What is a viable path in very late 2025 for a hobbyist to get started?
- https://www.asic-world.com/verilog/verilog_one_day.html
And it's associated starter FPGA: https://nandland.com/the-go-board/
If you outgrow this I would recommend moving to some sort of Xilinx Arty Spartan board
You can get a rough idea of what you're getting into by going through the NAND2Tetris self-learning course ( https://www.nand2tetris.org/ ) and the associated textbook The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. But that's just scratching the bare surface of the depth you'd need to go to to get useful acceleration.
That doesn't even go into the eyewatering cost of the development tools and professional FPGA boards. There are free versions of the tools and small FPGA boards intended for student and hobbyist use but, assuming your code is non-trivial, they're unlikely to get you any significant speed up.
Whatever people may say about reddit, it seems to be a good starting point to get started with pretty much any hobby (even if it's just to get a link to another community).
Edit: https://github.com/BrunoLevy/learn-fpga looks interesting.
Did he say why? It's hard to see what the motive for this is.
One example of a company offering something like that: https://www.enyx.com/
It highly depends on what you're doing, but in trading there is very often a direct reliationship between latency and how much money you can make.