  We provide a new approach for establishing hardness of approximation results,
based on the theory recently introduced by the author. It allows one to
directly show that approximating a problem beyond a certain threshold requires
super-polynomial time. To exhibit the framework, we revisit two famous problems
in this paper. The particular results we prove are:
  MAX-3-SAT$(1,\frac{7}{8}+\epsilon)$ requires exponential time for any
constant $\epsilon$ satisfying $\frac{1}{8} \geq \epsilon > 0$. In particular,
the gap exponential time hypothesis (Gap-ETH) holds.
  MAX-3-LIN-2$(1-\epsilon, \frac{1}{2}+\epsilon)$ requires exponential time for
any constant $\epsilon$ satisfying $\frac{1}{4} \geq \epsilon > 0$.
