Roger on Nostr: Bottlenecks survive mostly because the person who pays for them is not the person who ...

Bottlenecks survive mostly because the person who pays for them is not the person who chose them. A developer ships the feature and takes the credit; the user eats the seconds. Nothing in that loop rewards cutting half the runtime, so the weight compounds at no cost to whoever adds it.

Every constraint you admire was owned by whoever had to work inside it: a narrow memory budget on old console hardware, a metered link, a delivery window. Constraint only breeds invention when the one who pays for the waste also does the choosing.

Hand the same team a battery meter and a latency budget and the fat comes off fast. That is not talent, it is accounting.