611: quantum of sollazzo
#611: quantum of sollazzo – 17 June 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 Minimalism and the absurdity of the data-to-ink-ratio.
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
I asked Claude: "Claude, let's play Global Thermonuclear war."
Wow.
While there was a tragic air accident this week, I was reminded of the rather troubling issue with air traffic control in the UK last year which grounded a lot of airplanes due to a very rare bug in the software. So this blog post called "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation" was a rather eye-opening read – some of these I new, but some are totally surprising.
This short post is a good summary why "plugging a chatbot into patient medical records for doctors to query ... is a Very Bad AI Idea".
Alex Trouteaud's brilliant new noun – SchAIdenfreude "(noun): the joy or satisfaction experienced by critics when AI systems come up short on challenges that, until a few months ago, were thought impossible, often accompanied by a sense of vindication or relief"
✨ Topical
How much energy are you using on AI?
Datawrapper's Mirko Lorenz: "You may have heard that a single query to ChatGPT can use up to 10 times as much energy as a Google search. This comparison is surprisingly sticky — but is it reason to worry?"
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Scatterplot matrices with pairwise pivoting
"As with so many things in life, something that I used to think was infuriatingly difficult and cumbersome turns out to be really easy if you just format the data properly."
Agentic Coding Recommendations
"My general workflow involves assigning a job to an agent (which effectively has full permissions) and then waiting for it to complete the task. I rarely interrupt it, unless it's a small task. Consequently, the role of the IDE — and the role of AI in the IDE — is greatly diminished; I mostly use it for final edits. This approach has even revived my usage of Vim, which lacks AI integration."
Which Data Architecture Should I Choose for My Workplace? — A Data Engineer’s Approach
A good look at the big 4: "Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh"
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How I Use Claude Code
"One month ago, I subscribed to Claude Max. I've been using AI agents including Claude Code for some time prior, but with the flat pricing, my usage skyrocketed and it's become a daily driver for many tasks. I find myself going to VS Code much less often now.
Since AI agents are new for everyone right now, I thought it might be fun to share some patterns I've been noticing recently. Here's how I use Claude code."
Spatial machine learning with the tidymodels framework
"In this blog post, we will show how to use the tidymodels framework for spatial machine learning. The tidymodels framework is a collection of R packages for modeling and machine learning using tidyverse principles."
Decoding The SVG path Element: Line Commands
"SVG is easy — until you meet path. However, it’s not as confusing as it initially looks. In this first installment of a pair of articles, Myriam Frisano aims to teach you the basics of \<path> and its sometimes mystifying commands. With simple examples and visualizations, she’ll help you understand the easy syntax and underlying rules of SVG’s most powerful element so that by the end, you’re fully able to translate SVG semantic tags into a language path understands."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
The Illusion of Causality in Charts
Enrico Bertini: "How charts can mislead us by depicting causes that may not exist."
🤖 AI
How a Danish News Service Made a Profit with its Transcription Tool
"A software engineer at Zetland created the transcription tool Good Tape, which has brought in millions of dollars."
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