I think that the "best" message here is that the performance of memory access, hash lookup, etc, is a more complicated question than always just O(1). Knowing t

I think that the "best" message here is that the performance of memory access, hash lookup, etc, is a more complicated question than always just O(1). Knowing the context -- basically, the second-to-last graph that highlights performance vs size vs cache limits -- is the bigger picture for the system. And it's perfectly usable everyday, you just have to remember a few more words: "memory access is O(1) as long as I stay within L1". The problem I have with the article is that the author has replaced one broad generalization with another equally reductive but diametrically opposed one. It's no more accurate, and no more decontextualized, than the original statement, and in my head that means it's also not really all that useful.