Hello, reader!

Quantum #645 had an open rate of 52% and a click rate of 15%.

The most clicked link was the AI-powered chart inspiration website My Next Chart.

ISO/IEC 646 is 7-bit encoding standard.

Personal news: I'VE LAUNCHED shop.puntofisso.net!

Over December, I took on a membership of a printing workshop and worked at creating some hand-made screen prints derived from Open Street Map data.

While not Warhol-good, I really enjoyed the creative process (my back did a bit less but no pain no gain...) and they may fit well in your space. If you wish to buy one, they're also a good way to support this newsletter.

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

🛎️ Things that caught my attention

You should read the remarkable story of how my friend Kevin spent years – I can literally think of him telling me this a decade ago – trying to find a book he had read as a child, but of which he only remembered rough details.
After multiple failed attempts, he's found the book thanks to AI.

When I saw this thread, I immediately knew I had seen that chart before... so here's a handy comparison ;-).

In more serious terms, yes – there's a lot more interest in this year's World Economic Forum compared to previous years, but history tells us that web searches die down quickly after the event.

✨ Topical

Hosting the Olympics: The world's most expensive participation trophy

Amanda Shendruk looks at how much Olympic Games have been over budget.
I did a double take when I realised BY HOW MUCH WAS MONTREAL '76 OVER BUDGET?!?!?

Britain Lost 14,000 Third Places. They Were Called Pubs. Is Your Local Next?

Lauren Leek: "How private equity reshaped the local, the postcode tool that shows the pubs most at risk and most importantly what to do about it."

OpenFactBook

"The community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook. Comprehensive data on 254 countries and territories."
Maintained by an independent developer.

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

Give me 20

Evelina Parrou shares her "learnings from a 10 years+ data storytelling journey".
Key ideas: audience-first, simplify, uncertainty.

How is data stored?

Another pretty amazing tutorial from Making Software, which is consistently good at great content: "Invariably, it involves trying to trap electrons in increasingly complicated ways."

Creating actually publication-ready figures for journals using ggplot2

Jörn Alexander Quent: "This guide walks through my workflow for creating figures that are actually publication-ready, without writing custom code for every plot or endlessly fiddling with parameters. The goal is to spend less time adjusting figures."

Modern.css

"Stop writing CSS like it's 2015."
A collection of useful code snippets.

MonoSketch

"MonoSketch is a powerful ASCII sketching and diagramming app that lets you effortlessly transform your ideas into visually stunning designs."
It's more powerful than it first appears, and all open source.

shaper

"Visualize and share your data. All in SQL. Powered by DuckDB."
Also, open sourced here.

claude-wg

"claude-wg turns Slack into a real-time coordination layer between Claude Code sessions. When a non-trivial change needs input from teammates, you open a private working group channel, post your plan, and invite collaborators. Feedback flows back into your Claude session automatically. Plans iterate in parallel, ownership is explicit, approval is tracked — all without leaving your terminal."
This is by Dominik Dahlem, who I met at a summer school 21 years ago – this realisation is bonkers :-)

Querying India's MoSPI Data with Claude and MCP

"The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation recently released a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets you query their survey data using natural language through LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT. Instead of constructing API calls manually or digging through PDFs, you can ask questions in plain English and get back aggregate statistics from national surveys."

SQL Crack

"Transform SQL queries into interactive visual flow diagrams."

🤯 Data thinking

Why Data Lineage Matters

"Without this visibility, organizations operate with a fundamental blind spot. When pipelines break, teams face the digital equivalent of debugging in darkness. Data engineers scramble through SQL files, scour Git history, and manually trace dependencies across interconnected systems. The absence of lineage tracking transforms every troubleshooting session into a time-consuming mystery and every schema change into a potential disaster. Data governance becomes nearly impossible without knowing how data flows through your organization."

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Meet your typical tween

"Like many girls her age, she loves to keep up with the latest fashion trends and explore new ways to express herself. Shopping is fun, but it won’t always be this way."
Amanda Sakuma and Jen Diehm for The Pudding look at how female-intended clothing sizes display a lot of variance.

Is the name Gary going extinct?

Erin Davis: "More than ten (!!) years ago, the internet was briefly flooded with semi-ironic panic than the name Gary was going extinct. Indeed, if you look at the number of Garys born in the U.S., it looks pretty grim."

What are the odds?

A fun, visual look at how location and time affect odds.

Asteroids that didn’t hit Earth

Pascal Bürkle (Datawrapper) uses the NASA data to visualise recent near misses.

How much have major White House renovations cost over the past 100 years?

"USAFacts reviewed historical budgets and records to put the cost of the new White House ballroom in context."

South Africa wine exports

Via The Outlier, one of my favourite readings.

🤖 AI

Something Big Is Happening vs Something big is happening; but it doesn’t add up

This maximalist, AI-as-doom blog post is going around: "We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet." A lot that made me think, to be honest.
However, this measured, intellectual response by Andrew Doran offers a very solid counterpoint: "there’s something about where all this is headed at a macroeconomic level that doesn’t add up for me."

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

"Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats."
As noted by others, it might have been triggered by (malicious) human intervention, rather than... agentic agency. But still eye opening.

A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era

Ethan Mollick: "The shift from chatbot to agent is the most important change in how people use AI since ChatGPT launched. It is still early, and these tools are still hard to figure out and will still do baffling things. But an AI that does things is fundamentally more useful than an AI that says things, and learning to use it that way is worth your time."

AI Taxonomy – An Operational Framework for Precision in AI Discourse

""AI" has become semantically meaningless. The term now encompasses everything from a regression model to an autonomous robot, creating confusion in strategic discussions, partner conversations, and product positioning. This taxonomy provides a functional framework based on what the AI actually does, not what technique it uses."

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!

The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 40 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.