"you will quickly find out your VPN works fine for about 5 minutes, but then latency increases to 5sec, 10sec, 30sec(!), and then everything times out"
I recall the same thing occurring in Shanghai with many of the popular webmail services, they'd work briefly, usually just long enough to log in and get a glimpse at an inbox, then it would time out endlessly and that'd be it.
Scraper spam exists for virtually every website that is even somewhat popular, there is almost nothing site owners can do about it but rely on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc, to figure out the originator. Google should be able to figure it out and rank the true origin source appropriately, and usually Google is pretty effective at that. But sometimes they're not.
Perhaps what I find ironic is that many of the user "answers" on StackOverflow are basically clone spam themselves, copy/pasted from other websites by some user of the site, usually without sourcing the origin. I have personally found my own unique solutions and code copied verbatim and pasted to answers on the StackExchange network multiple times, outranking my original work without a reference to the origination of course, and I'm sure others have experienced something similar. Perhaps that's what you get with a user generated site, maybe Wikipedia experiences something similar.
Related, some of you may recall a few years back, that StackOverflow basically complained to Google in a public fashion about not ranking well enough and got a boost from them, whereas obviously the average Joe and an average website has no such option nor recourse. Here was the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286
It would be interesting to hear how effective this is, particularly from insomniacs.
I get occasional insomnia, never a fun experience. The most effective thing I know of to induce sleep in that situation is to physically exhaust yourself through intense cardio exercise, which is obviously not possible for everyone nor every scenario.
How many things are brand new and innovative? Most aren't, most are iterations, or just a more successful effort at something that has been done before.
If you want to build it, build it anyway. Build it for passion, for the experience, for interest, or for any other reason. Or don't, that is ok too.
Wi-fi trouble in OS X 10.10.x is very hardware dependent, brand new MacBook Pro 2015 is just fine for example. But have heard so many users with nonstop wireless problems from 10.10, to 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, perhaps 10.10.4 as well, we'll find out soon enough.
The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone / iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example, with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10 seconds.
It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.