Hello, reader!

Quantum #660 had an open rate of 49% and a click rate of 13%.

The most clicked link was Le Baguette Index

'till next week,
Giuseppe

Topical

What do Americans think of the economy?

"In 2025, roughly one-fourth of adults described the national economy as good or excellent, down 3 percentage points from 2024." A notable urban-rural divide emerged: metropolitan residents' positive assessments dropped to 46%, while non-metropolitan areas saw an increase to 37%.

Mapping greenery in Europe: how green is your city?

EDJNet/El Confidential explore urban greenery across European cities using the 3-30-300 principle: seeing three trees from your window, living where tree canopies cover 30% of ground, and having a park within 300 meters.

Tools & Tutorials

SQLite is All You Need for Durable Workflows

TL;DR: "For a large class of durable systems, SQLite is all you need."
Key quote: "Durable execution is often discussed as if it requires durable infrastructure. In many cases it does not. The durable part is the workflow state. The compute can stay cheap and disposable."

Test-Driven Data Analysis

A rather comprehensive book, by author Nicholas J. Radcliffe, that applies test-driven development principles to data science and analytics. Drawing inspiration from software engineering's Test-Driven Development (TDD), the book presents a systematic framework for reducing errors throughout the analytical process.

How to Get Started Using AI with R

An article on the popular web site R for the Rest of Us. It guides R users through different approaches to integrating AI into their workflow.

Skills for the curation of sensitive data

A report, published by Health Data Research UK in April 2026: "This report provides an evidence-based snapshot of current skills gaps, training provision, and barriers in sensitive data curation. It draws on surveys, focus groups, and interviews with curators, TRE/SDE/Safe Haven operators, governance specialists, and training providers across multiple sectors and data types. Our accompanying recommendations for key stakeholders set out a roadmap to improve skills and strengthen recognition in sensitive data curation."

A propt to stay in the loop with Claude's decisions

A pretty interesting one, if you use Claude Code. Another take on this is here.

Claude skills for journalism | Joe Amditis

"A curated collection of Claude Code skills for journalists, researchers, academics, and media professionals. Modular instruction sets that extend Claude's capabilities for specialized tasks."

Accessible (I Think) Split-Cell Table Headers

How to replicate the design below, with a split header cell?

DigitalOcean Serverless Inference: A Deep Dive

DigitalOcean have launched their Serverless Inference service, a fully managed, API-first inference platform offering access to over 30 foundation models across text, code, vision, image generation, video generation, and speech through a single API key and pay-per-token pricing. It's built with OpenAI and Anthropic compatibility.

AI Engineering for Developers

This guide addresses AI engineering for experienced backend developers transitioning to building production AI features. It assumes familiarity with Python, HTTP, Kubernetes, but no model training experience.

Functions over Idioms - Writing R in Python with rfuns

The author addresses the friction of switching between R and Python by creating rfuns, a Python package that implements familiar R functions. It uses libraries to allow cross-language calls. The article acknnowledges that this isn't great for production, but it may speed up prototyping.

Data Thinking

Moving data around still sucks

Randy Au (Counting Stuff) tells of their experience replacing a decade-old Synology NAS server, necessitating the transfer of 5.4TB of accumulated data, arguing that networking speeds haven't kept pace with computing advances.

Issue #58 – Building a Data Strategy (The Execution)

"This is where most data strategies go to die. Not because the direction was wrong; not because the use cases were bad; not even because people weren’t bought in. But because the executional machinery wasn’t established or just collapsed under the weight of competing organisational priorities."

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

From Metrics to Mood: The Emotional Story in A HYROX Race

Andrew Peters, a data scientist at Pfizer, explores how visualizing his HYROX race performance revealed the emotional dimension of data visualisation. From Nightingale.

How The Heck Do Traffic Lights Work? (An Interactive Exploration)

An interactive exploration of traffic lights from their Victorian railway origins to modern networked systems.

Terrasses Barcelona — Sol i Ombra

This is an interactive web application mapping Barcelona's 6,899 licensed outdoor terraces (terrasses), designed to help users determine whether a specific terrace will be in sunlight or shade at any given time.

Squares in Squares

This page presents an interactive take on a well-known mathematical challenge: packing n unit squares inside the smallest possible square container. Many cases benefit from tilted arrangements that reduce the container size.

Grow Your Own – a lot of data to work with and yet again more challenges than I expected

Steven Feldman: "I got to wondering about allotments and whether they were a British phenomena or they were widely spread? Which countries have the most allotments, growing space per capita and the largest size of allotments?"

What is the most unique word spoken by Fatiha El-Ghorri in Taskmasker S19?

Brilliant video explainer! (via Lisa Riemers)

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

Daniel Parris of Stat Significant looks at Letterboxd data and compares it to IMDB.

The Data the CIA World Factbook Left Orphaned

Creator Manuel Longo says: "When the CIA World Factbook faded as a free, machine-readable source, a swath of public-interest country data was effectively orphaned. Bamwor rebuilds it as open data: 261 countries and 5.2M cities, in four languages, as CSV/JSON with a permanent DOI (CC BY 4.0). It also adds nine composite indices the Factbook never had — economy, education, healthcare and more — scored across 244 countries." Links include Datasets, DOI, and a Brief.
But what does Banwor mean, I asked? Longo: "Honestly, when I came up with it around 2010 it didn't stand for anything. I just liked how it sounded, and the phonetic combination stuck with me. Over the years I kept trying to give it a meaning that matched what Bamwor actually became (the whole site, then and now), and in that search I landed on a backronym I now pretend was intentional: Borders, Areas, Maps, Worldwide, Open Reference. Suspiciously on-brand. It probably stuck because the sounds (b, m, w, o, r) are soft and easy to say in almost any language, which turned out handy now that the site runs in four. So it started as a sound I liked, and grew into a meaning along the way. :)" (via check other links)

Tracking the 2026 Ebola outbreak

NBC News: "Here’s where Ebola is spreading, how it infects humans and what the Bundibugyo type of the virus does to the body.".

Growing Up With K-Pop

The Pudding's latest scrollytelling is about K-Pop!

50 Hours to Draw Some Lines

Doug MacDowell explores the practice of hand-drawing data visualisations using traditional drafting tools like rulers, pencils, ink, and lettering kits.

AI

I built a (very small) long running agent

Jason Ganz explores the emerging concept of long-running agents in data engineering. Here, he builds "Tinyberg," a minimal read-only Apache Iceberg table inspector.

What "done" means when you're shipping AI features

"The definition of “done” has always been the problem. For AI, it has to be completely rewritten." This article argues that "done" must be redefined as "a calibration about an acceptable variance in output and more importantly, behavior, not a binary result about specification adherence."

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Ted Chiang for The Atlantic argues that large language models like Claude are definitively not conscious, and compares believing in LLM consciousness to believing Microsoft Word documents contain dormant consciousnesses.

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