The word "essential" is lifting your entire argument for you. If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential. But that's not up to you. You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve, what they want, and what they are allowed to have. That's all "essential" has ever meant: whatever I, the author, whose Word is obviously Divine, think Other People deserve to have. Why even bother using that word when talking about the economy? It's meaningless. Get rid of it and your argument collapses. People want GPUs.
> If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential.
You sure have a weird definition of it.
To make a quantitative claim, I'm not sure anyone would die immediately if Nvidia disappeared overnight, except maybe for a few traders. The potential long term casualties would likely be related to it possibly triggering a stock market crash, rather than first-order consequences of the company no longer delivering products.
Obviously, the disappearance of a company intimately related to logistics would be harder to mitigate.
> You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve
The crux of your confusion seems to be that you don't make a distinction between "deserve" and "need". Food and entertainment are both things everyone deserves, but only food is required for everyone to make it to the end of the month.
The category of "food" in economics is vast and absolutely includes things that humans don't need to live. Nobody dies if they can't buy clothing, except in very extreme cases, yet clothing is generally considered "essential". Meanwhile, people do die because they can't get jobs and become homeless, and you need an internet connection to get a job, but internet access is very rarely considered "essential" (although I suspect this is changing).
Besides, the usual definition of "essential" in economics is more about price elasticity, how consistent demand is, how spending on the category changes as income changes, etc. But whatever your parameters for that definition are, if you actually measure these things you'll see things that surprise you, and most of your results are going to be artifacts of how you categorize things. Lots of entertainment shows low price elasticity. Should dried beans and rice be in the same "food" category as foie gras? Is a Disney+ subscription essential to a working single mother of young children? Is heroin essential to a heroin addict? Are opiates essential to someone in chronic pain? Is alcohol essential to an alcoholic? Some would literally die if it were suddenly unavailable!
The category is murky, nobody can agree on what is or is not essential, nor even what its definition is: low price elasticity? necessary for life? necessary for a fulfilling life? able to be temporarily deferred in a crisis? All of these result in different lists.
> You sure have a weird definition of it.
As I feel like I've made quite clear: I do not have any definition of it, and neither do any of you. So let's not make policy decisions and economic predictions based on what is or is not "essential", please. People want GPUs, and you'll find lots of people who are more willing to give up their clothing and restaurant food than their GPUs.
Is this a kind of linguistical scorched-earth policy? I would like to know, because if we're going to be dishonest, there's plenty of other words we could start claiming have no meaning, until no meaningful conversation can happen.
Imagine for a second that the year was 1880. You would say that telephones aren't essential, wouldn't you? In the previous 25 centuries of recorded history we have lived without them. Nobody's going to die if they were to stop working.
And thus that the valuation of the Bell System must be based on pure hype. Right?
If they have stopped working today it would be disaster. If it stopped at that time, life would go on. It is not about technology but how society adapted around it.
"Disaster" is a very subjective term. One man's disaster is another's normality.
How many people died between 1812 and 1815 because there were no Trans-Atlantic telephone lines? About 30 thousand soldiers, wasn't it? Probably quite a few civilians as well.
I'd call the preventable death of 30 thousand men a disaster, wouldn't you? But in 1812 it was business as usual.
Would you say penicillin isn't essential, just because it's 1928 and people are accustomed to deaths from bacterial infections?
Or you could recognize that "essential" has a meaning in economic/financial terms, but that would entirely deflate the ad hominem attack you launched to avoid acknowledging that the answer to his question is: "Not really, with a few possible exceptions in some edge cases."
There's absolutely a reason to differentiate between essential and non-essential goods when talking about the economy. Why do you think the US runs a huge food production surplus? Why do you think publicly traded stock sectors include consumer staples (essential goods) and consumer discretionary (non-essential goods and services)?
> Or you could recognize that "essential" has a meaning in economic/financial terms
I do not recognize that. That is the point of my argument. A large portion of economics is rich people trying to justify their own greed as being moral. Classifying goods as "essential" vs. "non-essential" is a way of telling poor people what they're allowed to have, and always has been. A good goes from "non-essential" to "essential" only when rich people are worried they'll get guillotined if the poor don't have access to it.
I'm aware that it has a definition in terms of what people are able to stop purchasing when their income goes down, or how consumption relates to income levels in general, but the former is a problematic definition for many reasons, and the latter does not actually coincide particularly well with the categories of goods people list off when they think of "essential goods". Humans in real life just don't respond to changing conditions the same way the little econs in your head do; they way you've decided they "should".
Ever heard that humans don't "behave logically"? Yeah, that's economists with overly simplified models being annoyed that (mostly) poor people don't act the way that they've decided poor people should act. See the trend?
Ask four economists write out a list of "essential goods" and you'll get five different lists. That is not how definitions work. Ask four mathematicians whether something is a Commutative Ring or not and they'll all agree. That's a definition. "Essential" does not have a definition. Its meaning shifts depending on which group the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed you're reading wants to villainize this time.
> Ask four mathematicians whether something is a Commutative Ring or not and they'll all agree.
Amusingly, there are at least 3 different definitions of commutative ring.
The principal issue is whether it must have a 1 (unity, ie a multiplicative inverse). Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_ring as well as most modern sources insist on this.
Finally, if you do have a 1, then sometimes people include the condition that 0 != 1, ie the trivial/zero ring is deemed not a [commutative] ring. This is somewhat hard to find, but is relatively common among people who specifically define the concept of "ring with identity" (eg Zariski+Samuel). I have also found it unqualified (ie, just in the definition of "commutative ring") in the wild, eg in "Handbook of Mathematical Logic" by Barwise or "The Math You Need" by Mack.
(I agree with people like Conrad and Poonen that rings should have a 1. And I guess that the zero ring is in fact a [commutative] ring.)
The moral of the story is: "be careful with simile and analogy". Otherwise you get your arse handed to you on a plate and your very reasonable argument gets lost in the weeds 8)
In these circles is is generally safer to stick with car analogies.
> I do not recognize that. That is the point of my argument.
And my point is that you're going to continue to be frustrated and disappointed by refusing to use the same terminology for a topic as everyone else.
> A large portion of economics is rich people trying to justify their own greed as being moral.
Nope, but that view explains most of your reasoning.
> Classifying goods as "essential" vs. "non-essential" is a way of telling poor people what they're allowed to have, and always has been. A good goes from "non-essential" to "essential" only when rich people are worried they'll get guillotined if the poor don't have access to it.
Good lord. Which of these is more essential for human life? Food, or a luxury car? Basic medicine, or a trip to a casino? No one is stopping "poor people" from buying things from either category, but people clearly prioritize one over the other when funds are limited.
> I'm aware that it has a definition in terms of what people are able to stop purchasing when their income goes down, or how consumption relates to income levels in general, but the former is a problematic definition for many reasons, and the latter does not actually coincide particularly well with the categories of goods people list off when they think of "essential goods". Humans in real life just don't respond to changing conditions the same way the little econs in your head do; they way you've decided they "should".
So you do acknowledge the actual definition, you just refuse to accept it because you'd rather rage against the machine? Have fun with that.
> Ever heard that humans don't "behave logically"? Yeah, that's economists with overly simplified models being annoyed that (mostly) poor people don't act the way that they've decided poor people should act. See the trend?
Rich people also don't behave logically, for the record. It's almost like this class war you're describing is a figment of your imagination.
> Ask four economists write out a list of "essential goods" and you'll get five different lists. That is not how definitions work. Ask four mathematicians whether something is a Commutative Ring or not and they'll all agree. That's a definition. "Essential" does not have a definition. Its meaning shifts depending on which group the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed you're reading wants to villainize this time.
Congratulations on your discovery that economics is not a hard science.
You already said that essential does have a widely agreed upon definition above, so the rest of this rant seems odd.
> Which of these is more essential for human life? ... So you do acknowledge the actual definition ...
And you don't acknowledge the actual definition, or you would have been asking about price elasticity, not what is or is not essential for human life. Plenty of people will give up Chinese takeout before they give up GPUs.
> Food, or a luxury car?
The luxury car, because it's grandma's old classic that Tom has kept in good enough shape to drive to his job, and he doesn't know how he'll get there when it finally breaks down, but he doesn't really have a penchant for fancy food and gets by with some cheap staples he prepares at home.
> Basic medicine, or a trip to a casino?
The trip to the casino, because Judy is getting evicted, and doesn't have any friends or family she can stay with, and won't survive the winter on the street, and hitting it big at Blackjack is unlikely, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And although she does sometimes take Tylenol for headaches, she's otherwise in good health and doesn't have any ongoing medicinal needs.
What are we doing? You're deciding what other people need for their lives?
> Rich people also don't behave logically, for the record.
Of course they do, because however they behave, they have an army of op-ed writers, sycophants, and apologists who spew out post-hoc justification for their behavior, and viola, their behavior turns out to have been rational all along.
Meanwhile, if the poor (and we are always talking about the poor when we are talking about "essential") stubbornly show an unwillingness to stop purchasing some good that some economist has decided is "non-essential", they're villainized and called irrational. Many of them even have refrigerators!
> It's almost like this class war you're describing is a figment of your imagination.
You choose now, in 2025, to deny that there's a class war? That's certainly a take.
> And you don't acknowledge the actual definition, or you would have been asking about price elasticity, not what is or is not essential for human life. Plenty of people will give up Chinese takeout before they give up GPUs.
You just listed two examples of discretionary items (prepared food is generally not considered a consumer staple).
> The luxury car, because it's grandma's old classic that Tom has kept in good enough shape to drive to his job, and he doesn't know how he'll get there when it finally breaks down, but he doesn't really have a penchant for fancy food and gets by with some cheap staples he prepares at home.
You're 0 for 2. That's not a luxury car, unless Grandma had a love of rare exotics that he should probably sell to buy food and a reliable car.
> The trip to the casino, because Judy is getting evicted, and doesn't have any friends or family she can stay with, and won't survive the winter on the street, and hitting it big at Blackjack is unlikely, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And although she does sometimes take Tylenol for headaches, she's otherwise in good health and doesn't have any ongoing medicinal needs.
And now you're 0 for 3. Your earlier comments are making more sense.
> What are we doing? You're deciding what other people need for their lives?
Most humans understand what is essential to sustain human life and what is not. In fact, every functioning adult I've ever met does.
The implications of the fact that you don't can be left for you or other readers to decuce.
> Of course they do, because however they behave, they have an army of op-ed writers, sycophants, and apologists who spew out post-hoc justification for their behavior, and viola, their behavior turns out to have been rational all along.
> Meanwhile, if the poor (and we are always talking about the poor when we are talking about "essential") stubbornly show an unwillingness to stop purchasing some good that some economist has decided is "non-essential", they're villainized and called irrational. Many of them even have refrigerators!
Not remotely true.
> You choose now, in 2025, to deny that there's a class war? That's certainly a take.
Whether there is or isn't a class war is debatable, but the one you've concocted that is led by economists is certainly not happening.
> These tech stacks are mainstream because so many use them
That's a tautology. No, those tech stacks are mainstream because it is easy to get something that looks OK up and running quickly. That's it. That's what makes a framework go mainstream: can you download it and get something pretty on the screen quickly? Long-term maintenance and clarity is absolutely not a strong selection force for what goes mainstream, and in fact can be an opposing force, since achieving long-term clarity comes with tradeoffs that hinder the feeling of "going fast and breaking things" within the first hour of hearing about the framework. A framework being popular means it has optimized for inexperienced developers feeling fast early, which is literally a slightly negative signal for its quality.
I suspect it's not how you're using LLMs that is different, but rather the output you expect. I strongly suspect that if I wrote an application with the exact same functionality as your B2B SaaS, it would be around 20K lines. It's not uncommon to see a difference of 10x lines or more between different developers implementing the same thing, depending on how they code and what they value. My guess is that you like LLMs because they code like you, and others don't like them because they don't.
I'm struggling to even describe just how much 200K lines of code is in a concise, powerful language from a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity. Every unit of code you write increases the expressive power of all the rest of your code. 40k lines of code is not twice as much functionality as 20k lines, it's more like five times as much functionality. Code collapses on itself as you explore and discover it. Codespace folds in on itself like the folds of a multi-dimensional brain. New operators and verbs and abstractions are invented, whose power is combinatorial with all the other abstractions you've created. 200,000 lines of code is so much.
Fair: it was rude. Moderation is hard and I respect what you do. But it's also a sentiment several other comments expressed. It's the conversation we're having. Can we have any discussions of code quality without making assumptions about each others' code quality? I mean, yeah, I could probably have done better.
> "200k lines of code is a failure state ... I'd not normally huff my own farts in public this obnoxiously, but I honestly feel it is useful for the "AI hater vs AI sucker" discussion to be honest about this type of emotion." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976328
Oh for sure you can talk about this, it's just a question of how you do it. I'd say the key thing is to actively guard against coming across as personal. To do that is not so easy, because most of us underestimate the provocation in our own comments and overestimate the provocation in others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). This bias is like carbon monoxide - you can't really tell it's affecting you (I don't mean you personally, of course—I mean all of us), so it needs to be consciously compensated for.
As for those other comments - I take your point! I by no means meant to pick on you specifically; I just didn't see those. It's pretty random what we do and don't see.
What a bizarre attack. What makes you think I'm not "a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity"? I've been working on this thing for 9 years. It isn't some CRUD app. It's arrogant and rude of you to think you have any idea how many lines of code my life's work "should" take.
At this rate, don't limit yourself to 20K lines of code. I'm sure you could have written it in 5. Heck, you probably would have solved the problem without writing a line of code at all. That's just how good you are.
I understand the provocation, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Your GP comment was great, and probably the thing to do with a supercilious reply is just not bother responding (easier said than done of course). You can usually trust other users to assess the thread fairly (e.g.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44975623).
> What makes you think I'm not "a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity"
Some pieces of evidence that make me think that:
1. The base rate of developers who write massively overly verbose code is about 99%, and there's not a ton of signal to deviate from that base rate other than the fact that you post on HN (probably a mild positive signal).
2. An LLM writes 80% of your code now, and my prior on LLM code output is that it's on par with a forgetful junior dev who writes very verbose code.
3. 200K lines of code is a lot. It just is. Again, without more signal, it's hard to deviate from the base rate of what 200K-line codebases look like in the wild. 99.5% of them are spaghettified messes with tons of copy-pasting and redundancy and code-by-numbers scaffolded code (and now, LLM output).
This is the state of software today. Keep in mind the bad programmers who make verbose spaghettified messes are completely convinced they're code-ninja geniuses; perhaps even more so than those who write clean and elegant code. You're allowed to write me off as an internet rando who doesn't know you, of course. To me, you're not you, you're every programmer who writes a 200k LOC B2B SaaS application and uses an LLM for 80% of their code, and the vast, vast majority of those people are -- well, not people who share my values. Not people who can code cleanly, concisely, and elegantly. You're a unicorn; cool beans.
Before you used LLMs, how often were you copy/pasting blocks of code (more than 1 line)? How often were you using "scaffolds" to create baseline codefiles that you then modified? How often were you copy/pasting code from Stack Overflow and other sources?
200kloc is what, 4 reams of paper, double sided? So, 10% of that famous Margaret Hamilton picture (which is roughly "two spaceships worth of flight code".) I'm not sure the intuition that gives you is good but at least it slots the raw amount in as "big but not crazy big" (the "9 years work" rather than "weekend project" measurement elsethread also helps with that.)
Have you seen the list of books fascists want to ban? I think GP's point was exactly to emphasize that when we're talking about "dangerous books", we're talking about books that indicate you might not be a toe-lining member of The Party. We're talking about any book that any powerful person decides is some sort of threat, even if it's merely a threat to their ego.
You're giving company executives way too much credit in general. I'm sure there are unicorns out there where conscientious stewards of the company's long-term health are making measured, rational choices that may pay off in a decade, but it's a tiny minority of companies. Most are run by narcissistic short-term corporate raiders whose first priority is looting the company for their own profit and second priority is cosplaying as a once-in-a-generation genius "thought leader" in a never-ending battle to beat away the nagging (and correct) thought that they're nepo-babies who have no clue what they're doing. These morons are burning money because they are stupid and/or because it benefits them and their buddies in the short-term. They burned money on blockchain bullshit, they burned money on Web 2.0 bullshit, they are burning money on AI, and they will be burning money on the next fad too. The fact that AI might actually turn out to be something real is complete serendipity; it has nothing to do with their insight or foresight. The only reason they ever look smart is because they're great at taking credit for every win, everyone else immediately forgets all their losses, and op-ed writers and internet simps all compete to write the most sycophantic adulations of their brilliance. They could start finger-painting their office windows with their own feces and the Wall Street Journal would pump out op-eds saying "Here's why smearing poop on your windows is actually a Really Brilliant Business Move made by Really Good-Looking Business Winners!" Just go back and re-read your comment but think "blockchain" instead of "AI" and you'll see clearly how silly and sycophantic it really is.
This ignores the obvious solution of not cutting all the way through. If every other radial cut is only through half the layers, you avoid making the inner pieces too small. It's funny how common it is for people to claim some sort of optimality with lots of math and analysis while completely failing to consider a better possibility. Never take seriously claims that someone found a "mathematically optimal" way of doing something. They didn't.
This looks more like a copy paste error, where the function signature requests xyz, but the function itself uses an undefined array "axis" of which xyz correspond to indexes 0-2.
The code is correct aside from the obvious bug.
Bugs predate the existence of AI by decades. This particular bug doesn't look like one an AI would write.
Also it's a short function. It's impossible to miss unused parame if you read your own code at all. And if you somehow don't... then it's deserved anyway.
We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and progress.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as often) or being locked into burning buildings because preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.
It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of subsistence farmers and craftsmen were good, but they were better than what the dehumanization of mass production and automation created.
But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
The dream then was to go to America and become a farmer and OWN your own farm. No one dreamt to immigrate to America to work in the industrial factories.
Why was that the American dream at the time if farming was the worse option?
> I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
I hate to beat up on this because I agree with the spirit of it. But I think this is a little too cliche for my taste:
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before. It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model, etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or human-made) over creativity.
This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.
Nobody "created" a narrative that blames the FDA. The FDA is factually complicit in these deaths. Three review teams and two senior officials voted unanimously against approval, but the (then) head of FDA's CBER was buddies with Sarepta, and so they got approved and three people have died. Nobody created that narrative. It's simply what happened.
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