Order is about approaching infinity.

Bucketed response times still follow a curve as the X axis goes to infinity.

It’s really the same for addition and multiplication. If the add fits into a register it seems like it’s O(1j but if you’re dealing with Mersenne prime candidates the lie becomes obvious.

That we aren’t acknowledging any of this with cloud computing is quite frustrating. You can’t fit the problem on one core? Next bucket. Can’t fit it in one server? Next bucket. One rack? One data center? So on and so forth.

Order of complexity tells us which problems we should refuse to take on at all. You always have to remember that and not fool yourself into thinking the subset that is possible is the entire problem space. It’s just the productive slice of it.