614: quantum of sollazzo
#614: quantum of sollazzo – 8 July 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 entertaining 'Who is the best CDO' game
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
Hat tip to my friend Daniele Bottillo who spotted this status on Bluesky, showing Google AI unhelpfully telling the user to use Google search... which is exactly what they had done. AI with bad service design is stupid.
The Economist's Political Data Scientist Owen Winter (whose website also links to code and data), has tweeted this intriguing analysis of the New York City Mayor Democratic primary.
This report from the US Energy Information Administration, which I found via the Tedium newsletter, shows how much energy is being used by IT.
I'm not sure if I agree with Simon, but I truly hope he's right.
✨ Topical
See Vaccine Recommendations Backed by Science in These Handy Charts
Scientific American: "These graphics will guide you through science-based vaccine guidelines for children and adults"
What are free trade agreements and how do they affect trade?
"The US has 14 agreements covering trade with 20 countries."
When the cycle stops
A highly visual story by Reuters on amenorrhea, or period loss.
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Geocoding from within an LLM
The clever folks at (past Quantum sponsor) Open Cage have published an easy tutorial to use MCP with their geocoding API.
NativeMind - Private, on-device AI Assistant, no cloud dependencies
A private LLM-based assistant.
YATSEE - Yet Another Tool for Speech Extraction & Enrichment
"This project provides a modular pipeline for downloading, transcribing, cleaning, and preparing audio/video recordings into readable, structured text. It’s designed with a local-first philosophy, giving you full control over your data at every stage.
Capturing meetings, podcasts, or public hearings is easy. Turning them into something useful and searchable? Not so much.
Raw transcripts are often messy: broken sentence structure, inconsistent formatting, and poor readability. YATSEE steps through a clean, repeatable pipeline that transforms raw audio into usable, structured text that is ready for humans or machines."
CSV to HTML Table
"Display any CSV (comma separated values) file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table".
Also, here's an example.
CSS Color Functions
"CSS has a number of functions that can be used to set, translate, and manipulate colors. Learn what they are and how they are used with a bunch of examples to get you started."
🤯 Data thinking
How rating scales shape movie reviews
Datawrapper's Julian Freyberg: "How much does the format of a rating scale actually influence the score someone gives a movie? As it turns out, quite a bit."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
The Fed says this is a cube of $1 million. They're off by half a million.
Entertaining and technical. Brilliant. The line "Imagine the meeting" had me in laughing fits.
Calvin Laing, the author, used his self-developed dot-counter – no AI, just an easy to use tool.
Concept Pathfinder
"A tool for exploring the space between two concepts", as Matthew Siu explains here
I am an Airbus A350 Pilot
This British Airways pilot has created a number of dataviz and even started a thread on HackerNews.
Which Decade(s) Saw the Greatest Change in Popular Music? A Statistical Analysis
"Which decades saw the greatest shifts in mainstream music?", asks Stat Significant's Daniel Parris. Interestingly, he uses a PCA-based methodology to calculate it.
Extra points for using Material Girl as the leading picture.
🤖 AI
Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government
Benjamin Welby: "A few days ago, I lit the fuse on a working prototype of a government service. No team, no procurement cycle, no waiting for approval. Just me, a few prompts, and a handful of AI tools. And honestly? Fireworks."
Brilliant article that doesn't go where you expect it to go – it's not just technical, but it offers a few reflections on digital services and digital skills in the public sector.
The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering
"Context Engineering is new term gaining traction in the AI world. The conversation is shifting from "prompt engineering" to a broader, more powerful concept: Context Engineering. Tobi Lutke describes it as "the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.” and he is right."
Meaningful Stakeholder Engagement in Public Procurement for Artificial Intelligence
"A Mission-Oriented Playbook".
"In this playbook, we propose a future direction that identifies the key stages at which, and the ways in which, stakeholder engagement can add value to the entire process of public procurement of artificial intelligence solutions."
It ultimately links to a PDF but it's a very well crafted one.
The Subprime AI Crisis
Writer Ed Zitron: "I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry."
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