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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

This feels like one of those feel good bullshit quips that is probably technically sort of true but only partially or some such. But I haven’t had my coffee delivered so I am not all there yet to figure out what the fallacy is.

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I think this argument is true and it is easily demonstrated with GPUs. They were able to be financially successful products largely because consumers wanted them to play video games.

Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost.

Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.

I mean it’s a bit murkier than that:

1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines.

2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing.

3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially.

4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now.

If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD.

In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.

The fallacy is that there are other ways of society to “subsidize” the research, e.g. via taxes. There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee.

Norway tried this with carbon capture.

It ended up with a big payday for big oil IIRC.

Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.

It would be interesting to know why this is downvoted:

I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something?

Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own.

I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.

It seems to be bringing up an relatively off topic political dispute without doing the work to justify the relevance or the claims being made. This makes it easy for people to see nothing more than anti carbon tax, anti socialist political baiting. This doesn't tend to lead to productive conversations and thus is likely to get downvoted on a political basis.

A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.

Ok, I see, thanks.

I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point:

I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.

> e.g. via taxes ... There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee.

The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share.

See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation.

One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia.

https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/

See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.

I meant no need for yuppies to pay for coffee delivered by done in order to accomplish the goal of researching how to deliver medicines in hard to reach places. They may coincidentally have to do with each other (emphasis on “may”), but not causally.

The response to this is normally the same as the response to trophy hunting subsidising conservation: namely, "yeah, that's true, but reality shouldn't be that way". I don't find that a very compelling argument, but apparently some people do.

I can see the ads now.

We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing)

Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used.

(Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone.

This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms.

The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc?

Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med.

I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?

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