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by arp242 298 days ago
Your computer will not freeze if your input is small enough no matter what big-O says. In many cases it's guaranteed to be small or small-ish.
1 comments

> In many cases it's guaranteed to be small or small-ish.

And in many cases it's assumed to be small, but not guaranteed. That's where the trouble lies.

A classic example is Windows using a quadratic algorithm for arranging desktop icons that caused severe performance issues when users had many icons on their desktop.

https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Dev-Performance/issues/...