Discussion

"CEO Said A Thing!" Journalism

tadfisher: 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.

m00x: 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.

tolerance: 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?

code_for_monkey: im not sure what about this makes it left reactionary but I suppose left reactionary would be the term

stackedinserter: Also "some minority group is concerned about something" journalism.

somewhatjustin: "[Thing] happened and [group] are furious!" journalism

jsbisviewtiful: That's still more interesting than what some sociopath rich person without a real clue says.

yoyohello13: 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.

gkoberger: I think it's less that they "don't know what they're talking about", and more "we don't see things from the same perspective".Sometimes their perspective is self-serving, sometimes it's ahead of its time, and sometimes yeah it is just actually dumb.But take Elon for example. I despise Elon. But I think the biggest mistake you can make is thinking he's an idiot when he talks. He just has an agenda and belief system he's not directly sharing, and the "dumb" things he said is a good insight into those.

vrganj: 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

brk: 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.

hamdingers: If a journalist is not being paid enough to do journalism, what do we call their output?Certainly not journalism.

Aurornis: > 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.

_se: 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.

tolerance: 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!

hn_throwaway_99: 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).

yoyohello13: How is "the geometry level" lost in translation. It's simply a lie.

michaelsshaw: 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.

righthand: This is like half of the writing at Arstechnica for the last decade or more.

TallGuyShort: 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."

baggy_trough: Elon Musk is an "unremarkable white supremacist"? Come on.

vrganj: He's a remarkable white supremacist, I'll give you that.

kleinsch: Closely related to “people are upset about a thing” articles which just regurgitate quotes from random people on social media.

enjoylife: 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.

hn_throwaway_99: 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.

Animats: 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.

hnthrow0287345: >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.

hollasch: 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.

tolerance: Yeah it feels like you're catching on to the vibe I got from this article the best.

John23832: Reaction-baiting (or -bating depending on your perspective) really has ruined most discourse. There a direct line to advertising and social media.

hn_throwaway_99: 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.

qwertox: > 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.

tadfisher: > 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.

dylan604: 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?

xracy: 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.

pydry: 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.

vntok: [delayed]

guessmyname: 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.