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by oatmeal_croc 683 days ago
What's the use case for millisecond-latency streaming? HFT? Remotely driving heavy machinery? Anything else?
3 comments

I think it's less about guaranteed 1ms real time transactions and more about, like, it's just fast enough that you most likely don't have to worry about it introducing perceptible lag?

I'm working on a streaming audio thing and keeping latency low is a priority. I actually think I'll try Gazette, I just saw it now and it was one of those moments where it's like wait I go to Hacker News to waste time but this is quite exactly what I've been wanting in so many ways.

I'll use it for Ogg/Opus media streams, transcription results, chat events, LLM inferences...

I really like the byte-indexed append-only blob paradigm backed by object storage. It feels kind of like Unix as a distributed streaming system.

Other streaming data gadgets like Kafka always feel a bit uncomfortable and annoying to me with their idiosyncratic record formats and topic hierarchies and whatnot... I always wanted something more low level and obvious...

> wait I go to Hacker News to waste time but this is quite exactly what I've been wanting in so many ways.

This has happened so many times for me that I don't consider the time "wasted". I try to make sure I separate the a) "this is interesting personally", and b) "this is interesting professionally" threads and have a bunch of open tabs for a) that I can "read later".

But the items in (b) I read "now" and consider that to be work, not pleasure.

Collaborative systems come to mind. If you edit a document and want to subscribe to changes from other nodes it is valuable to have very low latency.
A millisecond is an eternity in HFT.