> there has to be people alive who saw a complex problem and simplified it 10x
Absolutely. Let's be generous and say that there are a thousand of them alive today, what about everyone else? Are their lives meaningless now?
> the simplicity of the Internet
The Internet is TCP/IP and TCP/IP is a lot of things but hardly "simple"
Re:A Faster Shortest Path Algorithm
by sashank_1509 on Thursday September 24, 2026 @11:59AM
(#49832572)
99.9% of humanity don’t derive meaning from their work, sad but true. They don’t care if their life has meaning, if their work is actually valuable etc.
HN just selects for the latter who care. Yes it’s probably much harder for those who care to have a meaningful life in the presence of LLM’s unfortunately.
Nevertheless it's certain that there has to be people alive who saw a complex problem and simplified it 10x, even if the solution never got out of their local sphere. Solutions that you and me would implement with automation and sensors, people in developing countries would find a way with less technology or resources. Even our current systems seem needlessly complex and overengineered compared to when hardware was a limitation.
If you want to think about needless complexity being everywhere, take for example the simplicity of the Internet, made when hardware was limited, against modern monstrosities like Bluetooth, now that we can just throw more hardware at problems.