> We bias these decisions towards throughput (I blame Taylorism). I think he's ignoring another tradeoff that may be hiding which leads to a bias towards throu

> We bias these decisions towards throughput (I blame Taylorism). I think he's ignoring another tradeoff that may be hiding which leads to a bias towards throughput. One of my favorite lessons with regard to video is something that old school Amiga demo scene taught years ago (slightly before my time) is that standard deviation trumps frames per second in video (I'm starting to suspect this is also true for audio). This has ramifications for video pipelines. Naughty dog has blogged about how they were able to greatly increase their throughput by adding latency (especially on the cell processor). In the process they were also able to make guarantees about variance, and their 30fps was a consistent 30 vs the 60fps that they would occasionally miss. This allowed them to have lower frame rates while still looking better than most gamers would expect from such a low frame rate. So, I would say in the context of making coffee, in real life, boiling enough water for 2 cups is definitely going to have lower variance in the finished time of the second cup. Does it matter for a cup of coffee? Not unless you're at barista scale. But it's an important tradeoff in certain contexts. And an important one to at least be aware of as an engineer.