#637: quantum of sollazzo – 23 December 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.

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Quantum #636 had an open rate of 49.67% and a click rate of 13.96%.

The most clicked link was the HOT OSM Export Tool.

I get you, I've been using it a lot too, including to create designs for my screenprinting (these might end up going on sale at some point...)

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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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The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 35 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.

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In memory of L

I would like to celebrate the life of L, who passed away a few days ago after some time living with cancer. L was a truly special person. As a medical researcher and doctor, L sent me dozens of links for Quantum over the past few years, and we had endless discussions on how to use data well in medicine, doing data analysis that matters, and removing bias from data. While living with the disease for many years, L always kept looking up to the good things in life, kept contributing to medical research, looked after others, developed an affectionate international social circle and a lovely family life. L always encouraged me to keep doing Quantum even when I wasn't feeling I could go on. I'll miss L very much.

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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social

🛎️ Things that caught my attention

Simon Willison has been sharing a lot of very good contents about LLM tools, both in terms of thinking about the broader issue and as practical tutorial. His latest post, Useful patterns for building HTML tools is a well-thought "how I created these tools using AI", with links to the prompts he used: "Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two years, almost all of them written by LLMs. This article presents a collection of useful patterns I’ve discovered along the way."

✨ Topical

Only three out of ten ambassadors from European Union countries are women

Civio together with the European Data Journalism Network reports that "Finland is the only EU country with a female majority while at the other extreme, in Italy and Czechia, men dominate the diplomatic corps."

Why is South Korean fertility so low?

Works in Progress: "Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate."
Some pretty eye-opening charts.

I Don't Want to Meet Your Friends

"Now, you might think “Hey, on average the ladies are barely doing any better.” But keep in mind that at the lower margins, the distinction between, say, three friends and zero is pretty important—and one in six men have zero friends."
Some intriguing aspects on the topic of male loneliness.

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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials

An SVG is all you need

"And that, dear reader, is literally all you need. A completely self-contained SVG file can either fetch data from a versioned repository or embed the data directly, as the example does."
Full credits as this is where I also found the next link.

Create world map charts with svgMap

"svgMap is a lightweight JavaScript library that lets you easily create interactive world maps, allowing you to display customizable data for each country in a visually engaging way."

Vibe coding for designers: my actual process

Designer Anton Sten: "here’s the honest breakdown of how I built and maintain antonsten.com using AI, what actually works, and where I’ve thrown my hands up and walked away."

How to Measure Similarity Between SQL Queries Using Embeddings

"Transform SQL queries into vector embeddings to cluster, compare, and analyze behaviors in data lakes with precision."
You know I get excited by similarity calculations.

Bayesian Data Analysis course - Aalto 2025

All materials from a university course.

Broken Chart: discover 9 visualization alternatives

Dominic Royé discusses what options he considered to create a chart of temperatures in R for a client: "So, what alternatives can we propose? Let’s not forget that our visualization is conditioned by its objective and also by the audience."

🤯 Data thinking

True Stories from the (Data) Battlefield – Part 1: Communicating About Data

"In this blog post, the first of a series, we’ll present a selection of non-technical but common issues that data professionals face in organizations. We will offer a diagnosis of “why” such problems arise and present some potential solutions."

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

How Jane Austen revealed the economic basis of society

Alex Selby-Boothroyd: "Happy birthday to Jane Austen, and do enjoy this delightfully on-brand chart from The Economist."

Do you die sooner if you retire later?

"I came across this meme on social media (Reddit, LinkedIn, 9Gag). It states that statistically, those who retire early live much longer, and those who retire at age 65 live just one more year."
TL;DR: no, and a closer look at the data makes it very suspicious.

Who we choose to spend our days with

Nathan Yau (FlowingData) makes good use of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS): "People seem more alone and isolated these days. Some of that is by choice (hello, fellow introverts) and some of that is from the time we are in. Given the season, and as I get older, I wondered about the time we spend with others and who we spend our limited hours with."

Newsmap.js

A visualisation of news popularity. Code is open source.

When do most people have the day off?

Amanda Shendruk (Not-Ship): "In just over a week, most Not-Ship readers will have a day off. It's a safe bet, even with a global audience. About 150 countries recognize December 25 as a public holiday. That covers over 5.5 billion people.
There is one day in the year, however, where even more people are off work. One day when nearly 6 billion people — almost three quarters of the global population — have a public holiday.
Can you guess what it is?"

English has become easier to read.

Works in Progress reports: "I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English."

Tonal

"Tonal is an audio project exploring water issues nationally with a special focus on the River Tone in Somerset. Each podcast episode is a riverside conversation with someone who has a strong personal or professional relationship to water and the river, building a broad base of knowledge from many distinctive perspectives. Tonal is a project by artist Feral Practice."

Where do inventors come from?

USAFacts reports on where most patents are filed. No, it's not California.

Is there a movie remake crisis?

Datawrapper's Julian Freyberg asks: "Are remakes as bad as their reputation? Are there more remakes today? What type of movies even get remade? And how can I fit all of this in a single chart?"
See also What Are the Greatest Sequels of All Time? A Statistical Analysis by Quantum regular Daniel Parris.

🤖 AI

Is almost everyone wrong about America’s AI power problem?

"Why power is less of a bottleneck than you think."

How AI Coding Agents Hid a Timebomb in Our App

"When a deleted comment led to deleted code and React’s Activity component masked the infinite recursion."
TL;DR: Be careful using LLMs to vibe code.

"Could ChatGPT Do This Overnight?" If Yes, Redesign It.

"Six filters for creating meaningful learning experiences in the age of AI."
(via Stefano Gatti's La Cultura del Dato)

I Reverse Engineered ChatGPT's Memory System, and Here's What I Found!

"When I asked ChatGPT what it remembered about me, it listed 33 facts from my name and career goals to my current fitness routine. But how does it actually store and retrieve this information? And why does it feel so seamless?
After extensive experimentation, I discovered that ChatGPT’s memory system is far simpler than I expected."

35 Notable AI fails from 2025

Indicator's Alexios Mantzarlis: "AI fails are of course at heart human fails, even if the person responsible isn’t always obvious. Responsibility for an error might be down to the authors of the information in the training data, the developers of the AI tool, or the end users."
You might need to subscribe (for free) to read.

Dwyane to Fruit Smiley 😭

One for the LOLs.

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