Comment by sovietswag

Isn't this experiment a bit bogus? Extrapolating a terminal emulator's behavior to represent a machine's latency /in general/... what if the terminal emulator just sucks? Dan Luu is of course aware of this but he's willing to swallow it as noise:

> Computer results were taken using the “default” terminal for the system (e.g., powershell on windows, lxterminal on lubuntu), which could easily cause 20 ms to 30 ms difference between a fast terminal and a slow terminal.

If that was the only source of noise in the measurements then ok, maybe, but compounded with other stuff? For example, I was thinking: the more time passes, the further we drift from the command-line being the primary interface through which we interact with our computer. So naturally older computers would take more care in optimizing their terminal emulator to work well, as it's the face of the computer, right? Somebody's anecdote about PowerShell performance in this thread makes me feel more comfortable assuming that maybe modern vendors don't care so much about terminal latency.

Using the "default browser" as the metric for mobile devices worries me even more...

I like Dan Luu and I SupportThismessage™ but I feel funny trying to take anything away from this post...