I wrote this a few years ago back before I joined Mastodon, but computers haven't gotten all that much faster and I think the numbers hold up. I assume we’ve all seen Grace Hopper’s classic description of a nanosecond; this is a list of human-scaled comparisons of various computer transaction times. If we scaled it so a CPU cycle was one second long, how long does it take to get your data from different places?
(What's missing from my list?)