The language and its ideas come from Ken Iverson's famous paper "Notation as a Tool of Thought". This is a common understanding for people in the APL, K/J/Q etc array language communities, who are likely this website and product's intended audience.
In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.
Iain M Banks’ The Algebraist does a great job of covering that territory. If an organism had a lifespan of millions of years, they might perceive time and communication differently to say a house fly or us.
For those that love the idea of this kind of child-friendly media consumption but maybe don’t have the time, consider Yoto. You can make your own cards that can contain one track or playlists of mp3s that you drag and drop onto a web interface. The yoto then downloads and stores those files, playing them whenever that card is inserted. You can also use the ipad app to browse and play the same content.
Yes, there is a lot of effort to understand, for example, the 99th percentile tick-to-trade latency as well as the average latency. For a lot of those worst-case timings there are things that are occasionally out of your control like the kernel, the network, the hardware. Then there are things always in your control like how you implement your software.
Most HFT algos are busy-spinning. You'll see a core pinned at 100% as it checks for input availability over and over. The vast majority of the time it is actually doing nothing, from an external point of view. When that tick appears that it needs to react to, it springs into action. It might react to some input in the range of a few hundred nano seconds but for literally billions of nanoseconds it's doing nothing at all.
Audio is processing a buffer of data (usually whatever your audio interface buffer is set to), then waits patiently until the next buffer arrives. There's a regular pulse to it. If your CPU isn't hurting, there's way more time between those buffers than are required to process them. The order of magnitude between work and 'not work' for HFT is huge compared to audio generally. HFT logic is simple, small and fast. Audio is hopefully complex if you paid good money for it. The best way to go fast is to do almost nothing.
In terms of the impact of not meeting a particular deadline, it's an opportunity cost in HFT. In audio, you get audio dropouts if you can't process it fast enough. In HFT, if your reaction time is slow, you're not at the front of the queue for that juicy trading opportunity you and everyone else just spotted, then you miss it entirely and someone else gets the prize. HFT is all about making thousands of small statistically favourable bets and being able to execute on them fast enough to realise the opportunity before the next fastest guy.
Audio has a lot of buffering behaviour that you wouldn't generally see in event-reactive HFT. Think of all the plugins that you know of that have non-zero latency, compressors with 'lookahead' etc. There are maybe some similarities where the logic is more complex (loop unrolling, SIMD and so on) but I feel like plugins are generally optimizing for throughput (CPU usage) and quality (oversampling etc) rather than purely latency in most cases.
I’ve just started using Warp+ and it has been excellent for my specific use case: better peering to my Plex server while in another continent. Plex was unusable and now it’s not. Overall very happy despite this brief outage.