One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

I got a reminder today that I do the kind of research where something as hilariously unintuitive as telling a program to treat long numbers as “words made up of 0-9” is actually a critical step to making sure you get the right results.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the distinction between “qualitative” and “quantitative” isn’t all that useful and that what we actually mean is usually better expressed in other terms.

The thing with any tech that promises to insert citations for you is that you still need to check the cites for mistakes and know the citation style well enough to catch the mistakes, and at that point, why bother using it in the first place?