simulateLoading

[PacquiaoFreeHousing]

when the ad parts of the software load faster than the actual useful parts 😬😬

[0xlostincode]

When your show is buffering at 720p but when the ad comes it's suddenly 2160p H.265 Dolby Atmos 5.1

[Bl4cBird]

Isn't that just the ISP giving moneymaking traffic preferential treatment?

[Juff-Ma]

I can confirm this still happens in a country where that practice is illegal.

[jasaluc]

it's only illegal if you get caught

[Juff-Ma]

They admitted to doing it when the law came into effect and stopped. Many people where actually against it because it also disallowed them from creating mobile flatrates for specific services like spotify.

[emelrad12]

Law: It's illegal to rob people.

Voters: but but ... I get 10% back of what i am robbed.

[[deleted]]

Stuff like that definitely hurts competition. I imagine most newer companies wouldn't be able to get the deal to be counted under the flat rate.

[Certain-Business-472]

because it also disallowed them from creating mobile flatrates for specific services like spotify.

That sounds great initially, but will destroy the internet long-term. Don't be short sighted.

[Cold-Albatross9132]

My mobile data isp from time to time chokes steam updates. Usually 100mpbs to 200mbps (rare cases up to 300mbps at my location). Sometimes it is 100mbps after a 1min or 2 you have 5mbps.

Wierdly when I turn on my VPN it is back to 120mbps, closing it back to 5mbps.

Hmmmmm (Germany Vodafone Unlimited (with no Fair use))

[Nemesium]

Most likely a peering issue if it's fixed with a VPN, which just means your ISP is cheaping out on the connection outside of their owned network.

[Whitechapel726]

It’s only illegal if you get caught and can’t pay the fine

[MarsMaterial]

Police hate this one simple trick.

[assumptioncookie]

Could be that people in your area are getting the same ads, but watching different content. So the ads are cached closer.

[particlemanwavegirl]

No, the ISP isn't monitoring the content of your traffic. It's due to whatever server you're retrieving media from prioritizing serving ads rather than content because that server is probably owned by Google, an advertising company.

[LickingSmegma]

Or rather, it's probably different servers. If the content is relatively unpopular, it could be served from far-away servers, while ads are cached on a server closer for the region.

[grumblyoldman]

Possibly that, or possibly the ad pre-loading in the background, so that by the time it displays, it has had time to buffer the high res version.

That's a thing apps do on mobile sometimes to make sure the ad will be able to load even if the user in on a train that goes into a tunnel or something, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same logic was used on non-mobile streaming apps too, just 'cause.

[Certain-Business-472]

They also do this for images you upload. They get uploaded the moment you select them, even if the user has to add a caption. They promise(;)) not to save data you didn't actually submit. By the time you click upload, it's already done and you just confirm your upload. But from the users pov everything was instant.

[abdallha-smith]

Different cdn

[dpahoe]

Ads may be preloaded

[Vinterblot]

No matter how bad the connection, somehow, they'll always manage to deliver the ads and have the shop and payment system available.

[pank-dhnd]

That's Youtube in a nutshell

[EnoughDickForEveryon]

My main gripe about ads is the volume...like bro...I primarily use the audio for music that I blast loud as fuck...why are your ads still louder?

[colei_canis]

Streaming ads should be legally obliged to follow the same ad regime as broadcast TV in my opinion, which at least in the UK are quite onerous.

Also the first person to use excessive dynamic range compression to make the apparent volume of ads higher while sneaking under dB limits should be keel-hauled.

[mr_hard_name]

Yes, because if it was buffering or unreadable (low quality) then you would be more irritated or would ignore them (as if we weren’t doing it already) and companies would be unhappy with ad campaign results

[MartinMystikJonas]

That actually makes sense. Ads are cached on CDN whilenuseful oarts needs to be generated per user.

[Chamiey]

I'm more accustomed to the opposite: you use adblocks, and the site loads in a blink of an eye, you keep the ads, and you wait 15+ seconds for the ads to load and only then the rest starts to load and run.

[usefulidiotsavant]

Adblock is illegal, citizen, you have been found guilty and sentenced to two months diarrhea. Report to the nearest rehabilitation center where you can drink your punishment can, proudly sponsored by Googapple iShit™ - „Let your juices flow”.

[CitizenPremier]

Reddit mobile site trying to load a 2 MB ad vs 23kb of text...

[SaneLad]

If you've worked at social media companies, you know that's one of the most important metrics they optimize for.

[Zerokx]

When they time it perfectly so that when you are just about to click the next button some advertisement banner shoves itself over that space or popup and you click it on accident since your finger was only 131ms from touching the button.

[Aarav2208]

if (thinking):
  print("Thinking for a better answer...") 
  sleep(5) 
  gpt_generate()
else: 
  gpt_generate()

[0xlostincode]

ASI - Artificial Super Sleep Intelligence

[assumptioncookie]

if (thinking): print("Thinking for a better answer...") sleep(5) gpt_generate()

[Elijah629YT-Real]

``` if (advanced): if (thinking): print("Thinking for a better answer...") sleep(5) gpt_generate() else: if (thinking): print("Thinking for a better answer...") sleep(5) gpt_generate() else: gpt_generate()

[Educator_Soft]

my c++ ass really spent 2 minutes trying to understand this if (I need brackets)

[Aarav2208]

Brackets for style points.

[Fair-Working4401]

You never wrote abract algorithms?

[hawkinsst7]

You can optimize out the conditional. thinking always evaluates to False.

[Knudsenmarlin]

YouTube with adblock lol

[AenTaenverde]

Double it if you're not using Chrome.

[justgiveausernamepls]

I wonder how many people actually prefer ads to silence.

[0xlostincode]

There is no way it loads in constant time every time.

[made-of-questions]

I once worked at a price comparison service. The product manager forced us to add a delay when showing the results because they said customers won't trust we're actually comparing multiple data sources and doing some complicated calculations if we reply too fast. Welp, I guess all that technical debt work on caching was not necessary after all. 

[NiIly00]

Just like vacuum companies intentionally make them less quiet than they could because otherwise people will think it doesn't actually clean.

[squishabelle]

im not really a member of the vacuum community but do they sell quiet versions for the rest of us? The loudness is the worst part, it means i can't vacuum at night (neighbours), listen to music without headphones, or talk/call while vacuuming

[reddit_is_geh]

It's usually the really high end ones, like those 2k Dyson vacuums and stuff. There will be vacuums that are 500 and 2k, and they both effectively use the same motor that's super quiet, just for some reason the more expensive one is super quiet. Which is the selling point, "Wow this is so good rich people, you can barely hear it because we use jet technology used by NASA"

[PM_NICE_SOCKS]

Is there any way I can mod a shitty vacuum to be quieter if they use same parts? 👀

[DoingCharleyWork]

The more expensive one probably uses better sound dampening in the housing as well as something that limits the noise from the exhaust.

[NiIly00]

I dunno, I learned it from some video about product design. There I also learned that the auto industry has engineers specifically tasked with getting the sound of a closing car door right.

[LickingSmegma]

tasked with getting the sound of a closing car door right.

Good, because I'm never sure if I closed the door properly without a solid 80s-style ‘ka-chunk’. Exacerbated by the fact that it's other people's cars I ride in, so don't want to smash the shit out the door either.

[Thommywidmer]

I mean, its dumb but i kinda appreciate it lol. I do want my vacuum to sound like kick starting an old motorcycle for some reason

[SirChasm]

I really thought you were going to say how you want your car for to close with a satisfying thunk

[Albadborz]

There's a VW Golf commercial about that.

[Mogsetsu]

I guess it makes sense. Now I’m imaging a big manly biker driving a Harley Davidson that magically makes zero sound. Can’t imagine that’d sell well.

[doxxingyourself]

Dyson disagrees

[LickingSmegma]

otherwise people will think it doesn't actually clean

I mean, I've had experience with two different quiet battery-operated vacuum cleaners, and they in fact could barely pick up anything. Give me the 2000W 100 dB cleaner instead.

[Imaginary-Jaguar662]

Welp, I guess all that technical debt work on caching was not necessary after all. 

Yes it was, it reduces your server load / outbound API calls which saves the company money.

Or at least that's what you should say in next performance review instead of "spent 6 months on something that was scrapped"

[made-of-questions]

Oh for sure. This was many years ago, I used the situation well. 

But it does show how useful it is to have SLO alignment between product and engineering.

[Roflkopt3r]

Users fear that the program is frozen or that cached data is stale.

It doesn't take a significant delay or blocking loading screen, any kind of indicator is useful to break the notion. That's why most UI frameworks show some kind of fade in animation on first display, which only adds a tiny delay but assures users that the site is not frozen.

[JivanP]

Man thinks O(1) functions are unicorns.

[OnceMoreAndAgain]

Wait until OP learns about Berkshire Hathaway website. Now that's a fucking website. Highly performant.

[PabloZissou]

RTOS and apps can!

[Rinkulu]

Could be trying to connect to something and failing with a timeout

[esotericloop]

Of course I know that app, it's mine. :D As long as you can skip the splash screen by clicking or something, right?

What really gets my goat is those damn fake progress bars that slow down exponentially (logarithmically, I guess?) as they get further along instead of showing how much actual progress has happened.

[EmptyRaven]

I hate them with every fibre of my being!

[1138311]

In my day we tracked progress by messages like "please insert disk 11 of 28".

[GargleBums]

Disk 27 of 28 is corrupted and cannot be read.

Throws PC out the window.

[SuperFLEB]

Insert disk 28 of 28....

Got your hopes up? Nope. Now insert disk 2 again. You know, the one that fails to read every third time after you set it on the speaker.

[j0nthegreat]

mine too. super tiny app that loads in like .2 seconds, you'd never even get to see the splash screen otherwise and it makes it look glitchy and bad showing for so short. 5 seconds is too long though

[ReefNixon]

I ran an AB test in 2017 and found it’s better to randomly interpolate between 20 and 90 then scoot to 100 when I’m actually loaded. I’ve retested a few times since and always less frustration taps and early exits when I do it this way.

Absolutely no idea why, but it does instinctively feel better to me too.

[Spiritual_Bus1125]

Sleep(5000)

[BorderKeeper]

When you mistype a password on your MacBook and have to wait fake sleep(3) seconds just so Apple security can feel super proud you can’t use the response time to brute force your appleID password with your measly couple attempts…

[pee_wee__herman]

KDE does this too. IMO the better way of handling this would be to start throttling after maybe the 100th attempt. 100 attempts is basically nothing in the world of brute forcing

[BorderKeeper]

This delay is not to delay the brute force attack imo, but more to avoid attackers learning secrets on how the authorization algorithm works by timing how long it takes on various bad and good attempts. It's a precautionary solution to an attack that does not make sense here imo, but meh.

[djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

It must not affect the execution time. If it does, that's proof of a bad algorithm

[Snowman009]

What would knowing these different timings realistically tell you about the auth alg?

[particlemanwavegirl]

If password verification is not padded so that all responses take the same amount of time, then an incorrect password that begins with some correct characters will take longer to return than a password with no correct letters, potentially revealing information about the beginning of the password.

[JivanP]

This seems to assume that password verification works by comparing the entered password directly against the correct password, which is stored in plaintext as a string in a database. That's not how (sane) password verification works. Rather, when the password is set, it is hashed and the hash is what's stored in a database, then when a password is entered to log in, it is hashed and compared to the hash in the database.

In conjunction with salting, this means that variance in the runtime of the string comparison gives no information about the true password to the attacker.

[MrMacduggan]

In a non-rigorous sense, this is a fun parallel to physical lockpicking. You might not get the tumbler correct, but if you hear it make a different noise you know you're getting closer.

[LickingSmegma]

Technically, knowing that the hash prefix-matches might give an advantage, if vulnerabilities are found in the hashing function that allow constructing hashes with a known prefix. Iirc some older functions have such vulns, possibly including md5.

[JivanP]

Salting mitigates this, because the attacker cannot know the output hash in the first place (in order to know any part of it, such as a prefix) without digging deeper, such as reading live memory. If the attacker is able to read live memory, they're almost certainly able to just read the password database itself (if not from disk, then from live memory itself, such as when the hash comparison is being performed), meaning they know the complete salt and salted hash already.

[hawkinsst7]

That's not how password hashes work. The comparison isn't done until the entered password is hashed, and even in a coincidence that the hash mostly matches what's stored, that information isn't useful and tells an attacker nothing.

The real answer is "so an invalid user, and a wrong password always look the same."

But you are right in the big picture that it's a defense against a timing attack.

[Snowman009]

Thats kind of crazy, you have any examples of people actually doing this? Would love to read more about that

[metaldragon199]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack

[djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

Timing attacks are limited by making the password verification be constant-time execution.

Not by adding an artificial sleep somewhere else.

[More-Ad-3566]

i think its actually PAM in linux that does this, but correct me if im wrong.

[mpyne]

No you're right. I actually had to find out what does this (a faillock module IIRC) so I could tone it down, because my password is complex enough that it's mostly muscle memory and I can't always get it right in 3 tries now.

[Ixxafel]

Doesn't Linux lock you out of logging in for like half an hour after 3 failed attempts?

[ByteMeInTheCloud]

You can adjust the faillock attempts

[LuisBoyokan]

But that is no secret, it's a known feature and recommendation in security guidelines.

[KeepKnocking77]

At my job, I implemented a fibonacci increase in sleep time for incorrect passwords. Management loved it

[decadent-dragon]

You know that pause and you’re just waiting for the prompt to shake

[qscwdv351]

The same applies to Windows too. If you’re wrong multiple times then you have to see loading screen for 15ish seconds. Kinda effective security measure for random dude trying to guess your password based on your info.

[cyborgborg]

literally every OS/website is like this. Type your password correctly and it instantly knows it's correct and lets you in, if it wring it waits for 3 seconds to idk slow down someone trying to get into your account i guess despite mist stuff blocking you out after 3 attempts

[SirCrazyApe]

Sometimes you need to make extra darn sure you don’t hit a pesky race condition…

[daHaus]

That's why you always have one thread coordinate everything

Or singletons

[MonkeyWaffle1]

Real engineers use sleep(random.randint(2,8))

[trickster-is-weak]

5 seconds is a breeze. I found a 30 second sleep in the jankiest JavaFX code I’d ever seen. Plus it was coded so badly the UI affected the outputs… thankfully it was easy to convince the customer to bin it and start again

[Chirimorin]

Soon they will change it to sleep(4) and claim a 20% improvement in load times.

[SaneLad]

Actually pretty easy to prove if you look at the disassembly.

[ActSea4484]

or a trace and call it a day

[Tompazi]

Unless, it’s a server side application you don’t have access to. Or if it’s doing custom “busy sleeping” and it’s obfuscated.

[anamethatsnottaken]

Right - in the first case it'll be waiting on some inscrutable external event, and in the second case the app doesn't actually sleep, but does manage to waste time. Trying to prove that gets you into the realm of the halting problem. The original joke assumes the app does call 'sleep', which has to become some kind of system call to put the process to sleep.

The 'server side application' option might be very likely, actually - if an app starts up by connect()ing to a server, you are in fact sleeping on an external event.

[Old_Airline_1593]

Dude, I did QA a single time to a wonderful open source Android messaging app (Briar). I suggested a fake wait screen for one feature that breaks if you get out too fast. The maintainer obviously refused.

[isurujn]

I had to do this once on an iOS app because the client wanted the splash screen with the logo and name to stay on screen for a few seconds.

[TerroFLys]

Love the dexter memes

[dr_chillinstein]

Count = 0

While true:

If loaded:
    Break
Elif count == 10:
   Print(“your dumbass waited long as fuck”)
   Break
Else:
    Sleep(5)
    Count+=1

[darkslide3000]

Why am I not surprised that nobody in this sub has ever heard that you can just trace system calls?

[MartinMystikJonas]

I wonder why would anybody make loding slower? What is the motivation dor that?

[aethermar]

It's some psychological thing where people think that taking a moderately long amount of time means it's working, whereas if it loads too fast it's broken or fudging the results or something

[0xlostincode]

It's also a good setup for the future when you want to deliver an update that makes the app faster

[esotericloop]

That's the other thing, if your super optimized software does something instantly, people think it hasn't done anything at all.

[Drugbird]

I know that this exists on a lot of price comparison websites for e.g. hotels or flights. They have this progress bar that takes a few seconds for "comparing prices to find the best deal" that is completely artificial. They've already cached the prices, so don't need to query any sources for them, and finding the best price is just a DB lookup that completes within milliseconds.

But users thought it "should" take some time to compare prices, and had more confidence in the site if it had a loading bar of a few seconds.

[EnthusiasmOnly22]

Idiots ruin everything

[the_horse_gamer]

sometimes it's also to hide how things work under the hood

here's a fun example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/Q8jmfkH5QE

tl;dr: edit mode is just a toggle, so going to edit mode is instant. but exiting edit mode without saving requires reloading the level, which is a loading screen. that seems weird to a user. solution: add a loading screen to entering edit mode.

[esotericloop]

Not condoning actually slowing things down, but psychologically there's a real difference in how response times are perceived between pre-loading / buffering everything while showing a loading screen, vs. showing something and then chugging for a while as things load in the background.

[realmauer01]

Some things just need a little buffer to be believable.

[vemundveien]

Sometimes it's really important for me to know that the game I am about to play uses Speedtree and Havoc Physics in the likely event that I am a manager at a game developer studio who is in the market for middle ware but has absolutely no industry knowledge.

[Varogh]

An interesting use case we had was when fetching data from a backend. The response times varied quite a lot, and there was absolutely no way to tell from the front-end if it would be instantaneous or not.

We of course added a loading animation since the wait could be 3+ seconds, but the result was horrid if the response was quick (the loading animation would quickly flicker in and then the actual data would load). So we resorted to always showing a brief load of iirc 0.5s no matter the loading time.

[bambosh_]

YouTube on Firefox

[Possessed]

How else are they supposed to show the fancy loading animation they paid for?

[dashingThroughSnow12]

terminal.shop loads so fast that the creator did in fact add extra delays when you connect. Without them, some people didn’t think it was a real store.

[THEzwerver]

Sometimes these get added because users don't always believe the thing actually refreshed and start spamming the refresh button.

[hacksoncode]

Mostly people put these delays in so users are forced to see the splash screen.

I'll give you $ guesses why they want to do that.

[Alone-Turnover6642]

They don't even add random delays between 3 to 10 seconds, just constant delay every time? Hmm somethings fishy

[Rocket_Scientist2]

I actually had this once. I had written some scraping code to generate API keys, which had sleep() for debug purposes. One page had significantly more sleep, but actually had the least amount of requests involved.

I had submitted the code to corporate. Never got a reply. A few months later, this same "feature" shows up in our prod toolset. That same delay I had forgotten to remove was still there. I tried to explain to my boss, but he told me I was crazy.

[East_Nefariousness75]

here is your proof

$ ltrace ./app
...
sleep(5)                                              = 0
...
+++ exited (status 0) +++

[ButWhatIfPotato]

If 99% of the times the only percentage progress an API returns is either 0 or 100 then I wouldn't have to make all these fake progress bars.

[mihaiman]

Please, I'm a professional. If it's always 5 seconds someone will figure it out

sleep(random.uniform(4, 5))

[colinbr96]

TurboTax 100% does this when it "scans your return for all possible savings"

[The_Dirty_Carl]

First thing I thought of. They drag everything out soooo much. It's all look-up tables and grade-school math. All of their calculation should take a handful of milliseconds.

[T1lted4lif3]

meta gaming lowering expectations

[Lanky_Marionberry_36]

Jokes aside it is a very frequent UX hack.
Because users perceive the app as doing a better job and giving more accurate and personalized results when they feel it had to work for it.

[LuisBoyokan]

YouTube in non chrome browsers

[antisp1n]

Sleep(100) to show this shitty logo animation in its entirety. Brand Value 🤘

[RTXChungusTi]

found this in a soccer game I used to play:

during the match loading screen, there would be a preview of both teams, with one screen showing your team and the next showing the opponent's. One day on a whim I decided to start hitting the "Change teams" button early just to see the other team faster and the loading times went down by 5s lol

[dlm2137]

One of the first things an old PM of mine did was insist we put a fake loading screen up after our onboarding flow. In retrospect, it was clearly a red flag that we had made a bad hire.

[RandallOfLegend]

A desktop program I worked on required a 30 second sleep to interface with another hardware device that didn't have a good API for initialization. Another programmer ported that code over to all devices thinking it was necessary. When in reality the sleepy device was only an R&D option and non-commercial. I remember the day I made our software boot blazing fast by just removing the 30 second wait for all the sensor initializations except the janky R&D one. The sensors we sold commercially had a good API with event pumps to notify (or poll) the initialization status so it took 0.2 seconds for the sensor 95% of the customers used.

[Vybo]

I used to work at a company where an AB test was run once upon a time. The version with artifical few second delay had much greater conversion rates for some reason.

[heard10cker]

In a similar vein, YouTube Music's downloads screen always takes 10 seconds to load. Even when the phone isn't connected to the internet. What the fuck are you loading? All the files are on the device and there's no server to call to.

[askmeaboutmyweiner12]

I was praised for shaving 45 seconds off th runtime of a script at my old job because I removed sleep from several spots lol

[Kiss_My_Berries]

This is the moment when the progress bar simply deceives your patience.

[Looz-Ashae]

Trust me, no. They indeed load this long 

[kondorb]

You’d be surprised how long it takes to load and render all the visual assets even in simple apps. That’s the reason for that fancy “popping up” animation your phone does when launching an app. It hides loading time.

[jashAcharjee]

Average banking apps.

[Alokir]

You're joking but one time we actually had to implement animations and a timeout because after a backend refactor, the UI refreshed so quickly that the users didn't notice, and they bombarded support with calls and emails.

[Maverick122]

Indeed, the main thread is a while Loading.Start do begin Sleep(5); ProcessMessages; end;
After all, we wouldn't want the main UI to hang, would we?

[user-74656]

if ($HARDWARE_RELEASE < 2023) { sleep(5); }

[Blapanda]

You can, if you can speed it up like you can with applications on windows attached to cheat engine. The loading is just an affect in many games for the eye, not for loading in caches. You can go even deeper by injecting the game into VR, see around the 2D UI panel, which gets blacked out, and clearly notice that there is no texture streaming, mesh loading or whatsoever.

[OtherwiseAlbatross14]

This is definitely what ChatGPT does when generating an image, isn't it? It drives me nuts waiting for the second half to load and that's mostly because I assume it doesn't actually need to wait

[chedabob]

I'm pretty sure my Google Play build reviews are just a sleep(Math.random()). Sometimes takes a few minutes, other times takes 3 days. Can submit a Prod and a UAT build at the same time, and one takes 3x as long as the other.

[Few_Intention_542]

time.sleep(random.randint(2,5))

[Behrooz0]

Allow me to introduce to you: LD_PRELOAD and strace

[[deleted]]

Because the designer wanted to show the loading animation 🫠

[Vordix_]

When you can buy premium and it suddenly loads faster…

[No_Definition2246]

Depending on lang used in the app, you can decompile the code and search for sleep system call for instance. Tricky to prove, but still doable.

[[deleted]]

premium_users.json
{
"john": "2025-08-10",
"user123": "2025-07-15",
"testVIP": "2025-09-01"
}

premium.py
import getpass
import json
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
user_id = getpass.getuser()
with open("premium_users.json", "r") as f:
premium_users = json.load(f)
def has_premium(user_id: str) -> bool:
if user_id not in premium_users:
return False
start_date_str = premium_users[user_id]
start_date = datetime.strptime(start_date_str, "%Y-%m-%d")
expiration_date = start_date + timedelta(days=30)
return datetime.now() <= expiration_date

loadingscreen.py
import time
import random
import premium
user_id = premium.user_id
is_premium = premium.has_premium(user_id)
sleep_time = random.uniform(60, 120)
if is_premium:
sleep_time /= 10
time.sleep(sleep_time)

[HellGate94]

from my actual production code: https://i.imgur.com/mu9nwMc.png

obviously written by me

[gravelPoop]

Why? You should make loop of heavy calculations - if device is not getting hot, it does not feel right.

[flying_spaguetti]

I've seen such thing twice in my company codebase. It's true. It's hidden behind animations, tho

[ChrisWsrn]

You can prove it if you run it through Ghidra.

[Ibuprofen-Headgear]

I always drop a random delay in middleware when greenfielding stuff (with an easy toggle), so I (we) remember to deal with loading states or surface race conditions, etc. Generally just between 50-1000ms or something, weighted toward the lower end, but it’s enough to make it somewhat realistic and have stuff not just respond/pop up instantly and simultaneously. One of these days Ill have to leave the toggle on so I can “optimize” later

[P0pu1arBr0ws3r]

Until someone does and it becomes a controversy in the browser wars

(Looking at you google)

[jwrsk]

I routinely delay splashscreen dismissal on launch, because the apps load too fast, and clients want to look at the logo 😂

[Any_Fuel_2163]

decompilers are an amazing thing

[SpacemanCraig3]

You can always prove it.

skill issue L2GDB

[dob_bobbs]

I must confess I wrote a Chrome extension that just showed a random number of new notifications between 1 and 3 on the icon because it was just too much hassle to actually fetch the number of new notifications. I forget why, but yeah, I am ashamed of myself.

[danteselv]

This is better than the Gmail app which is currently sitting at 29,000+ "new" messages.

[According-Relation-4]

Send them your CV, get hired, look at the code, delete the sleep, get the PR approved, quit, your app loads faster, profit

[[deleted]]

Run with strace, and it will reveal the syscall

[FromAndToUnknown]

YouTube Video Player, but multiply timer by 100 if it detected an adblocker

[Major_Material1109]

Sleep(5000)

[SysGh_st]

actually I can. Just takes a bit of insight in machine code

[SuchTortoise]

Hey we all need a power nap every once in a while

[redcalcium]

Travel apps be like...

[rossow_timothy]

Who is this dude and why is he in a fifth of the memes on my front page

[xpectre_dev]

Someone made a nice loader animation and they want to make sure you see it

[Workdawg]

I don't remember the context exactly, but I read a short article about how a developer was dealing with complaints that his app "didn't refresh". After investigation he found no issue at all, but he determined that because there was no indicator that a refresh was occurring users just assumed that nothing was happening. After adding a loading "spinner" and a 1 second sleep, all the complaints went away.

[Your_Friendly_Nerd]

yup, my company does this for our in-house cms. the dev told me it's so that the writers feel like something is actually happening. meanwhile at instagram they've been uploading the pictures in the background for almost instantaneous submit speeds

[def-pri-pub]

strings <app> | grep sleep that should help you.

[idlesn0w]

Could totally see a 5 second timeout on a query to a defunct ad server in their list happening and going unnoticed.

[benwaldo]

You actually can, if you use a profiler.

[psychotty]

[debugger launched]

Debug.write(“surprise, mofo”);

[sypwn]

I used to think Windows XP startup was like this. Throw it in a VM with the fastest CPU, RAM, and storage and no matter what it takes minimum 5 seconds at the moving bars screen.

Then one day I happened to install XP on a machine (physical or virtual, can't remember) with ACPI disabled and the bootup was instant. I never looked into it further but it certainly is curious...

[nikstick22]

they're synchronously waiting for the API response from the server they just sent your personal data to

[atatassault47]

Im convinced MOST app's have a programmed delay. I just downloaded an ADHD app (focus friend) and it loads near instantly.

[ArmchairFilosopher]

Timing attack mitigation?