least it's slightly more interesting than "company X raises Y millions at Z billions valuation", but point taken
I've come to the conclusion recently that if a tech CEO is pushing for something , it's probably something normal people should be fighting against. To the point where "Elon/Mark/Jensen/Peter wants society to do [thing]" is a pretty strong signal that [thing] is actually a terrible idea.
Uncritically regurgitating what sources tell you is not journalism. It's too lazy to rise to the level of propaganda. It's more like writing them a press release for free.
>I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.
Yeah, shrinking revenue, lawsuits, death threats, buyouts and takeovers, government strong-arming all contribute to not really wanting to fight the fight that they need to.
There isn't a solution to this as you can't bankroll media outlets or journalists and not expect to be considered biased. The revenue has to come from every day people. So if the revenue isn't there to pay the best people, you're simply not going to have a good, independent media industry any more. Any very-rich person bankrolling that probably also has political affiliations, which again introduces bias.
With rising cost of living, the population will clearly cut out the media subscriptions thinking that the free journalism slop is enough to keep them informed.
This guy is all too right. Fortune.com today:
> A CEO trying to reindustrialize America says blue-collar pay is headed for ‘massive hyperinflation’ and kids should skip college to become welders
> Trump said the Iran war was ‘very complete’ three weeks ago.
> Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says ‘We’ve achieved AGI.’
It's like reading dispatches from an alternate post-truth universe.
> You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).
That's the worst. It's like it's now wrong to call CEOs on their bullshit.
Yesterday I noted that Donut Labs, with their heavily promoted solid state battery, had previously announced they would be shipping in volume in Q1 2026. I wrote on HN "They have until Tuesday." That was voted down.
The worst is "Jony Ive said"
This is ultimately a consequence of the attention economy, which is absolutely harmful for most everyone in the long term, with the exception of, you know, Elon, Sam, Mark and the like.
Another restatement of Brandolini’s Law. The cost of parroting this kind of information is very low, while the cost of refuting it is very high. And the value an outlet can extract from its readership to fund that refutation is nowhere close to cover its outlay. Maybe a counter is the occasional take-down article can sometimes go more viral than the original claim, but chasing those is probably unprofitable too.
Naturally media are on the side of money.
This is like half of the writing at Arstechnica for the last decade or more.
Now this was an article where I didn't even need to read the article. The headline was all I needed to know it has all the same complaints I do.
Also "some minority group is concerned about something" journalism.
"[Thing] happened and [group] are furious!" journalism
And the "X slammed by media/journalists" meta articles lazy journalists write about others' headlines.
That's still more interesting than what some sociopath rich person without a real clue says.
This is all a result of the techbro "genius" worship culture that YC & co are definitely guilty in helping to create. Writing code on a computer doesn't make anyone smarter than anyone else, and hopefully people will wake up to that fact sooner rather than later.
Like media reporting about Trump. Trump is a (mostly) fake-news generator. The problem is that the traditional media is largely structued to suit different goals, often the owner (make more money), in part to send out a certain narrative (propaganda). Or both.
I don't have a good work-around for this either. I try to gather news from different sources and use my brain, but even then my brain is influenced a lot by what information is given. Youtube is kind of great and awful here; great because you may have critical content (e. g. I like Vlad Vexler's thinking and reasoning, even if I may not always agree with the rationale, analysis, premise or outcome), but there is also soooo much propaganda on youtube. Tons of parrots repeating a certain narrative. Peter Zeihan is my personal disfavourite right now (the recent "How to Break Iran" is pure propaganda IMO) but there are so many more examples, influencers too. One day I'll need to disconnect myself from youtube (and, in the process, Google); right now I admit I am too addicted to some of it (the content, not the platform; the platform pisses me off. It is not even usable anymore without ublock origin).
> There's no better example of this than what I affectionately refer to as "CEO said a thing!" journalism.
If you are half wrong with your first examples, maybe you should focus on yourself first?
I get the point you are trying to make, but you can't do that spreading misinformation. Jesus.
Elon Musk is an "unremarkable white supremacist"? Come on.
True. His wealth and racism are both remarkable traits.
Is that what you think is most remarkable? Seems blinkered.
It’s the only parts of his person I consider such. All other ”accomplishments” are a-dime-a-dozen for the ultra-rich. Why would it for example be remarkable that he does not seem to understand the difference between gender and sex? Or why would it be remarkable that he has an inability to keep the timelines he has made for Tesla? Well, I suppose it is remarkable (and a bit funny) that he wanted to party with Epstein and was rebuffed. I don’t think it is remarkable that he is not a good PoE player, but should I?
He's a remarkable white supremacist, I'll give you that.