[johngossman]

I think you're right that the inelegant part is how AI seems to just consist of endless loops of multiplication. I say this as a graphics programmer who realized years ago that all those beautiful images were just lots of MxNs, and AI takes this to a whole new level. When I was in college they told us most of computing resources were used doing Linear Programming. I wonder when that crossed over to graphics or AI (or some networking operation like SSL)?

[dwaltrip]

What could any complex phenomenon possibly be other than small “mundane” components combined together in a variety of ways and in immense quantities?

All such things are like this.

For me, this is fascinating, mind-boggling, non-sensical, and unsurprising, all at once.

But I wouldn’t call it inelegant.

[jiggawatts]

> When I was in college they told us most of computing resources were used doing Linear Programming.

I seriously doubt that was ever true, except perhaps for a very brief time in the 1950s or 60s.

Linear programming is an incredibly niche application of computing used so infrequently that I've never seen it utilised anywhere despite being a consultant that has visited hundreds of varied customers including big business.

It's like Wolfram Mathematica. I learned to use it in University, I became proficient at it, and I've used it about once a decade "in industry" because most jobs are targeted at the median worker. The median worker is practically speaking innumerate, unable to read a graph, understand a curve fit, or if they do, their knowledge won't extend to confidence intervals or non-linear fits such as log-log graphs.

Teachers that are exposed to the same curriculum year after year, seeing the same topic over and over assume that industry must be the same as their lived experience. I've lost count of the number of papers I've seen about Voronoi diagrams or Delaunay triangulations, neither of which I've ever seen applied anywhere outside of a tertiary education setting. I mean, seriously, who uses this stuff!?

In the networking course in my computer science degree I had to use matrix exponentiation to calculate the maximum throughput of an arbitrary network topology. If I were to even suggest something like this at any customer, even those spending millions on their core network infrastructure, I would be either laughed at openly, or their staff would gape at me in wide-eyed horror and back away slowly.

[aragilar]

The first two results from Google with "Voronoi astro" gave two different uses than the one I knew about (sampling fibre bundles): https://galaxyproject.org/news/2025-06-11-voronoi-astronomy/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14697

[jiggawatts]

Astronomy is pure research and is performed almost exclusively by academics.

I’m not saying these things have zero utility, it’s just that they’re used far less frequently in industry than academics imagine.

[aragilar]

And astronomy tends to throw up technology that becomes widely used (WiFi being the obvious example) or becomes of "interest" to governments. I expect that AMR code will be used/ported to nuclear simulations if it proves to be useful. Do I expect it to be used in a CRUD app? Obviously not, but use by most software shops isn't a measure of importance.

[petters]

I have not only used linear programming in the industry, I have also had to write my own solver because the existing ones (even commercial) were to slow. (This was possible only because I only cares about a very approximate solution)

The triangulations you mention are important in the current group I'm working in.

[jiggawatts]

I'm curious to hear what you specifically use these algorithms for!

PS: My point is not that these things are never used, they clearly are, I'm saying that the majority of CPU cycles globally goes towards "idle", then pushing pixels around with simple bitblt-like algorithms for 2D graphics, then whatever it is that browsers do on the inside, then operating system internals, and then specialised and more interesting algorithms like Linear Programming are a vanishingly small slice of whatever is left of that pie chart.

[srean]

3d modelers would like to have a word with you.

Part of the reason why linear programming does need t get used as often is that there are no industry standard software implementation that is not atrociously priced. Same deal with Mathematica.

[jiggawatts]

3D modelling is mostly linear algebra, not linear programming, which is an entirely different set of algorithms.

[srean]

Oh I mentioned it in the context of mesh geometries, tesselations.