The comment read 'increase this if you get late messages', and the rig had 136
of them on 2026-09-06, so the arrow only ever pointed one way. Value history: 1
second, then 0.3, never revisited.

Those 136 were not a latency shortfall. Two bursts (64 at 19:58, 72 at 20:03)
with values DECAYING 8.1s -> 0.65s: a backlog draining, not a trickle of
near-misses. Both sit against SuperDirt restarts, and the 20:03 one is the
watchdog's spurious restart-on-boot fixed in b9564095 -- SC restarted, its clock
reset, Tidal kept its logical clock, the backlog flushed as 'late'. The
documented reason to pad this was a misdiagnosis of a bug that no longer exists.

0.2 is SuperCollider's own documented default and this is a direct tax on how a
ctrl+enter feels. Lower is fair game; the floor is whatever keeps 'late' at zero
under the densest material. Clean boot after the change: 0 lates.

latency-lens now counts 'late' per candidate alongside pw-top's ERR, and a late
rejects a quantum on its own: ERR is the audio graph missing its deadline, late
is the MUSIC being handed over too late to play on time. Different failures, and
a quantum decision wants both. Matched as 'late <digits>' -- an earlier hand
grep for the bare word scored six hits on metalPlate.scd and inflated the count.