Whenever I see a post at #1 with not comment, I know it's been artificially pumped to the top. So many people upvoted but not a single comment yet. Let there be some comments! lol.
OpenAI is a geopolitically important play besides being a tech startup so it gets pumped in funding and in PR, to show that we're still leading the world. But that premise is largely hallucinated.
I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.
This is just a roundup article (though there are still some good nuggets about Sora vs Meta's app.) Looking forward to another HN discussion purely driven through article title vibes. With nothing mooring the discussion, you know it's going to be "good".
I do like stratechery but this is a roundup newsletter and not an article. If the HN thread gets engagement it will likely be based on the headline and not any of the articles in the roundup.
Ben Thompson bopped around doing engineer things at Apple, Microsoft, and Automattic, until more than a decade ago he started this subscription newsletter with business-of-tech kind of analysis. The success of his paid newsletter gave Substack the idea [0].
A fair chunk of the tech who’s-who seem to find his thinking useful.
I've seen articles from this blog over the years and every time there are a bunch of comments referring to the author on a first name basis. As far as I can tell he's a guy who posts a bunch of hot takes on finance/economics/markets/etc. and I guess is very well known to a core audience that might overestimate his name recognition to other people who might just be seeing something on the front page of Hacker News without recognizing the source.
There's nothing inherently wrong with comments referring to him with by his first name, but I don't think I've ever seen a similar pattern with any other sources here outside of maybe a few with much more universal name recognition. It's always struck me as a little bit odd, but not a big enough deal for me to go out of my way to comment about it before now.
Anecdotes are only a datapoint and nearly meaningless by themselves. For a great many others just the stratechery.com website alone is enough to get a view and an upvote.
Are you sure you property clean up the blood stains of the call girls you murdered in your basement?
And what I mean by that is what evidence are either of us bringing that our claims are true?
Therefore I bring that I have no evidence at all about my claim above, and seeming you're in the same boat.
This said the website above lists
>I am not paid by any company for any opinion I post on Stratechery or in any public forum, including podcasts and Twitter.
>I do not hold individual stocks in any company I write about. I do hold various 401k and IRA accounts that invest in a wide-ranging basket of stocks, over which I have no control.
>I occasionally agree to speaking engagements for both public and private events, but not for companies I cover on Stratechery. Compensation will vary based on the nature of the customer and event, as well as the topic. I do not do any consulting at this time.
So you tell me.
>I pay for all of my own travel and expenses when I attend company events.
I was very wrong but on a very deep level, not the superficial sit we’re debating here.
For those who ca read between the lines, here is my moment of realisation:
The way forward does not have to be all about the way forward. The narrative is key, and we need to change the narrative to to be positive so we may move forward without all the chaos and trauma.
AI can contribute to such a way instead of make things worse. I will have some ideas to share. I hope you do, too. We have a chance now. The fog of war is over. And I have to say Trump did what Biden refused to do. I didn’t vote for either, but I am glad as hell he stopped the carnage and found a way to move toward the future, beyond the hate and carnage.
I will bring some ideas forward on how AI can help with peace.
It’s definitely a point of deep recognition.
What happened is huge. We need to stand behind peace and progress.
I’m convinced.
Peace to all those who have lost their lives for us to get to this money, on both sides.
It's easy to write a cynical reaction, but the simplest explanation is usually true. In this case, it's just a very good headline.
I read Stratechery. Ben's articles are what he makes for public consumption. This weekly summary thing is a new roundup for subscribers, and just happens to be public, and if you're not a subscriber you can't follow the links. If Ben could choose something to be #1 on Hacker News it would likely be a full article with this headline, rather than a weekly summary post for subscribers.
OpenAI has been at the top of the app store for years now. A lot of people are interested in it. That trivially explains the upvotes without a conspiracy.
OpenAI is a geopolitically important play besides being a tech startup so it gets pumped in funding and in PR, to show that we're still leading the world. But that premise is largely hallucinated.