> I almost never use the human-readable file sizes.

Same here. I love the idea, and i keep trying to use human-readable sizes in every command which supports them. But it turns out they're much less scannable than numbers in a common unit. How long does it take you to see which of these files is biggest:

  13k  potatoes.txt
   7M  tomatoes.txt
  128  recipe_ideas.txt
   1G  hot_sauce_formula.txt

How about now:

       13093  potatoes.txt
     7182642  tomatoes.txt
         128  recipe_ideas.txt
  1023984672  hot_sauce_formula.txt

Human-readable numbers also break all sorts of useful things like sorting (unless you have some fancypants sort which understands them), calculating totals with awk, sedding them into an expression to evaluate with $(()), etc.