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Comment by jrbapna | Hacker News Reader

"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over."

The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole.

An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency.

But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)

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The weird thing about this line of thinking is that if you take it to its logical conclusions, you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.

One of my early projects at Google involved latency optimization - incredibly boring, invisible stuff. At the end of the project, we'd saved maybe 20ms/search, and my boss was like "20ms/search * 3 billion searches/day = 60M seconds/day = 16K hours/day. Every day, you've saved humanity 16,000 hours of their lives."

And then I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle, which had an estimated 400 million hours of total playing time. Well, shit. There goes the next 68 years of latency optimizations.

(As an aside, this feels a lot like what Silicon Valley does. Save time on your job so you can waste it on social media, crypto gambling, or computer games. You just can't win, because there is no win condition - we'll continue to exist regardless of what we choose to do in the meantime.)

Chuckled a bit at this. The other way to interpret it is everything matters

The doodle is a net win, because it makes people happy (and they can skip it if it doesn’t). The latency makes everybody sad. You increased net happiness in the world.

I'd like to echo this point. People having more time to do what they want is a net benefit itself. How they choose to use that time is up to them.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life. “ — Socrates

Did it make them happy, or make them think it made them happy? (only said half teasingly, with thoughts of what the game industry actually optimizes)

> I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle

was that a purposeful choice?

That's funny, but it also sounds like a cynical way of looking at your work. Once you throw in games in the "waste of time" bucket, where do you stop? Movies? Music? Drawing? etc?

20ms sounds like very little, but have you ever tried to get anything done in a place where everybody has a lax attitude towards time?

You kinda said it - lowering latency is less about saving time, it's more about saving annoyance / making the product more pleasant to use.

I might be particularly sensitive to it - I have a strong preference for low latency and tight controls in everything including cars. Ten or fifteen seconds bootup, don't care too much. I click on a browser tab and it takes 200ms to switch - ugh, is there a better browser?

That's 20ms on a good link, but on a bad one there's probably a multiplier.

Too bad all these savings are eclipsed by js cruft.

>There goes the next 68 years of latency optimizations.

If you use a derivation like your boss did as the KPI, sure. But the way he did it seems like the wrong way to go about it. Would make more sense to me to think about it in terms of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_degrees_of_influence#Mor..., and gradients of computational latency. Quite literally the function call latency of the global information supply chain^Wsocial graph.

Remember: A vehicle full of people is a rolling wetware data center.

> you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.

And, in some ways, it really doesn't matter, by itself. 16,000 hours. 68 years. Those are potentials, not realities. You give or waste time. But what is that time used for? Do people make any meaningful usage of it? What is meaningful?

Some will say everything is. Some nothing is. But trying to find a middle path and to keep at least some semblance of objectivity, are we making meaningful usage of our time? As a civilization, as a species, is humanity headed in any particular direction? Is it a good direction? Are we progressing?

And, more practically, if we don't have good answers to those questions, does giving people more time to waste, really matter?

That's a silly way to evaluate utility, or at least your example is. Let's shave a minute of sleep off of everyone in the world. In just one day we will gain back 14 THOUSAND years of productivity.

And that's silly because...?

Because shaving off a minute of sleep isn't necessarily a profitable business that needs venture capital, which is the point of the article.

There is no moat in moving something from a billboard to a smartphone app, there is no obvious way in which this 'appification' industry is actually profitable or a viable business.

One particularly prominent example being moviepass. Is there some potential gain for customers in there somewhere, yes obviously but does that mean that sending you a credit card and having investors subsidize your cinema habits is a viable business or even worthy of being called 'technology'? No.

It's not a very profitable business because alarms/alarm clocks are already ubiquitous.

Because if you're gonna multiply the 1 minute gained by the world population, you should divide the extra good/services produced amongst the world population too. It comes out to.. goods/services worth 1 minute of extra productivity per person. All the stores in the world being open 1 extra minute feels like 1 extra minute of shopping time for each customer, not 14 thousand years.

We basically do that every year, and the results don't look so promising...

"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20140100

Do we have an estimated cost of switching away from DST? Programmer friend and I were talking today (re: Europe) and he said it'd cost a lot of money for everybody to upgrade their libraries.

I said that its a one-time cost versus those lives (I estimated 20 a transition, for 40 a year), and those lives win even with a very high return on money now.

Nobody won the debate.

I would be interested to know myself. My guess is that the cost of upgrading libraries isn't that expensive. Library maintainers probably have to change things every couple of years anyways when new countries get added or a country changes timezones. Removing DST would just be yet another change but slightly larger in scale. I would assume most of the cost would be from people assuming that DST was in effect, and as a result being late to something important.

Really? I already argued why.

one hour of time collectively is not equivalent to one minute * 60 people's time individually.

in something like packet processing maybe so. but it doesn't generalize to waiting to get your luggage checked. it's horribly inefficient to staff for peak load. that cost will be borne by all the people that come in during the average times, for no reason.

when i go to starbucks, fuck it i shouldn't have to wait in line at all. think about the 30-60s line wait (ie, waiting just to place your order) times 300 people that might come through starbucks in an hour during peak. shouldn't starbucks just hire 2 more people and have 4 more machines so that all the time spent waiting by the customer isn't wasted????

If you could actually use that 1 more minute in a productive way, then yeah, that would be huge. If you're just forcing people to stay awake and stare at a wall then no that is not productive.

Adjust it slightly perhaps: create a mechanism to help people fall asleep one minute faster on average and you buy the world XX years of waking time every day...

Sleep doesn't really work here as an analogy, because sleep itself is (probably) productive use of our time.

But on the other hand, it might not be as productive as other things we do. And we have alarm clocks to do exactly what you suggest.

In "poorer" economies service jobs are handled by servants, and the relationship is more personal and human. This could be good or bad depending on the "master". It has the potential to be better than an economic relationship, and may not be worse than an economic relationship if the "master" follows laws (or not, cf. Hong Kong domestics). In any case the gig economy is just replacing a "human master" with a "machine master".

Probably servants are better compensated too because the transaction has fewer middlemen.

> Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over.

And since you need someone to walk your dog every day during your two-week vacation, that would involve calling Eric, Margaret, Phillip and then in the middle of it coming up with Margo's number because Eric got cold.

> 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS

I can't fathom the kind of constant stress one must be under to consider this a big problem.

I'm fine with this, but we must balance human efficiency and output against the well-being of the surrounding ecological systems. It can't just be about number of human hours.

"Some people like driving the long way home."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g

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