Stupid irritation after trying yet again to follow the time sequence of a news story on a Facebook local group. About two years ago Facebook eliminated time order. You can still pick ‘most recent’, but this only gives you one or two new messages at the top, then continues in Zuck order after that.
This makes no sense in terms of cost and efficiency. Plain time order is FAST in any programming language. Placing the latest message on top of the pile is the EASIEST thing to do, because pushing the stack is an intrinsic command on even the oldest and simplest CPUs.
Zuck order consumes a huge amount of AI. The system must read and understand each message so it can evaluate the “relevance” of this message by Zuck’s standards. Then the message must be inserted somewhere in the pile, at a height appropriate to its “relevance”.
= = = = =
Footnote for fairness: Pushing the stack isn’t quite intrinsic because you need to allocate memory for the new message. In modern systems this happens automatically behind the scenes, and it’s the same allocation no matter how you organize the list. So this is a constant, not a variable.
Polistra's Mill 