[Animats]

It's an argument against such things as HTTP/3. That yields a slight increase in performance (maybe), for which there's a large increase in complexity. Classic issue in military and industrial equipment, where you often accept somewhat less than maximum possible performance in exchange for robustness. Mechanical designers think about this a lot, because their enemies are wear, vibration, and fragility.

[nonrandomstring]

See advael's remark above ours on short-termisim. In the commercial digital world, wear vibration and fragility are not the enemy - other companies are.

Until we can move past that silly winner-takes-all incentive we can't have nice things. Most of the genuinely good stuff will be stillborn. We'll always have a 5% vying for perfection in an ever-escaping, unrealistic red queens race, while the bottom 95% suffer a dearth of simply good-enough. How many objectively better search engines than Google died in the ditch of obscurity between 1998 and 2020?

[anonymoushn]

TCP must be destroyed. It's totally ridiculous that the default behavior of video players on flaky wifi networks is that they'll open a separate TCP connection for each video segment, and then when one of those connections inevitably decides that the link's bandwidth is like 1kbps, the whole video will stall for a minute or until the player skips the segment.

HTTP/2 gets you this behavior less often, but when you get unlucky with packet loss it affects every segment instead of just one, so the player doesn't have any segments to skip forward to.