Cute. Except the ones suffering the most from the HFT machinations were most likely pension and mutual funds, the ones most folks parents rely on. Not rich fucks or their catered hedge funds.
Whatever the realities of the market, people have an expectation of "fairness", and are generally against the idea of a party or parties being able to insert themselves into a situation where they can essentially get a speed jump over the rest of the market by virtue of buying a place that enables this (microwave links, colo in the exchange etc.)
A very good point, we should have a metric that establishes how much carbon is released extra into the environment from cpu cycle wasting crap like atom and even more bloated versions of word.
Clippy could pop up: "I can see you would like to release an extra ton of carbon into the atmos, why not upgrade word now!"
I am not sure we need to go as lean as hand-rolled asm, but we sure went down a wrong path when we just accept that word will get bigger and bigger with each release. No one asks why.
Once it installed from the floppy, why would I need to keep using from the floppy?
You also described caching behaviour of the OS, rather than the huge size of modern day word.
The real problem is precious snow flake developers who do not care about bloated code, who think it becomes the dev ops problem to go and get bigger aws instances, or newer macs. Shit attitude to your work will always show. If engineers, plumbers, electricians, doctors, chefs - basically any other field of employment took the same cavalier approach to the end product, we would right castigate them. But somehow, we give devtards a free pass. Why?
I could edit a doc with a word processor that could fit onto a floppy, and it worked well. Now, why does the same task require a multi GB pos bloatfest to do the same job? And oftentimes, more slowly!
Imagine for a second, the power of today's hardware running optimised lean code. It could be so good, but we accept bloated crappy bug ridden shitfests of OS and application software. We seem to care more about glossy and social then performance.
It is a real problem.