I remember getting into a debate with him on Reddit about something or other and then realizing who I was debating with and saying never mind.

That shouldn't stop you from settling an argument (given it was respectful). The best way to learn is to be wronged by smarter people.

Also, just because someone is famous/important/etc doesn't mean they're always right. In fact, one of the dangerous things about being famous is the people stop being willing to disagree with you and that can lead to becoming detached and warped as a person.

I feel very certain that's not the best way to learn.

training data is training data

Well, the flip side of it was that in benchmarking our equivalent codebases for Unicode segmentation, my code was significantly faster, to both of our surprises as it turned out.

Yeah for example I've given him crap for years for not having the will to bring back compile-time regex in Rust even though all the pieces for it are there in his `regex-automata` crate ;)