What made you read this as a quote?

Possibly the leading greater-than sign, a symbol used by a lot of software to indicate quotes.

Yeah I agree that the ‘gt’ symbol in this case could be a bit confusing, but in the context at least I read it as a way to say something along the lines of “hey, this could be something that might align with Simon’s work of making datasets easier to explore”.

Fair. Yes.

I was reading it in the style of 4chan greentexts, personally.