@rachelplusplusRachel Barker yeah this is a little bit of a tangent but we tend to get obsessed with scale and cost and commanding vast datacenters full of super-powered hardware. but the amount of data that you can process on a single laptop, especially if it's a high-spec developer machine, is truly mind-boggling. any macbook pro built within the last 4 years with sqlite can host things that in the early naughts would have been globe-spanning megaliths with whole datacenters dedicated to them
@glyph @rachelplusplusRachel Barker The thing that gets me is that "a relatively small random sample will accurately predict the nature of the entire dataset to within a very small margin of error" is... the core insight of the entire field of statistics, the fundamental reason the field of statistics exists. But here we are somehow.
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://mastodon.social/users/mhoye/statuses/114260310099435859 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)