Subnostr

Replying to

Code & Psychology ⚡️

💡Everything has a cost. 💡

There is no free lunch!

If you see something as overly cheap or free, then ask yourself:

* how does it worth it for the people who host it?

* why would they do it, if it does not make them money?

* how do they pay their costs?

If it is a well-established company, these questions apply even more. If a company can operate and still they offer their things for free, it means they can pay their bills, so they have income. If they give their stuff for free, they have income frome somewhere else. Otherwise they would have already gone bankrupt.

Be sensible, and spread awareness. 💜

rieger_san 2y ago

Software developers have always free lunch when it comes to optimization!

Because of the growing efficiency of hardware components they mostly don’t have to care about runtime efficiency.

That’s why software libs are becoming bigger and bigger over the last decades.

And this is a real problem!

Hardware becomes more and more efficient, but we don’t so any effects of this, because the software becomes more inefficient year by year.

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Discussion

Code & Psychology ⚡️ 2y ago

Hmm, interesting opinion.

I was rather thinking on the consumer side, that you will never get anything for free. Everything has a cost.

Somehow I think not optimizing has a midterm-longterm cost as well. Maybe for the dev, maybe not. But I am not sure if it is a free lunch.

If you need to create a product, you anyway need to put in work, so it costs your time. Of course you will put the minimum necessary effort into it to meet the criterias. If it does not require a certain runtime, you will cheat there, but still requires work.

If you optimize to earn more, it also costs your time. So somehow I think there will be either an implicit or explicit cost. That you are aware you pay, or you are not. And I wanted to raise awareness with this post to the fact that everything has a cost, either you know you pay it or you don't.