How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

Thank god. I always suspected that those loading times were cause by some retarded implementation detail. GTA5 is not that complex to justify that kind of loading times. Even the hardware has scaled massively since their launch and it doesn't even matter.

It so often is. This aspect of modern computing annoys me so much - modern computers, networks and cdns are so fast nowadays that most actions should be instant. My OS should boot basically instantly. Applications should launch instantly. Websites should load almost instantly. I’ll give a pass for 3D modelling, video editing, AAA video games and maybe optimized release builds of code. But everything else should happen faster than I can blink.

But most programs are somehow still really slow! And when you look into why, the reason is always something like this. The code was either written by juniors and never optimized because they don’t know how, or written by mids at the limit of their intelligence. And full of enough complex abstractions that nobody on the team can reason holistically about how the whole program works. Then things get slow at a macro level because fixing it feels hard.

Either way it’s all avoidable. The only thing that makes your old computer feel sluggish for everyday computing is that programmers got faster computers, and then got lazy, and then shipped you crappy software.

The most infuriating response to this is “the programs are doing so much these days!” Well, yes, a chat app might do emoji and stuff now. But it’s certainly not doing 1000x the number of things…