Why the Brain Hates Slowpokes (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Brain Hates Slowpokes (2015)

nautil.us

28 pointspseudolus14 comments

I don't mind people being slow if they're aware of their surroundings and provide affordances for faster people to get around them. The slow people I do mind (walkers, drivers, etc) are the ones that are in my way, and who could easily move out of my way, but don't.

The worst example of this to me is people in the narrow aisles of small grocery stores. I am constantly aware of people approaching from either side so that I can preemptively make way for them to pass. And yet I see people who remain utterly oblivious to others despite being asked over a dozen times in a handful of minutes to give room to squeeze by.

Certainly nobody—including myself—is perfect about this, but it’s inconceivable to me how someone can be so unaware of the people around them, especially after having been asked repeatedly to move out of the way.

When I go to the grocery store I constantly have to remind myself that the people around me have unique lives. They are most likely sleep deprived, exhausted, in pain, hard of hearing, and just plain deaf. I guess this is why manners are so important, you never know what a stranger is going through.

Then again sometimes they are self absorbed jerks that will block an entire aisle while they try to find the cheapest can of soup with the latest expiry...

This is the worst part of it. If you're on a German highway, I don't care if you're only driving 100km/h, but if you're on the center lane at that speed (despite the right lane being empty), you're putting me and others in danger as well as wasting our time.

> As of 2012, videos that didn’t load in two seconds had little hope of going viral.

This finding aligns with the results of a survey of users of the Mux video analytics service. We asked them "Which of the following streaming video problems is the most frustrating for you when it occurs?" Video rebuffering or stalled playback was considered the most annoying problem for 47% of respondents; video picture quality was chosen by only 14.3%. Slow startup times and rebuffering have a huge impact on the perceived QoE compared to video picture quality.

https://mux.com/blog/rebuffering-the-most-frustrating-and-fr...

It depends on what you're used to. When I stated programming 42 years ago, it took two days between submitting the punched card deck to the computer centre and getting a printout of the results. Now I get concerned if my program takes longer than 20 seconds to compile.

>I get concerned if my program takes longer than 20 seconds to compile.

I go into a rage at 2 seconds!

Both of you should try building chromium with ninja builds on any non-ssd system. every freaking header change used to be close to 20 minutes if the gods are happy.

The brain only hates slowpokes when it's been told, repeatedly, that it hates slowpokes.

Things are annoying if they are not as you want them to be, and you do not have as much control over them as you would like.

Patience is a skill, like any other. You can train yourself to be more patient by exposing yourself to situations where you need to be patient.

> We now practically insist that Web pages load in a quarter of a second, when we had no problem with two seconds in 2009 and four seconds in 2006.

Actually, this is false. Anything less than 250ms has always led to fewer conversions, less engagement, etc.

Companies only tolerate this recently because, if they don't, they can't monetize with ads which take the lifetime of the universe to load.

It's also ignoring the fact that internet has gotten faster. Back in 2006 plenty of people were still on dial up, or low end DSL. Everything would have loaded in ~> 2 seconds for them.

That's not necessarily true. Websites have become much bigger and more complex over the years.

And yet, the page with this article takes about 4 seconds to stop loading. That's on a 8 core, 16GB RAM machine on a 400+Mbps connection.

If anything, the UX of computing devices has become objectively slower over the past decade as everything moved to the web / web frameworks.

Everything I touch has latency, latency, latency. The fastest gadget UI in my household is on the microwave from the 80's, which has two dials for UI and reacts instantly. Everything else takes its sweet time for every operation.

I even had to upgrade the firmware on a speaker to get acceptable amounts of out-of-sync (the firmware added >0.5 sec latency to aux in!).

Going back to webpages, I mostly avoid articles that can't be processed with Firefox's Reader View. Everything else is too slow -- and for no good reason.

Try volunteering in disaster relief for the American Red Cross if you would like a lesson in practicing patience

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