The thing is that the software business has discovered its Three Big Lies:
- Everything is Exponential (Sigmoids are For The Small Thinkers)
- Breaking The Law is Progress if You Do It With a Computer
- Computer People Know What's Best
Other industries that have become tentacled over the years have had similar Big Lies (High Finance has Price Movements are Gaussian Distributed for example, and Bailouts are The Business Cycle).
I'm at the age both in life and career terms where its like, this could be a cyclic thing and these assholes are going to get thrown out soon, or it could be I came of age in an aberrant exceptionally good time, this is how it always ends up.
What I do know is that that software is an effective tool for mitigating the damage of malware, excellent computers are cheap now, and so it might be possible to fund an effective resistance doing rewarding work for the greater good with frugality and some creativity about paying the bills, I'm still figuring out the details.
This is one of the many reasons I tend to be vehemently in favor of decentralization. A lot of these problems are just because organizations become too large. It also feels kind of dystopic, or sterile at least, how you can be a thousand miles away and have a main street that looks largely indistinguishable from the one you just came from.
But markets are effectively part of the natural world: if you engineer the most oppressive, regimented, panopticon nightmare prison available to human deviousness you will succeed in creating a black market, not in eliminating markets.
So any solution has to be about preventing market failures, not eliminating markets. If North Korea can't effectively inhibit markets from forming, it's a pretty convincing demonstration that no acceptable amount of anti-market intervention is going to be okay.
On halting monopolies I would vote and canvas for you if you ran on it.
I agree about the appeal of decentralization, I just don't know how to make it happen in a world where centralized control is enforced by MQ-9 Reaper drones with sole executive discretion on "kill or capture" of anyone and decentralization is considered a national security priority.
An example would be the people who argue that inherently sovereign and anonymous money would liberate people. What it would do is get you shot for fucking with the Mint.
This is one of those comments where I'm like, I bet the big LLM can write a FireFox extension that will block HN comments by username now...
I think there's a dividing line in society between those who understand systems and those who don't. The systems people look at the non-systems people as stupid; the non-systems people look at the systems people as evil.
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.
--
[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
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
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.
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.
What's odd is that you'd think tribal thinkers would respond to a track record of being proven correct but they emphatically do not. Moreover they're invariably convinced that you too think tribally.
As an example, I can think of one politician who is definitely a systems thinker (who is not nice, but is successful and generally outplays his opponents because of it) and ~80% of Hacker News is convinced beyond the shadow of any doubt that he's an evil idiot loser who invariably makes stupid mistakes.
Not sure whether you’re talking about the Orange Man, but calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell given the damage his tariffs, defunding, and other nonsense are causing.
You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.
Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.
Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.
That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.
Q: If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate? Wouldn't that make them stupider than the Donald for such an obvious oversight of the electorate?
>That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.
Managing to become president twice is insuficient evidence?
For one thing, the GOP have had a successful campaign over the last 50+ years to win the framing war. They're now able to present themselves as the plucky outsider who'll come in and fix things, even when they're not. Likewise, the Dems are *not* able to do this, even when they are.
Also the Dems are incompetent boobs.
The Democratic party in it's current state is ineffective & incompetent in many ways.
> Managing to become president twice is insufficient evidence?
Yes. You are ignoring the damage he is doing now, which is direct evidence against him being a good “systems thinker”
All world leaders are cut from the same self serving cloth as you don't get to become a presidential nominee if you're a genuine threat to the establishment.
How? They keep giving themselves more tax breaks. Sounds like their ground is just fine.
The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy
For the average voter, the grifts are irelevant since all candidates do it anyway, they just want a candidate that executes on their dissatisfactions with the system and that turned out to be the Donald.
Just follow the portfolios of those who funded the campaigns of the presidential winner, it doesn't matter if it's Clinton, Bush, Trump or Obama, all politicians are grifters, since once elected they need to pay back via grifts those who funded their campaigns as that's the main reason wealthy elites spent million for their candidate to win, to get into grifts with the government that make them even richer.
>The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy
What IS the optimal strategy? I think MAGA base is getting what they voted for (mass deportations and shit) so for them IT IS the optimal strategy.
If you know both sides are going to leave you worse off, it's probably pretty understandable that I'm always mad at the last guy to take a strip off my ass.
"Vices and virtues" are pretty much irrelevant to systems thinking but they are the bread and butter of tribalism.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/994/418/48b...
bizarre. tribal thinking doesnt seem to let you comprehend this.
^^ this bit was in anticipation of a response exactly like yours.
I was actually referring to Putin. It was quite impressive to watch him successfully invite sanctions in such a way that they resulted in steady level of export oriented industrialization. This was the same thing Trump was gunning for when he stepped on a tarriff rake of his own design.
The number of people who have done this is vanishingly small (and skeptics raise credible objections about even the best examples).
Jim Simons was such a man, and (to the satisfaction of most) proved it. Some might say the same of Buffet. After that a list that started controversial rapidly gets into the zero consensus asymptote.
So if you genuinely believe that your systems thinking prowess is prescient in its scope like something out of a Herbert novel, I can point you the narrow way through: get an account on Interactive Brokers and ascend!
But for human systems? Eh... Yeah I struggle with agreeing there. I think much harm has come from trying to think about human systems like computer systems both in the small of my own immediate life and in larger regimes. No matter how you feel about Elon Musk and DOGE? That didn't look like it went great for either side of that equation to mention one recent high-profile exanple. That looked pretty lose/lose.
I put "standard of living" in scare quotes because I strongly believe that, after a certain point in the US, people are conditioned by society and marketing to spend gobs of money on shit that doesn't make them happier and often actively makes them feel worse. I'm going through the process of moving and downsizing, and I can't even begin to go through the gobs of crap in my house that I'm throwing or giving away. Even home ownership itself is something that I feel is a bad lie - you're signing up to spend huge amounts of money to live in a box where you'll also need to spend huge amounts of money to slow its inevitable decay.
But I digress. The main point is that leaving (or changing) tech is easy, but you just have to have an honest conversation with yourself about how much you, your family and your self image requires a lot of money.
If you are in a situation with two parents making a professional level salary, which I suspect is the case given you stated paying $2k/kid/month for child care, well frankly you should STFU. In those cases, that is simply a choice you are making. There are certainly other options (which millions of people do because they don't have a choice), so you're not garnering much sympathy pleading poverty because you have to pay for your children's daycare.
In general (with a few exceptions like finance that are generally up front about what they are), the chillest, sanest jobs with the most accomodating environments tended to pay the best and vice versa.
I also have too many friends who tried sacrificing pay for better working conditions and more meaningful work and ended up bitter because they were sold a hollow dream.
I was fine having a lower paying job, but what I didn’t expect was that the lower pay meant that the skill level for my colleagues was also much much lower. Years of the “Dead Sea effect” [0] had turned it into an environment where the blind were leading the blind and they weren’t even aware of how bad things were.
So high pay also means “better coworkers”
[0] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
Being 'underpaid' is different than being paid less, though. Describing a job as underpaid is, almost by definition, assuming a company is exploiting its workforce. It's not hard to believe such a company would also be a toxic environment in other ways. But if two companies pay different amounts, but they're both paying a fair salary, it doesn't necessarily imply anything about the company that pays less.
Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors.
> Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue.
That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner.
The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.
And they all paid $180k+, the last two $200k+, in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. I only work over 40 hours if I’m working on something I’m passionate about. I realize FAANGs can go into the $400k+ range, but… do you really need that? Is it worth it? For the stress, the rat race, the pressure and all that?
Granted, they’ve been remote roles, and I live in North Carolina, not one of the HCOL metros (I don’t see how anyone can justify living in NYC, SF, or LA, honestly).
But like… this just seems untrue. There are plenty of good-paying, ethical roles to be had. Moreover, I’d say if you spend some time actively seeking out ethical, fairly (not excessively) compensated roles… they’ll find you, without you having to search for them.
Well, a lot of them. Not every. There are jobs at big tech companies where you work on good things benefiting society, like improving security in open-source, or developing a lot of the OSS tools out there. (Think Project Zero, or many of your favorite major OSS project, which are developed by engineers at big tech.) They are not nearly as common as other roles obviously, but they do exist, and it's worth at least attempting to get them.
A thousand times, yes.
And even if you find ethical jobs (e.g., paid-for and ethically committed open source work), they are much-much more difficult to do well. Distrust and secrecy are absolutely rampant between you and your (inevitably proprietary) partners; reverse engineering plays a central role. It's a warzone -- and the constant fighting, battling, against measures put in place by other humans, just takes the will to live out of me.
It should be possible for well-paying, ethical, interesting, and co-operative jobs to exist. They only exist as exceptions.
Practically every recommendation is also a tech job, its just not "big tech" where you have very little real decision making power.
Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue. And after you have a high paying job its hard to justify leaving it, and every other similarly paying job is basically the same thing in a different package.