Comment by jiggawatts

I'll reiterate a rant about Flight Simulator 2020 here because it's on-topic.

It was called "download simulator" by some, because even the initial installation phase was poorly optimised.

But merely calling it "poorly optimised" isn't really sufficient to get the point across.

It wasn't "poor", or "suboptimal". It was literally as bad as possible without deliberately trying to add useless slowdown code.

The best equivalent I can use is Trivial FTP (TFPT). It's used only in the most resource-constrained environments where even buffering a few kilobytes is out of the question. Embedded microcontrollers in NIC boot ROMs, that kind of thing. It's literally maximally slow. It ping-pongs for every block, and it uses small blocks by default. If you do anything to a network protocol at all, it's a step up from TFTP. (Just adding a few packets worth of buffering and windowing dramatically speeds it up, and this enhancement thankfully did make it into a recent update of the standard.)

People get bogged down in these discussions around which alternate solution is more optimal. They're typically arguing over which part of a Pareto frontier they think is most applicable. But TFTP and Microsoft FS2020 aren't on the Pareto frontier. They're in the exact corner of the diagram, where there is no curve. They're at a singularity: the maximally suboptimal point (0,0).

This line of thinking is similar to the "Toward a Science of Morality" by the famous atheist Sam Harris. He starts with a definition of "maximum badness", and defines "good" as the direction away from it in the solution space. Theists and atheists don't necessarily have to agree with the specific high-dimensional solution vector, but they have to agree that that there is an origin, otherwise there's no meaningful discussion possible.

Microsoft Terminal wasn't at (0,0) but it was close. Doing hilariously trivial "optimisations" would allow you to move very much further in the solution space towards the frontier.

The Microsoft Terminal developers (mistakenly) assumed that they were already at the Pareto frontier, and that the people that opened the Github Issue were asking them to move the frontier. That does usually require research!