I don’t think it seems clever so much as pithy? I don’t think it’s necessarily about algorithms so much as it is a claim that the main way to be 1000x slower is

I don’t think it seems clever so much as pithy? I don’t think it’s necessarily about algorithms so much as it is a claim that the main way to be 1000x slower is by doing 999x times too much work or waiting. An example that is basically unrelated to complexity theory is something like talking to a distant service but keeping a small number of requests because eg you were worried about load or didn’t notice you were waiting for acks or create a new tcp connection for each request or have a small sendbuf or somehow send way too fast and get rate limited and need to retry.