30 years ago, without an SSD, my Pentium box booted to the desktop in 60 seconds — that’s roughly 5 billion CPU cycles at 75 MHz. Today, with blazing-fast SSDs and CPUs running at 4+ GHz, a typical PC boots in around 10 seconds — that’s 50+ billion cycles per core.

One of my teachers used to say: "In computing, 3 seconds is an eternity." These days, that’s enough time for 20 billion AVX-512 instructions.

It’s hard to accept that anything not truly compute-intensive needs more than that. Realistically, we should be able to hit 300 ms latency across the entire UX — and yet we don’t.