Comment by chihuahua
4 years ago
In principle, that sounds good. But then it can happen that you profiled when N=1000 and it seems fine. Then a few years later (like in GTA), N has grown to 63,000 and it's no longer fine. It seems unlikely the developer will go back and profile it again. Also, I think the original Windows Update algorithm for figuring out which updates you needed to download started out fine, but 20 years later it turns out it's quadratic and now there are tens of thousands of updates, so it becomes almost impossible to install XP SP2 from a CD and have it update itself.
also dont forget the quadratic time desktop icon arrangement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26152335
Do you have a link for the Windows Update algorithm being quadratic?
I believe this is what the parent was referring to: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/expon...
Thank you, I had a vague memory of this but this article sums it up perfectly and states that it's worse than quadratic, it's exponential.