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by KirinDave 3161 days ago
It is no more an oxymoron than "locally optimal". There is always a scope for claims of optimal in practice.

Perhaps it was "superfluous" to say. But then, so was your post.
1 comments
carapace 3161 days ago
No I don't agree.

To me, it's like saying "somewhat unique".

The phrase "relatively optimal" doesn't make sense to me. Do you have a server that's optimal relative to some other server? That's just "optimal", no? And if it's sub-optimal relative to some other server, that's just "sub-optimal"?

Locally optimal is a known thing (it even has it's own wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_optimum), but "relatively optimal" is just sloppy thinking in my view.

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andrewingram 3161 days ago
If you want to know what I meant, I can tell you.

In practice I was able to have a GraphQL server which produced optimal downstream request waterfalls (i.e. to internal APIs) for every query that our app made in practice, and nearly every contrived query I could come up with.

So what I mean is that if you'd hand-written the code to handle those data requirements, in nearly all scenarios you wouldn't have been able to do better.

Does "optimal, nearly all the time" make you feel better?

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