That's right. My background is mostly in quantitative finance, where we would use models like linear regression on expert-engineered features based on market data, instead of throwing a deep neural network at raw price data like what some people might imagine.

For push vs. pull, I'd recommend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006476.

On single machine, you really should just use Polars. Quokka is faster than Pandas because it can take advantage of multiple cores, but so can Polars -- and it is likely to be faster.