607: quantum of sollazzo
#607: quantum of sollazzo – 20 May 2025
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Hello, regular readers and welcome new ones :) This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data. I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I've been sending this newsletter since 2012 to be a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week. The newsletter is and will always (well, for as long as I can keep going!) be free, but you're welcome to become a friend via the links below.
The most clicked link last week was the brilliant London Underground Live Map.
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Sorry for the relatively short issue this week. I've had... things to deal with, but normal service should be resuming soon :)
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
It was last week's most clicked link – the London Underground Live Map by Ben James was definitely a hit. Ben has now published a good write-up of how he made it, which might be even more interesting than the map itself, as it gives a lot of thinking around AI use in software development. "AI was terrible at identifying these bugs, but fantastic at writing powerful debug tools", for example.
A lot of you came back to me about AI 2027, an long piece with predictions of where AI is heading to. I don't have a lot to add to your doubts and criticism of the piece, to be honest – it is a problematic piece that buys into the hype, of course, but it does so in ways that make you think about a good set of what if scenarios and our social and economic resilience. There are a few analyses and responses out there, including this interview of the New York Times with one of the authors, Effective Altruism-inspired think-tank MIRI take on it which broadly agrees with the article, a collection of responses, and even an AI-generated critique. I haven't found a good, comprehensive counter-narrative, though. Please do send it to me if you find it.
MinorMiner: we turn your kid's maths homework into Bitcoin by Robert Heaton made me laugh a lot, but also think – it's a library, called CUDAAAAGH, to exploit primary school level calculations to mine Bitcoins....
✨ Topical
In the Network of the Conclave
Barbara Orlando: "How network science can help us understand who will be the next Pope. The study by Soda, Iorio, and Rizzo reveals how status, information and alliances influence the papal election."
Robert Prevost had quite a good standing.
(via Guy Lipman)
SA's children can't read for meaning. What can we do about it?
Very interesting piece by South African data newsletter The Outlier on the ability of their nations' students to read. There is also an international comparison.
Air Force One gift would smash presidential records
Axios looks at presidential gifts, with great use of dataviz.
Moody's has downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating for the first time since 1917
A brilliant use of an historical timeline visualisation by Professor Justing Wolfers.
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Pixel Map Generator
A simple way to generate pixelated maps. This is built with... (look at the following link)
(via Geomob)
amCharts 5
...part of this library for charts, which sadly isn't free to use.
gmail-to-sqlite
"Index your Gmail account to a SQLite DB and play with the data."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
🤖 AI
#30DaysOfAI
Look at this hashtag on LinkedIn. I'm particularly enjoying Michael Skelly's posts.
AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder
"Historians are finally having their AI debate"
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