You can easily observe how significant latency is in videos like this: https://youtu.be/vOvQCPLkPt4?t=80 (Microsoft Research presenting its ultra low latency displays for touch interactions). Many mobile games have you drag and drop things, so it's not like it's just first person shooters that suffer from latency.
You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.
One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.
Thanks for posting this. This comment section has been particularly frustrating to read, since it's a mirror of what I've seen in the real world. There are teams at big tech companies making TERRIBLE decisions about the future of gaming because they don't actually understand how latency affects games, and they aren't hardcore gamers so they can't feel the effects themselves.
Even the ~50ms total latency you get from locally streaming over a 1ms wired network (from buffering/inappropriate firmware design) ruins whole genres of high level gameplay. You miss tricky shots in FPS games, you can't confirm/link in fighters, etc.
You're a lay person, you couldn't have known this, you're using words with very specific meaning to streaming (like latency) and you're comparing it to human reaction times, which are measuring something else entirely. You kind of reasoned about from a first principle in a very Paulgrahamarian way, and it led you deeply astray. That happens. And you're not the only person doing this, this is a comment section full of people who play games and parrot stuff they seen in YouTube, and don't have a concrete grasp of what it is they're even talking about, so it's understandable when it's laypeople shouting at laypeople that it's just a bunch of blah.
One of the reasons I hate HN and write in throwaways nowadays is that the comments section is a better example of Knoll's law than actual journalism.