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.
“CEO said a thing” journalism
31–40 of 81 posts
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#32Closely related to “people are upset about a thing” articles which just regurgitate quotes from random people on social media.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#33[flagged]
He's a remarkable white supremacist, I'll give you that.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#34It 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.
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."
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#35This is like half of the writing at Arstechnica for the last decade or more.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#36This 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.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#37It 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.
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.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#38I'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?
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).
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#39It 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.
> 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.
Re: “CEO said a thing” journalism
#40The 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" struct…
If a journalist is not being paid enough to do journalism, what do we call their output?
Certainly not journalism.