[andrewf]

The speed of light isn't getting any faster. Examples: https://www.cloudping.co/grid

I'd be wary of taking asynchronous actions and making them synchronous. For instance, if you had a list of items each with a delete icon next to it, you don't want to turn deleting three items from click-click-click into click-wait-click-wait-click.

Chrome Dev Tools can simulate added latency as well as restricted bandwidth, so you can plug intercontinental latencies in and see how much a particular site is affected.

Some things will be fine. I'm posting this on HN from Western Australia, no problems.

[mixmastamyk]

Can’t batch actions with either strategy?

[andrewf]

Yeah a delete checkbox would make sense. I've seen that in the past, and evidently forgot about it.

A specific horror show I remember was a Netflix-like DVD shipping service, where you maintained an ordered list of DVDs you'd like to receive. Each DVD in your queue had a textbox with a sequence number (1, 2, 3...) in it. You could edit the numbers and on submit, the server would do a stable sort. "1" and "999" could conveniently push multiple items to the top/bottom of the list, but to precisely order the first five items - the most common use case! - you'd usually need multiple passes. Drag and drop would have been way better.