608: quantum of sollazzo
#608: quantum of sollazzo – 27 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 this pixel map generator.
AMA – Ask Me Anything! Submit a question via this anonymous Google form. I'll select a few every 4-5 weeks and answer them on here :-) Don't be shy!
The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 31 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.
We have (finally!) announced that the 10th Open Data Camp UK will happen at the University of Edinburgh Business School, on September 27 & 28, 2025.
Stay tuned for updates!
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
Gary Marcus has written what is, in my opinion and thus far, the best analysis/take down (you choose) of the famous AI 2027 article, with quite a few quotable lines: "as a scientific analysis of a range of scenarios and which might be most likely, it’s dead on arrival. There is no serious analysis of alternative scenarios at all" but also "people have been using synthetic data for driverless cars for close to a decade"
Last week, Anil Dash announced that, fundamentally, Glitch is shutting down. It's not clear, from the announcement, if and how some of Glitch will stay. While I never used it, it was frequently featured and was fairly popular among data creatives.
✨ Topical
Something alarming is happening to the job market
The Atlantic: "A new sign that AI is competing with college grads."
"According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis."
The article gives different theories and discusses the AI-driven one.
Forest Fraud: National Greenwashing Program
Lighthouse Reports: "Satellite imagery analysis and inside sources reveal deforestation and questionable commodities across the Philippines’ national greening program". Interestingly the methodology is fully described, with links to several openly accessible sources of data and satellite imagery.
Brain food, delivered daily
Every day we analyze thousands of articles and send you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 505,869 curious minds. Subscribe.
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
Noel Berry: "I think it'd be fun to talk about my workflow, and what I actually use to make games."
SQLite-JS Extension
"SQLite-JS is a powerful extension that brings JavaScript capabilities to SQLite. With this extension, you can create custom SQLite functions, aggregates, window functions, and collation sequences using JavaScript code, allowing for flexible and powerful data manipulation directly within your SQLite database."
Getting AI to write good SQL: Text-to-SQL techniques explained
Per Jacobsson, Google: "In this blog post, the first entry in a series, we explore the technical internals of Google Cloud's text-to-SQL agents. We will cover state-of-the-art approaches to context building and table retrieval, how to do effective evaluation of text-to-SQL quality with LLM-as-a-judge techniques, the best approaches to LLM prompting and post-processing, and how we approach techniques that allows the system to offer virtually certified correct answers."
Spatial machine learning with caret
"This document shows the application of caret for spatial modelling at the example of predicting air temperature in Spain. Hereby, we use measurements of air temperature available only at specific locations in Spain to create a spatially continuous map of air temperature. Therefore, machine-learning models are trained to learn the relationship between spatially continuous predictors and air temperature."
caret is an R package that streamlines training classification and regression models.
🤯 Data thinking
Decibels are ridiculous
Pretty enjoyable article on the oddity that is the Decibel as a unit.
As a mostly ad-hoc'er, I've got workflow issues
"Please, let's celebrate doing things the ugly way. For our peers that do things justly as ugly."
Writing things by hand helps wiring your brain to understand them.
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Ranked: Per Capita Beer Consumption by Country
Guess who's first – the screenshot only captures mid-table.
Country Centered Map Projections
"What does it look like if you center a map on a specific country? Click on a country to find out."
🤖 AI
[$] Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon
"Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs. But at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been more friend than foe."
|
DID YOU LIKE THIS ISSUE>? → BUY ME A COFFEE! 
You're receiving this email because you subscribed to Quantum of Sollazzo, a weekly newsletter covering all things data, written by Giuseppe Sollazzo (@puntofisso). If you have a product or service to promote and want to support this newsletter, you can sponsor an issue. |
quantum of sollazzo is also supported by Andy Redwood’s proofreading – if you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, check out Proof Red. Oh, and he also makes motion graphics animations about climate change.
