this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Programmer Humor

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might be a form of Jevons Paradox (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago by not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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https://raru.re/@ocean/116214437024389203

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 points 22 hours ago

Found out about this while watching "Halt and Catch Fire" (AMC's effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).

Doherty Threshold

In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.