The workstation paragraph seems like a humble brag. Most of us yearn for a set-up like that! Especially with the price of components going up thanks to AI and corporations buying all the hardware to support it.

Just a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK"

The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.

The author is known for deep dives on data sets like that (I'm following him on Linkedin for that), so makes sense they always mention their setup even if it doesn't apply to his specific data set.

Yea, I agree. The dataset is < 100MB... so duckdb can very easily handle this on an old macbook air.

https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data

It is a humble brag. I saw the specs and thought the author would discuss different approaches of finessing the data and a benchmark. There isn’t one. So it’s indeed a humblebrag.

Seems like he ran out of money to get a good GPU though :)

[dead]