I agree that it sends the wrong symbol, but actually Daniel is great. He cares tremendously about doing work that is actually real-world useful. I've co-written a few papers with him, and he's really hard working and open to outside suggestions. The danger is that if you send him comments, he'll eventually manage to rope you into writing a new and improved version. Seriously, if you are a non-academic computer scientist with a good idea that you want to publish, he'd be incredibly open to working with you.

As to why he now has this on his blog? I also cringe when I read it. I presume someone told him he should self-promote more, and this is his lame attempt to do so. He's almost certainly the most cited person in his department, but it's entirely possible that none of his colleagues actually know this. Cut him some slack. Self-promotion is not his strength. He's a nerd's nerd, and not a marketer. I'll mention to him that his attempt here might be backfiring when I'm next in contact with him.

He's not a loser; he's done some really fun work that many people use daily. I've used his range mapping trick in multiple projects/papers. It's elegant.

It sounds like he's gotten bad advise about how to market himself /or/ this is being marketed to people who have bigger checks to write and whom he believes will be responsive to this kind of marketing. As an academic, it rubs me very wrong - I think it's detrimental to the field when we get into h-index stacking contests or citation count comparisons. But I don't know what incentives he's responding to, which seems important for putting this stuff in context.

(as an aside, it turns out that polars + fastexcel is about 10x faster than pandas + openpyxl for searching that dataset, if anyone else is curious what he was actually talking about. :)

I found his website, https://www.lemire.me/en/ , and the "2%" brag is the very first sentence, geez.

Being the top x% is what OnlyFans girls brag about, professor...

And it's not exactly brain surgery, is it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I

That lines looks very cringe indeed, but the guy has some crazy good blogposts on SIMD stuff.