> Honestly, most people go for the shiniest number they can afford.
Right. It's a costly and irrational anxiety or obsession over a headline number that likely doesn't matter for most people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677199
> But I will say that as a software developer who has had to fix bugs on random branches of very substantial software projects (web browsers), there is a tradeoff between recompiling the whole project and simply downloading the binaries that the CI system has already built.
Right. I thankfully don't do that kind of development much, but I agree that I'd want a faster connection if I had to. I would certainly expect to have it at the office, though I don't find a need tor it at the home.
In the past when I worked as a developer for FAANG and related spinoff companies, I did most of my development on "cloud desktops" or VMs which had much faster connections. This was mainly in order to have more CPU, RAM, and storage for builds, although the additional network bandwidth was important as well.
> For reference, most streaming services use about 15–25Mbps for a 4K television stream.
To me, 720p seems incredibly high-quality. I think I'm living out something like https://m.xkcd.com/606, although perhaps on a 20-year lag rather than a 5-year lag.