638: quantum of sollazzo
#638: quantum of sollazzo – 30 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.
Quantum #637 had an open rate of 48.97% and a click rate of 13.68%.
The most clicked link was the mesmerising NewsMap.js.
I used the Christmas break to play with some of my geeky hobbies, including some fun with ESP32 microcontrollers (blog post to follow soon). But I also managed to complete my long-awaited Parli-N-Grams redesign. It's now more modern, clearer, and mobile-ready, thanks to the very useful and open source D3 gallery by Juanchi Parra (previously linked in Quantum), and some LLM coding help. It will still need some UI touch up, especially on the inputs, but I wanted to get it out there early and improve it iteratively. Enjoy, and please send me any feedback.
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
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
Guy Lipman sends me this intriguing AI-driven editorial from the British Medical Journal by Prof Sati Heer-Stavert, a clinical researcher, presented under the heading "Christmas 2025: Black Mirror". It asks AI what a doctor looks like, and it gets interesting photos back: "Of the 24 images generated, only six (25%) depict female doctors. Depictions of female doctors are confined to the specialties of obstetrics and gynaecology, and paediatrics within the NHS, UK, and US groups. Meanwhile, six of the eight US doctors (75%) are depicted as white; the two ethnic minority depictions are also the only US female doctors. There is a notable difference between the NHS and UK images: the “NHS” prompt generated images of doctors who all appear to be from an ethnic minority, whereas the images generated when the term “UK” was used are depicted as white."
It would also appear that emergency medicine correlates more strongly with alopecia...
✨ Topical
Can you afford to live in Rome, Milan, or Bologna?
"Puoi permetterti di vivere a Roma, a Milano o a Bologna?", asks this Italian article, here translated into English, which looks at salaries and rents.
Which chart types did our users create in 2025?
Veronika Halamková's turn to do the traditional Datawrapper end-of-year wrap-up.
What are the best decades of Americans' lives? Many say their 20s or 30s
"A new YouGov survey finds that 22% of Americans say they will be their best decade, but about as many say their 30s were or will be the best years of their life. 12% say their 40s will be their best decade, 9% say this about their 50s, 7% about their 60s, and 4% about their 70s. Only 1% think their 80s will be the best years of their life, and none say this about their 90s or beyond."
Famously not true for nerds.
Jokes aside, some interesting gender-based differences.
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
picknplace.js
Javascriopt library that creates an UI that is "alternative to drag and drop". Useful for a bunch of interactive dataviz use cases.
LEANN
"RAG everything locally with 97% less storage than traditional vector databases", says Eric Vyacheslav. LEANN is a local-first MIT-Licensed LLM framework. It can be integrated elsewhere, for example via MCP by Claude.
Building an answering machine
Sort of similar to the previous URL: "Today we released what we’ve been calling the MotherDuck Answering Machine (you get it: a machine that answers queries!). It is an MCP server, which is probably the dullest way to describe something so surprisingly delightful. It lets you ask questions about your data from within Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT and get high-quality answers."
The rise of the LLM data engineer
Good slide deck.
Line Chart Remake
Yan Holtz: "I teach data visualization with R and Python, which means I review hundreds of charts from talented students. The same issues come up again and again.
This page takes a chart with a solid message and improves it step by step. It is a practical way to revisit the most common pitfalls and see the impact of each fix."
Discover, Share & Showcase the Best Data Engineering Projects
"Explore curated Data Engineering projects from the community. Be recognized for your projects, vote for your favorites and share your own creations."
claude-howto
"Complete collection of examples for some important Claude Code features and concepts."
Data Testing like it’s not 1997 — Part 1
"We’ve had a lot of progress in improving how we test software from twenty years ago, but data has always lagged behind.
I’m going to take you through how we can apply the lessons learned from software testing to data and how to approach data quality from the ground up."
Parallelizing ClickHouse aggregation merge for fixed hash map
"In ClickHouse 25.11, we introduced parallel merge for small GROUP BY, an optimization that significantly speeds up aggregations on 8-bit and 16-bit keys by parallelizing the merge phase for FixedHashMap-based aggregations."
Emerging Trends in AI Ethics and Governance for 2026
Nahla Davies for KD Nuggets: "In 2026, people want accountability frameworks that feel real, enforceable, and grounded in how AI behaves in live environments."
Da2a: The Future of Data Platforms is Agentic, Distributed, and Collaborative
"Instead of a single, all-knowing monolith, imagine a collaborative ecosystem where domain experts describe their data in natural language, providing context that empowers a network of intelligent, autonomous agents. Each agent becomes an expert in its domain — sales, marketing, logistics, finance — managing its own data by combining human-provided descriptions with its own skills to answer questions. This is the future of data platforms: a system that is agentic, distributed, and truly collaborative. I created a new open-source project, Da2a, to explore this paradigm."
🤯 Data thinking
Don't say "data visualizations"
"Imprecise and knotty language is bad for charts."
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Helios
A Solar Windchime. Basically, data sonification.
Beauty and the feast: Examining the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data
"This paper looks at the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data. Customers were surveyed as they left a set of five Virginia restaurants about the dining experience, their server, and themselves, including about their tip and their server’s beauty and productivity. I find that attractive servers earn approximately $1261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers, the primary driver of which is female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females. Potential explanations of this earnings gap are drawn from both the labor and experimental economics literatures, the most compelling of which is customer taste-based discrimination."
Sadly paywalled, but you might have access through an academic institution.
Fictional Brands Archive
"Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of many fictional brands found in films, series and video games. " Not quite data, but definitely metadata.
The Hydrant Directory
Similarly, this one is about hydrants, and it comes with each hydrant's location and colour palette.
A Visual Representation of Biblical Contradictions
Old one, but if you like a rationalistic approach to religious scriptures, you might like it. I also wonder if we could do the same with certain transcripts I always geek out about...
Tracing the 'yellow line' & 2025 in review
Forensic Architecture analyses Israel’s conduct since the ‘ceasefire’, together with their 2025 wrap-up.
Dreaming of a White Christmas
Dataviz guru Ansgar Wolsing's hoping for snow.
🤖 AI
The great AI hype correction of 2025
Will Douglas Heaven for the MIT Technology Review presents "four ways to think about this year's reckoning".
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
Simon Willison: "In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest.
This is rude, a waste of other people’s time, and is honestly a dereliction of duty as a software developer.
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
As software engineers we don’t just crank out code—in fact these days you could argue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works—and we need to include proof that it works as well. Not doing that directly shifts the burden of the actual work to whoever is expected to review our code."
The Big-O Complexity of Vibe Coders
"The best vibe coders will not be the ones who iterate the fastest, but the ones with the lowest effective Big-O in tokens per shipped outcome."
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