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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Shows the weirdness of online journalism. News outlets were briefed about an upcoming event and pre-wrote and scheduled articles. When the time came they were all triggered. Except...the event didn't actually happen.

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In a future where Claude and ChatGPT agents automate all aspects of society, that triggers a cascade of real world consequences where everything keeps running as if the new model is released, except the vibe coded upgrade procedure fails to do a staged rollout, taking down the entire agent infrastructure when they try to upgrade to a nonexistent model all at once.

The Machine Stops [0] [1] [2] comes to mind.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

[1]: https://archive.org/details/themachinestops_1411_librivox

[2]: https://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.ht...

Presumably this sort of thing was rampant pre-internet? News outlets would _have_ to receive embargoed information so that they could publish papers on time. I believe government budgets are a good example of this happening. I think the weird shift was when online journalism started, and live reactions became the norm, no?

Or you could wait a day or two to write about it, but with initial reactions etc. added. 24-hour new cycle came into view in 80s I think?

Ya, 24 hour cable news in the late 80s.

Hype and views die off very quickly, hence advertising money has disappeared by the next day most of the time.

No, embargoed news is super common. Almost every single product announcement goes through that. Critics watch movies early, companies have access to LLM model improvements early, car manufacturers send production models early… it happens everywhere all the time.

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