624: quantum of sollazzo
#624: quantum of sollazzo – 16 September 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 web page of csv,conf,v9. So you'll be pleased to know that there's a special section with a few links from it!
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!
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ The csv,conf,v9 Special
What a week in Bologna. csv,conf,v9 was truly amazing, and I loved helping run it for the first time. I will post links to videos as soon as they become available (I hope in a few weeks).
For the time being, here's a quick list of some of my favourite talks (the link points to the slides whenever available):
- My top #1 recommendation for you Quantum readers – Guillaume Pique: Building CSV-powered tools for social sciences; this talk wins my award for the most useful content, and the slide deck is amazingly beautiful and elegant
- Paola Masuzzo's live commentary on Bluesky (the thread is also "unrolled" here)
- Marco Montanari: Semantic MediaWiki data description, transformation and integration tool
- Monica Palmirani spoke about Akoma Ntoso the legislative data standard on which ultimately Parli-N-Grams is based
- Sara Petti's keynote told the story behind the great success of the OKFN's Open Data Editor.
- Russ Biggs spoke about the OpenAq project trying to "aggregate and harmonize open air quality data from across the globe onto an open-source, open-access data platform"
- Rahul Bhargava: Make Mirrors, Not Windows, one of the 4 keynots, looked at how communities can use data to look at themselves rather than others
- Kari Jordan: Bridging Communities The Carpentries and GREI Collaboration Creators looked at the work done by the Carpentries, an organisation whose training materials are world-renowned for their effectiveness
I was really happy to have the opportunity to introduce 2 of the 4 keynotes:
- In the first, the Maldita.es team made by CEO Clara Jiménez Cruz and CTO David Fernández Sancho. They spoke on how Maldita uses technology and data to empower communities to defend themselves from misinformation. I serendipitously heard them speak at TRGCON last year, and I immediately thought they'd be a great match for csv,conf,v9 – and their talk was outstandingly well received by over 20 minutes of questions :) I had to stop the session to send people to a break, a nice chairing problem to have!
- In the second, Italian open data legends Giorgia Lodi and Andrea Borruso of Associazione onData charted the journey of 15 years of Italian open data, with some successes and a lot of difficulties.
Slides and videos to follow soon, and I will keep my own write-up of the talks I attended up to date.
Internet Society Pulse
A resilient Internet connection is one that maintains an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation. Track your country’s Internet resilience via the Pulse Internet Resilience Index.
✨ Topical
Air pollution directly linked to increased dementia risk
On Nature: "Long-term exposure accelerates the development of Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s disease with dementia in people who are predisposed to the conditions."
British economic sentiment is following the US in becoming a partisan signal
John Burn-Murdoch on the Financial Times notes that economic optimism seems to be polarising across party lines. The chart below is beautifully crafted (although I'd prefer a version without the total line, or an interactive way to remove it to better capture the polarisation).
(via Peter Wood)
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
boundr.dev
Daniel Inniss has released an easy navigator for "UK administrative boundary spatial data", with data from the Ordnance Survey. It's pretty cool.
"Boundr transforms complex Ordnance Survey datasets into a simple API that makes spatial queries, visualizations, and boundary analysis simple."
Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge?
Sam Henri Gold: "It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door."
Code here.
quartz
Quartz is "a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites".
Color Shifting in CSS
"An Exploration of Color Animation Techniques".
I love UUID, I hate UUID
"UUIDs, however, can be generated by the client. This is because the probability of a UUID collision is astronomically low- so low in fact that most systems rely on them to be absolutely unique."
Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL
Yes, you can. Among other very good points this article makes: "Databases exist to synchronize shared state across clients."
The SELECT FOR UPDATE Trap Everyone Falls Into
I have to admit that I didn't know the SELECT FOR UPDATE syntax. This blog articulates some issues in how it can be used.
What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
"Suppose the OpenDocument file format, and specifically the "ODP" OpenDocument Presentation format, were built around SQLite."
🤯 Data thinking
Is data modeling dead?
Confessions of a Data Guy: "A recent post on Data Modeling, specifically that data modeling is dead, caught my eye. A rare piece of gold mixed in the usual pile of crap. It some truth being spoken on the interwebs, hold onto your panties you bright eyed data zealot. I agree %100 with this sentiment."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
The US beef industry looks a little unsteady — but Americans are still bullish on steak
Using data from the US Departmern of Agriculture, this article has a few interesting charts including the one below suggesting that "America Is Now A Net Importer Of Beef".
Energy Dashboard
"The interactive map shows the location of the UK's operational electricity generating stations and sites as of April 2025. "
Mapping destruction in Gaza
Datawrapper's Gregor Aisch uses the "damage analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University’s Conflict Ecology lab" to make these impressive maps.
Are immigrants eligible for government assistance?
USAFacts: "Eligibility for federal benefits depends on immigration status. Recent policy changes have narrowed access for some."
🤖 AI
Data Is Risky Business: The Risk of AI Atrophy
Data Is Risky Business: The Risk of AI Atrophy – TDAN.com
Recently, I’ve been digging into what the future of work and the workforce might be in a post-GenAI world. Right now, organizations are experimenting with and adopting various forms of AI, GenAI, and agentic AI. We are seeing the impact of this in recruitment in areas such as customer service (replaced with chatbots), management consulting, […]
The Last Programmers
"We're witnessing the final generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand."
Computer, delete logs.
::Roundtable:: ChatGPT and the Marjaʿ
"In older times, the most common way of finding an answer to a religious question was asking the local mosque’s imam. ... But over the past two year, the rise of general-purpose generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has begun transforming nearly every aspect of life. ... Trained on vast amounts of data, including authoritative Islamic texts, these models raise an urgent and complex question: Can LLMs replace the marjaʿ? Or is there an essential attribute of the marjaʿ as a mujtahid al-jamaʿ al-sharāʾiṭ—and of the act of ijtihād itself—that distinguishes it from a machine-generated response?"
MIT says AI isn’t replacing you… it’s just wasting your boss’s money
"The report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that fewer than one in ten AI pilots make any real money. Only 5 percent of projects are creating millions in value. The rest? They are eating up budgets without improving the bottom line."
Journalistic AI cautionary tales
Clare Spencer is asking on LinkedIn: "When you have gone through AI training, what has the trainer presented as cautionary tales of mistakes around using generative AI for news?".
The list is growing (the AI-produced gibberish obituary is my favourite).
mySociety AI Framework
"Guiding principles and questions".
Who aligns the aligners?
Let's close with something humorous... the Cneter for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers.
(h/t Chris Weston)
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