Hello, reader!

Quantum #656 had an open rate of 48% and a click rate of 13%.

The most clicked link was Claude 101, a "collection of free guides to master Claude."

I've built a thing! A Eurovision data scrollytelling.

I've never been a huge Eurovision fan, but... I've always been curious about the odd politics around it, and wondered if its lyrics could be analysed for themes. And after much procrastinating, I've finally done it!

And I've done it with a scrollytelling article, heavily inspired by the style of The Pudding. It looks at 70 years of love, empowerment, and freedom: Eurovision by its lyrics. Head to https://puntofisso.net/eurovision/ and please share!

Topical

Convene the council

My friend Kevin Lewis has launched this rather clever use of AI: a council of experts prompted to give advice according to their personality.

Dads are doing more childcare—and they love it

"The new American dad is more present and more exhausted, but also more satisfied with life."

The problem with healthy life expectancy [£]

Paywalled, sorry, but really good article about healthy life expectancy decline. With this amazing chart by John Burn-Murdoch.

Brain food, delivered daily

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Tools & Tutorials

heerich.js

"A tiny engine for 3D voxel scenes rendered to SVG".
TIL "In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel" (Wikipedia).
The visual language draws inspiration from geometric artist Erwin Heerich's exploration of stacked topologies.

How We Built an AI Second Brain for 60K Knowledge Workers

Analytics at Meta: "What if an AI agent had persistent, structured access to everything a person is working on, and carried that context across every interaction? Not a chatbot that answers questions, but a working partner that tracks projects, reads meeting notes, surfaces connections, and builds on prior conversations.
That AI Second Brain experiment, born in the analytics org, has since been adopted by over 60,000 people across Meta: engineers, PMs, designers, legal, finance, communications, and sales. This post covers how it was built, how it grew, and what we learned."

Map projections: a practical guide to common mistakes and how to fix them

Dominic Royé looks at the misuse of map projections in scientific publications and media. Royé effectively explains that no projection can simultaneously preserve area, shape, distance, and direction, and that the fundamental rule of mapping is to "match the projection to the purpose."

Schotter Plots in R

This post translates Georg Nees' 1968 computer-generated "Schotter" drawings from ALGOL and Python into R.

AI Model & API Providers Analysis | Artificial Analysis

Artificial Analysis provides independent analysis and benchmarking to help "understand the AI landscape to choose the best model and provider for your use case".

ARIA Roles and Web Accessibility: A Quick Guide

An in-depth guide: "ARIA roles add semantic meaning to HTML elements on a web page so assistive technologies (like screen readers) can understand their structure, purpose, and interactivity. When used correctly, ARIA roles help assistive technologies interpret complex user interface objects and rich content that native HTML elements alone cannot fully describe."

Data Thinking

Five Worlds of Data Engineering

"You read a post declaring “if you’re still using stored procedures in 2026, you’re doing it wrong,” and the comments erupt. Half the people are nodding along. Half are furious. Both sides are right. They’re just living in different worlds and don’t realise it."
Data engineering exists across five distinct worlds, each with different priorities, tooling, and definitions of success, argues the author.

NHS England's Misguided Retreat from Open Code

There's been a lot of controversy around NHS England's guidance SDLC-8, requiring all source code repositories to be private by default from May 11th, due to cybersecurity risk. Start here for an intro.

Counterfactual analysis, an (organizationally) unloved method

"The basic idea of counterfactuals is that you have to construct a special selection of data points in your data that lets you make the argument of what would have happened."

Living well with data: stewardship as a just and viable paradigm

"In this report, Reema Patel argues for a fundamental shift in mindset to address deep-seated challenges in data governance. The report maps ten different mental models, ie ways of thinking about data governance, and demonstrates that many are failing. In the report, Reema proposes Data Stewardship as the foundational ‘meta-mental model’ for a just and viable future.
The report proposes a new, relational approach to data – through stewardship. Data Stewardship reframes data not as a resource (or ‘the new oil’), but as a relationship and a ‘living system’ or ‘the new soil’ that requires continuous, reflexive care. This approach grounds data governance in ethical responsibility, collective benefit, and long-term relational care, rejecting extractive or colonial logics."

We're Missing Data: The Other Half of AI Transformation

"We're not spending enough time talking about the operating model."

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Eurovision 2026: Typical winner according to history

Speaking about Eurovision, Anthony Vella from Better Collective has crunched the data and has some predictions on who might be winning.

Searching for Birds

This interactive data essay explores Google search trends for birds over the past five years.

Talea: Ombre di Bologna

Bologna's City Council is mapping shadows. (via Maurizio Napolitano anche altro link)

Should You Trust the Netflix Top 10? A Statistical Analysis

Daniel Parris asks: "*Netflix’s Top 10 helps us choose faster. But does it help us choose better?"

The map that keeps Burning Man honest

Amanda Shendruk: "Each year, 70,000 people gather on a dry lakebed in Nevada to build a city from scratch. This is Black Rock City, home to the infamous Burning Man event. Eight days later, it's gone.
But 150 people remain. They line up — side by side, an arms width apart — and slowly walk the 3,800 acres (15.4 km²) of dusty playa. They're looking for MOOP: Matter Out of Place. A screw, a sequin, a cigarette butt.
This forensic-style sweep takes weeks; everything they find is removed and logged. At the end, they're left with a remarkable accounting of what 70,000 people left behind: The MOOP Map."

Britain's Roundest Postcode

Tom Peterken: "What is Britain's roundest postcode?" Tongue-in-cheek, but not just.

New York City by how long it takes to get there.

Anthony Castrio has launched an interactive accessibility map that visualizes public transport connectivity across different locations in New York City.
Also look at this post by Milan Janosov that explains how to use New York's GTFS data to compute accessibility metrics in Python.

Occupations with the highest divorce rates

Nathan Yau: "Some jobs tend towards higher divorce rates and some lower." At least in the US.

Visualizing History: The Polish System

"The Polish System — which almost anticipates Piet Mondrian’s abstract checkerboards and the wider modernist fascination with grid figures — coupled chronology to the map-making traditions of geography. In Jażwiński’s original chart, each main 10x10 box is a century and the rows separate decades."

AI

The Collapse of Heterogeneity in Silicon Philosophers

Silicon Philosophers, i.e. LLMs simulating philosophers. "Silicon samples are increasingly used as a low-cost substitute for human panels and have been shown to reproduce aggregate human opinion with high fidelity. We show that, in the alignment-relevant domain of philosophy, silicon samples systematically collapse heterogeneity. Using data from N = 277 professional philosophers drawn from PhilPeople profiles, we evaluate seven proprietary and open-source large language models on their ability to replicate individual philosophical positions and to preserve cross-question correlation structures across philosophical domains. "

The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet

"The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. We also find evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, our findings diverge from public perception of AI's impact on the internet."
All code and data are also available.

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.

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