Ask HN: I want to leave tech: what do I do?

Some of those insights are overused cliches at this point.

My pet peeve is the "S-curve argument":

> Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)

Yes, that's technically true because universe is finite, yadda yadda, but in practice where you are on the curve and your time horizon matters. Plenty of things are still effectively exponential[0], and I feel some people bring up sigmoids specifically because they you squint hard enough, it seems nicely and comfortably linear. But it isn't.

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[0] - Random example from a recent HN discussion: total amount of all written text to date. It's obviously going to be a sigmoid (or worse, if disaster strikes), but right now, we're still before the inflection point, so I wouldn't short the stock of storage providers just yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44442770

It is absolutely going to be a sigmoid, because population in high-literacy areas is crashing generally to name but one antecedent, and so your example is not even a particularly good one.

But really what you're doing is arguing for a nasty status quo with a bunch of deflective name-calling because this is hard to argue against in good faith: calling a potent, contrarian-to-the-gravy-train argument a "cliche", and in so doing implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN. To the extent that it's been raised before and is being raised again, it's precisely because no one has addressed in a satisfying way. And we're going to keep raising it until someone does.

Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.

"They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation." - Erik Naggum

I guess it depends on perspective, or maybe circles you frequent. I for one am tired of sigmoids, I truly perceive them to be a tired cliche. Hell, most people haven't even grasped exponential growth to this day, and here we are, pointing at the ending and implying they can skip the beginning.

Litmus test: when you hear soundbites like "in the last N years alone, the world used more energy/emitted more CO2 / did more whatever than it did in all recorded history", are you shocked? Surprised? If so, you failed to understand what exponential growth means. I mean, I assume you do understand this, but most people don't.

> implying that it is "asked and answered", that it has been raised, addressed, and disposed of, is the worst kind of argument on 2025 HN

If it were, I wouldn't have written my comment in the first place. I see the HN commentariat, on average, to be still enamored with sigmoids, treating the s-curve nature of growth in real world as some profound insight that invalidates the entire concept of exponential growth.

> Saying "we're in the the pre-inflection part of a sigmoid" is not the same as manipulating everything from stock markets to wars premised on log-scale-and-ruler math.

For one, it worked (and still does), so there's that. But secondly, this is not just about capitalism and wars. It's everywhere. COVID-19 was actually a nice demonstration. Yes, infections ultimately followed a sigmoid, as they were expected to, but the first part of the sigmoid is exponential, it was also the part that mattered at the beginning, and which most people across all social and economical strata failed to grasp.

Also thanks for the Naggum quote. I do consider myself a moral being and I am proud to be firmly in the S-expression camp.

Worked for who? Because behind the Valley I see a trail of broken technooptimist promises ranging from the ones so egregious their peddlers are in prison (SBF, Holmes), I see entire continents and cultures at war with a fundamentally antidemocratic surveilanvce capitalism, I see an entire clique of TESCREAL/EA psychos in positions of terrifying power, openly on the record about antidemocratic, authoritarian agendas (Thiel and everyone who has ever shaken his hand, Yarvin at the "quiet part out loud" end of the spectrum, pmarca and pg in the sort of edgy libertarian / still wants some mainstream acceptability tension zone, down to gladhanding collaborators of every stripe in the Roganverse, every shade in between: all rich, all anti competition, all anti democrocratic institution).

I see all of the CEOs lined up at the inauguration kissing the ring, buying up the commons that the DoD and Bell Labs built with taxpayer dollars into oligarchic empires straight out of Russia circa 92-94.

And at the apex of the Altman Era you have the swindler in chief peddling the absurdity that we weren't deep into the LLM asymptote a fucking year ago with implications ranging from wild infringements on the power of states to enforce their regulations in conflict with "AI Innovation..." /cuts to Amodei/ ..."to stay competitive with China!"

This is a fucking disaster for everyone but a small clique of Battery-frequenting bottom feeders who a better generation would have put in prison for crimes innumerable.

But it works for a few people. Those people are building bunkers though, and its not to keep out rogue AI.