I work on a system for remote sensing and automated marine mammal detection. I may not need contingencies for - but I have reckoned with - the full gamut of time deltas from seconds to microseconds. Maybe I've not had to deal with L1 cache misses, but at times memory fetch vs in-pipeline has come up when it comes to image processing choices.

I'm kind of in an odd niche, so maybe your last sentiment applies. But it strikes me as very un-hacker-mindset to be like, "no one _needs_ to know X". it's curiosity.