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dale_glass t1_iy3ircn wrote

Reply to comment by unlikemike123 in eli5 How is computer memory deleted? by unlikemike123

Yup.

Also, fun fact, computers lie to users all the time. Eg, say you're playing a game and save. The game with very high likelihood will tell you it has saved well before the computer actually did it, and resume playing.

Why? Because people hate waiting, and the computer can actually do the writing to disk while you keep playing without making you wait for everything to be done.

There's many, many such optimizations.

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ThatGenericName2 t1_iy3vbv5 wrote

There's also the lie in the other direction. While I don't think it's practiced anymore, sometimes software would "fake load" in that the program simply just waits for an extra bit of time because people would think that a computer didn't do something properly if it worked too fast.

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goclimbarock007 t1_iy41vuk wrote

I read an anecdote about a programmer that wrote some sort of script that worked too fast and didn't look like it actually did anything. He added sleep counters and a progress bar to make it seem like it was doing something. A year later he "optimized" the program by cutting the sleep timers in half.

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ClownfishSoup t1_iy4mkcj wrote

This weird thing happens with cake and cookie mixes as well. You can easily make a mix that just requires adding water and then baking, but people didn't believe they would be any good, so manufacturers changed the ingredients so that the end user has to add oil, milk and eggs to the mix. ie; people were suspicious that the mix was too easy, so they dumbed it down.

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Brian57831 t1_iy41vtz wrote

Until you crash shortly after saving and the file shows it's corrupted.

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