jean23

My favourite example is number theory, which was either hailed or ridiculed for millennia as being pure mathematics that can and will never be applied to real life problems.

Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.

Bitrate isn't the problem. Modern codecs like Opus achieve transparency at around 100-120 kbit/s. Even uncompressed CD audio (at 1.411 kbit/s) could be streamed over Bluetooth 5 Low Energy – just (about 1.6 Mbit/s usable).

With a 5,400 rpm, just the slow rotation can introduce a wait time of 11 ms. Seek time from moving the arm can incur up to 20 ms (although some of that might overlap with the rotation time). And if it's a ten year old HDD, there might be a re-read necessary.

Even if the average read time would be just 20ms per file, cutting out ten of these reads saves 0.2 seconds, which is already noticeable to humans. And that's under the unrealistic assumption that Firefox is the only program trying to read from that poor slow HDD.

On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold.

When all you have is a single user machine, and "gain root from my regular user" is all you want, su is enough.

Yes, sudo has a few more features, but just because you don't need them doesn't mean they are necessarily "unnecessary".

And if you look at the bug – that bug wouldn't have occurred in your setup. You could replicate the functionality where this bug occurs with sudo and pam, but I don't really think that's less "surface area", and I know the chance that I would muck up re-implementing sudo functionality that way with a greater chance than the sudo devs.