Re:Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time
by hinkley on Friday February 09, 2024 @11:45PM
(#39323659)
> “But in practice, constants really matter,” he said. “In the real world, a factor of 10 is a game ender.”
Working at a place who kept losing customers to a competitor whose software was less than 2x as fast as ours fundamentally changed how I view optimization and how I view constant overhead C. And crystalized once I saw how delivering steady gains milestone after milestone can buy a lot more goodwill than one fast and dirty optimization.
Speed doesn't matter if you're the only game in town (a monopoly). For everything else it matters.
I'm hoping because Quanta's explanation was approachable, but ultimately, wrong when I try applying it the following way:
Theorists will spend an enormous amount of time developing algorithms that are O(kNlog(N)) that are impractical in practice because
- K approximates infinity
- It is well-known K approximates infinity.
- It is not expected for K to decrease.