615: quantum of sollazzo
#615: quantum of sollazzo – 15 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's the best CDO? game.
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
Oh, that "AI eye" they use at Wimbledon. So much grief – and also a fantastic example of what deploying AI should (not) look like. You'll find a few thoughts from me here.
And that chimes with this brilliant post by Jonny Williams, Chief Digital Adviser for the UK Public Sector at Red Hat and former DWP colleague – which starts with this provocative question (to LLMs): "What is a sensible approach to gun safety in schools?"
✨ Topical
Oasis infographic
"Every single song by Oasis visualised" by Delayed Gratification, still my favourite slow journalism magazine.
Brain food, delivered daily
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Interviewing AI Assistants for Data Visualization
Alex Kolokolov for Nightingale: "Now, let’s take a look at the list of potential assistants! Who will we hire for our team? Tell us a little about yourselves, dear candidates. I’ve heard that some of you are great at working with data, but not all of you understand charts. And some can even build dashboards? How about a trial period and a test task? All agreed?"
Buildmytransit.nyc
This website offers a tool to "design, visualize, and simulate New York City subway systems. Perfect for exploring "what-if" scenarios."
Got this SQL interview question and how you'd answer it
"I recently got asked this question in a behavioral+SQL round and wanted to hear how others would approach it: “Imagine your dashboard shows a sudden 0% conversion rate for a specific product. What would your SQL investigation plan look like?”"
SVGs that feel like GIFs
"The moving image below is only 49Kb and has an incredibly high resolution. It's similar to a GIF but instead of showing moving images, it shows moving SVGs! The best part: Github supports these in their README.md files!"
This is pretty cool.
Machine Learning Visualized
"ML algorithms implemented and derived from first-principles in Jupyter Notebooks and NumPy"
Why Parquet Is the Go-To Format for Data Engineers
"What follows is a deep look into the internals of Parquet — not just how it works, but how to make it work better. For anyone serious about making their data systems faster, leaner, and a little less mysterious."
🤯 Data thinking
“Data Science Is a Dead Career” — The Truth Behind the Trend No One Wants to Say Out Loud
"It used to be the sexiest job of the 21st century. Now, people whisper that it’s over. What happened?".
Bit clickbaity, but good thoughts. TL;DR: it's not dead, Jim.
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Draw a search polygons
Alasdair Rae: "Ten years ago I worked with Rightmove 'draw a search' data to explore the shapes people drew in their housing searches. The project was about housing market economics and spatial search patterns but the maps were pretty interesting too as they were purely the result of people drawing their own personal search areas across Britain. A few million overlapping search polygons."
Start with his LinkedIn post, more on this Rightmove blog post, and an open access academic paper on the subject.
Real-Time Crime Index
"The Real-Time Crime Index launched in September 2024. Its purpose is to enable users to see national crime trends as they develop through a data sample from hundreds agencies nationwide. Scroll below for further information on the RTCI’s team, methodology, sourcing, and answers to frequently asked questions."
(with thanks to Donata Columbro's newsletter (Italian only))
Your Life in Weeks
"Create a map of your life where each week is a little box." Here's Taylor Swift's.
Another brilliant link thanks to Donata's newsletter linked above.
Bloom Filters by Example
"A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
The price paid for this efficiency is that a Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure: it tells us that the element either definitely is not in the set or may be in the set."
All explained well in this interactive website.
Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data!
"Last summer, I wrote about the statistically improbable restaurant, the restaurant you wouldn’t expect to find in a small American city: the excellent Nepali food in Erie, PA and Akron, OH; a gem of a Gambian restaurant in Springfield, IL. Statistically improbable restaurants often tell you something about the communities they are based in: Erie and Akron have large Lhotshampa refugee populations, Nepali-speaking people who lived in Bhutan for years before being expelled from their county; Springfield has University of Illinois Springfield, which attracts lots of west African students, some of whom have settled in the area."
Brilliant idea, not least because it turns around completely the concept of recommendation.
The Weekly Chart turns 400
Datawrapper's Rose Mintzer-Sweeney celebrates their 400th weekly chart with a look at their record.
🤖 AI
What can agents actually do?
Software engineer and Carta's CTO Will Larson: "This post is an attempt to concisely summarize how AI agents work, apply that summary to a handful of real-world use cases for AI, and to generally make the case that agents are a multiplier on the quality of your software and system design."
Indexing the AI economy
"Stripe analysis of payment trends finds AI companies are expanding their revenue and geographic footprints far faster than companies in earlier waves of tech innovation."
The PDF report is here.
Warning: Prompt Injections Work!
Mastercard's AI Governance Director Richard Boorman: "Last week, I added a hidden prompt to my LinkedIn profile just for fun.
Within days, it had tricked someone’s AI assistant that was scraping profiles to generate personalised messages.
Why did it work?"
'I'm being paid to fix issues caused by AI'
"AI is making me extra money, says Sarah Skidd, a product marketing manager who writes for tech and start-up companies."
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