627: quantum of sollazzo
#627: quantum of sollazzo – 7 October 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 Timesketch. Quantum #626 had an open rate of 47.8% and a click rate of 11.76%.
BREAKING NEWS – Topi Tjukanov has launched the 2025 edition of his 30 Day Map Challenge. All details here.
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
Journalist João Bernardo Narciso has created Desalojamento.pt, an amazingly detailed and visually catching illustration of the local accommodation market in Lisbon and Porto and the crisis it is living with the rise of AirBnb rentals.
Academic Ethan Mollick: "Hey Claude, 'We all know among Sauron's many evils was that he ran Mordor using an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Show me the spreadsheet'.
It made 12 tabs that are "so bureaucratically complex that even the Eye of Sauron would need reading glasses to review it."
Another brilliant illustration of LLMs' behaviours as competent, confident liars, unless controlled well.
✨ Topical
How does the government budget process work?
USAFacts, in the context of the recent US Government shutdown: "Congress hasn't passed a full budget on time since 1997. How is the government getting funded?"
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
ChartDB
"Visualize Your Database in Seconds – DB diagram editor". It supports quite a chunky list of DBMSs, and it's open source.
HunyuanImage-3.0: A Powerful Native Multimodal Model for Image Generation
From Tencent: "HunyuanImage-3.0 is a groundbreaking native multimodal model that unifies multimodal understanding and generation within an autoregressive framework. Our text-to-image module achieves performance comparable to or surpassing leading closed-source models."
Subtleties of SQLite Indexes
Aside from being a little triggered for the use of "Indexes" instead of "Indices", this article discusses well how understanding and not misusing indices can squeeze better outcomes out of SQLite's query planner.
A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive
And similarly to the above: "Query planning is hard. Sometimes. Queries often have more than one filter (using an and clause)."
How Kafka Works
"Learn Everything About Apache Kafka’s Architecture, Including Brokers, KRaft, Topic Partitions, Tiered Storage, Exactly Once, Kafka Connect, Kafka Schema Registry and Kafka Streams."
A complete guide to HTTP caching
"Caching is the invisible backbone of the web. It’s what makes sites feel fast, reliable, and affordable to run. Done well, it slashes latency, reduces server load, and allows even fragile infrastructure to withstand sudden spikes in demand. Done poorly – or ignored entirely – it leaves websites slow, fragile, and expensive."
For your high-performance data applications.
The Coyier CSS Starter
As per Wikipedia's definition, a "reset stylesheet (or CSS reset) is a collection of CSS rules used to clear the browser's default formatting of HTML elements, removing potential inconsistencies between different browsers. It also prevents developers from unknowingly relying on the browser default styling and force them to be explicit about the styling they want to apply on the page."
Here Chris Coyier explains his.
🤯 Data thinking
Interviews with members of the OpenStreetMap community
Former Quantum sponsors OpenCage: "We regularly interview members of OpenStreetMap communities small and large around the world to learn how OSM works in their part of the globe. Please get in touch if you would like to be interviewed."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
The Quantum Mechanics of Greenhouse Gases
"Earth’s radiation can send some molecules spinning or vibrating, which is what makes them greenhouse gases. This infographic explains how relatively few heat-trapping molecules can have a planetary effect."
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
"Daily entries from the 17th century London diary", with some good data thrown in.
(via Ian Watt)
The "Gone Too Soon" Movie Star Hall of Fame: A Statistical Analysis
Daniel Parris (StatSignificant) asks: "Which actors left us too soon, yet remain unforgettable?". He looks at the morbid passion of people to search Google and Wikipedia for... deaths.
Mapterhorn
"Public terrain tiles for interactive web map visualizations".
(via Geomob).
How long do government shutdowns last? How often do they happen?
More on the lead political topic of the week. "Congress has walked up to the edge of a shutdown numerous times in recent years, but prolonged closures are rare."
Messengerr
Not quite data, but amazing interactive visual game/storytelling in the browser that might inspire a few.
🤖 AI
Endless AI-generated Wikipedia
"I built an infinite, AI-generated wiki."
However, as of Friday 3 October: "edit: I temporarily disabled new page generation because of automated traffic, but I’m re-enabling it with a rate limit (and openai/gpt-oss-120b instead of Kimi-K2)."
(via Daniele Bottillo)
LLMs and floor plans
Thomas Baekdal: "Just a casual reminder that generative AI has no idea what it's doing, nor does it understand anything.
A house is for sale near me, so, just for fun, I decided to ask ChatGPT to create an image of the house based on the floor plan to see if it would actually understand it."
The results are hilarious.
10+ MILLION people saw this and believed it, but it's complete BS.
So, in Quantum #626 I featured this status by Cameron Mattis stating he had tricked a recruiter LLM to send him a recipe of a flan.
Now, AI consultant Mohit Mrinal responds here by suggesting it's all BS.
It's interesting that Mattis comes in the comments again with his rebuttal (which I'm inclined to believe). Also, there are some interesting thoughts about the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of this story in the media: "to be clear, I only got one message that fell for the prompt. plenty of people writing about it have exaggerated to make it seem like I was inundated with flan."
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