630: quantum of sollazzo
#630: quantum of sollazzo – 4 November 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.
Quantum #629 had an open rate of 51.97% and a click rate of 14.83%. The most clicked link was Yan Holtz's new portfolio-building website
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Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
A media consortium led by Agence France-Presse and funded by the European Commission has just launched ChatEurope, a LLM-based system that crawls through European news: "ChatEurope is the first chatbot dedicated to European news. Launched by 15 European partners, this project includes a unique news platform, an integrated chatbot and social media channels.
Led by Agence France-Presse, the media consortium behind this project brings together prominent names in European journalism : the German and French broadcasters Deutsche Welle and France Médias Monde; the Romanian radio RFI Romania; the German and Italian news agencies dpa and Ansa; the Polish press group Agora; the Spanish non-profit foundation fighting against disinformation Maldita.es; the Spanish daily El Pais, and the online media outlet specialized in Southeast Europe OBCT.
At the heart of this innovative project, the chatbot was developed by the Romanian company DRUID AI and operates using the language model of the French company Mistral.
As the technical partner of the project, XWiki developed the news platform. Dpa and AFP subsidiaries, news aktuell and MediaConnect, are in charge of the communication.
ChatEurope is co-funded by the European Commission and enjoys complete editorial independence, a key to its credibility."
There's an interesting controversy mounting on a political analysis done by the New York Times recently. It's behind a paywall, unfortunately, but the core argument is: moderatism in politics is a good strategy to win. However, there's quite a bit of criticism about how sound the data analysis is. Dataviz professor Alberto Cairo, for example, writes on LinkedIn: "Whoever did the data "analysis" and visualizations for this piece should be embarrassed. This is beyond naive empiricism; it's wrong in so many ways that it'd take an entire article to explain them. I have better things to do, but this type of intellectually vacuous nonsense must be debunked." Other comments on the same thread link to interesting analyses of the analysis.
Finally, this is SO BAD that I'm sorry I didn't come up with it myself.
✨ Topical
Black Icons in Data
It's Black History Month, so Data Orchard has a good list: "To celebrate Black History Month, we shine a light on seven incredible icons in data. We’ve picked out people who are outstanding data professionals AND remarkable role models. People who inspire and uplift others through their community and charity work."
Space Elevator
Another incredibly fun scrollytelling story by data viz guru Neal Agarwal.
Does the news reflect what we die from?
"What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?"
Brain food, delivered daily
Every day we analyze thousands of articles and send you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 505,869 curious minds. Subscribe.
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team training
"Join the HOT Training Working Group on Saturday, 22 November, from 10:00 to 12:00 UTC for a webinar focused on enhancing your mapping efficiency with JOSM plugins and paint styles.
This session will cover:
• How to install and use JOSM plugins and paint styles
• Essential tools like Buildings Tool, Utilsplugin2, and Reverter
• Simplifying workflows with To-do List, Terrace, and validation paint styles
• Improving mapping quality with the Apple validation style and more."
Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure
"To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, we’re publishing in this post an updated set of data infrastructure architectures. They show the current best-in-class stack across both analytic and operational systems, as gathered from numerous operators we spoke with over the last year. Each architectural blueprint includes a summary of what’s changed since the prior version.
We’ll also attempt to explain why these changes are taking place. We argue that core data processing systems have remained relatively stable over the past year, while supporting tools and applications have proliferated rapidly. We explore the hypothesis that platforms are beginning to emerge in the data ecosystem, and that this helps explain the particular patterns we’re seeing in the evolution of the data stack."
Welcome to GeoUtil.com
"All-in-one online geography toolkit for working with maps, coordinates, and geographic data". Browser-based, with quite a few useful tools.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Simon Willison: "Skills are conceptually extremely simple: a skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts that the model can run to help it accomplish the tasks described by the skill." And they are very powerful when used right.
Build Your Own Database
"A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch."
SQL Anti-Patterns You Should Avoid
"These issues can compound, causing erosion in trust in data, and slower query development in general."
JSON Query
"A small, flexible, and expandable JSON query language."
Just use cURL
"What the f--- happened to making HTTP requests? You used to just type curl example.com and boom, you got your goddamn response. Now everyone's downloading 500MB Electron monstrosities that take 3 minutes to boot up just to send a fucking GET request."
A bit ranty, but very useful :)
Scripts I wrote that I use all the time
Evan Hahn: "In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites."
🤯 Data thinking
Data as a Product: Applying a Product Mindset to Data at Netflix
"Adopting a “data as a product” mindset means viewing data not as an incidental byproduct of systems, but as a core product in its own right."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Can you fix it?
Data analyst Yanika Borg: "Have you heard of Repair Cafe? It’s a wonderful initiative, with 3.5K+ branches all over the world." She looks at repair rates (but I can't find the source of the data).
New analysis from EnergyTag on power prices in Europe
By Farida Shawky at EnergyTag, here reported by their ED: "The analysis (see comments for details) looks at hourly data across 13 of Europe’s biggest markets from 2019 to today. Every country tells it own tale, but broadly there is a pattern - especially post energy crisis:
➡️ When power is cleaner, prices are lower.
➡️ When fossil fuels dominate, prices spike.".
(via Guy Lipman)
Project: A little bit of Reverend Bayes all night long.
"Can you predict when Lou Bega's greatest hit, Mambo No. 5, was released based on the names of all the women mentioned in the song?".
(via Ian Watt)
Chasing sunsets
Civixplorer asks: "When does the earliest sunset of the year occur in Europe?"
(via Peter Wood)
Daylight saving: like night and day?
On the topic of sunsets, look a this brilliant set of data visualizations by Datawrapper's Elana Levin Schtulberg, which looks not just at sunlight hours but also at public perceptions around daylight saving.
Spain is an historical curiosity – I'll let you research why it's on the... "wrong" time zone :)
The lessons from the brazen heist at the Louvre
Paywalled, but you can see the chart on Alex Selby-Boothroyd's LinkedIn, which is worthy because of the "Heistogram" pun.
What Qualifies as Middle-Income in Each State
Nathan Yau (FlowingData): "Middle class income is a range that depends on how much people make where you live. So if income leans higher in one state than in another, the middle-income range reflects that. It also depends on how many people are in the household."
It's based on the American Community Survey, the more regular counterpart to the US Census.
% of homes bought with cash, 2024
New dataviz by Alasdair Rae.
Mind the Gap
"The average distance to a train station in 2024" in the Netherlands. Interactive, made with Flourish, more details on Linkedin.
(via Peter Wood)
🤖 AI
An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now
Academic Ethan Mollick discusses "what AI to use in late 2025".
Things I do while AI writes code:
The AI-driven blurring boundaries between work and home life, according to CTO Mark Somerfield.
Apple M5, the pin to burst the bubble?
This is a very AI-critical take, but it's got some useful ideas. I'm particularly interested in the point about "small AI".
The AI water issue is fake
"AI data centers use water. Like any other industry that uses water, they require careful planning. If an electric car factory opens near you, that factory may use just as much water as a data center. The factory also requires careful planning. But the idea that either the factory or AI is using an inordinate amount of water that merits any kind of boycott or national attention as a unique serious environmental issue is innumerate. On the national, local, and personal level, AI is barely using any water, and unless it grows 50 times faster than forecasts predict, this won’t change. I’m writing from an American context and don’t know as much about other countries. But at least in America, the numbers are clear and decisive."
How I Almost Got Hacked By A 'Job Interview'
"I was 30 seconds away from running malware on my machine.
The attack vector? A fake coding interview from a "legitimate" blockchain company."
This is remarkable, because aside from all the ethical considerations, it does take A LOT of effort.
Gaia Marcus at the UK Parliament Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Video on ParliamentLive.Tv of Ada Lovelace Institute's director's evidence. Interesting point on the so called "Tesco question" in the following exchange.
Dame Chi Onwurah: "One thing that is often said to is that Tesco’s Clubcard knows exactly what you are buying. You have Facebook. The public shares its data with private sector companies on an enormous scale."
Gaia Marcus: "The public hold the public sector to a higher account because they do not have the ability to opt out. ... If Tesco had an enormous data breach, I could decide to take my data away from the Clubcard system and maybe shop around. I do not have that luxury with public provision".
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