Hello, reader!

Quantum #661 had an open rate of 47% and a click rate of 14%.

The most clicked link was this collection of Claude skills for journalism.

'till next week,
Giuseppe

Topical

What are the biggest drivers of inflation in the past year?

USAFacts look at US inflation, finding that housing and transportation were the primary drivers between April 2025 and April 2026.

World Cup 2026: guide to all 1,248 players

The Guardian's World Cup guide shows all 1,248 players interactively.

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Tools & Tutorials

What it takes to transpose a matrix

This article explores the optimisation of matrix transpose operations on classical CPU architectures, "with the most sophisticated implementation being up to x25 times faster than the naive one".

Colour Palette Generator

An interactive colour palette generator tool.

Checklist for Reusable Code

"Reusable code is well-documented, human-readable, portable, organized, and version-controlled.". This comprehensive guide from Cornell Data Services outlines best practices.

ninejs

"ninejs adds interactive behavior to plotnine charts with a minimal API. You can attach tooltips, hover grouping, and on click events directly from aes(), then export the result as a standalone HTML plot. All of this with just 2 or 3 lines of code!"

SQLite improving performance with pre-sort

This article explores how to optimize SQLite insert performance when working with random, unordered data like secure session tokens. An example shows that inserting 160-bit random values (generated by SecureRandom) into SQLite suffers from poor performance because B+ Trees are ordered structures, and random data causes page thrashing, splits, and rebalancing. The solution is pre-sorting batched data before insertion.

A Front-end developer's guide to the hybrid mobile app development landscape

This article is about hybrid mobile app development: apps that blend HTML content rendered in WebViews with native mobile functionality. "Users prefer your app to look and behave like the rest on their device do."

openverto

Forgive the Italian link :) Openverto is a Python CLI tool and library that transforms coordinates between all Italian coordinate systems, including Roma40, ED50, IGM95, ETRS89, and RDN2008. It was developed by the Associazione OnData.

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Ebola Outbreaks in Africa

Steven Feldman continues experimenting with Claude AI to create vibe-coded maps. This time he looks at historic Ebola outbreaks, creating both a static map and an interactive one.

Ask an Astronaut

"Find your question among hundreds of astronaut interviews aboard the International Space Station."

Your summer reading list, based on the data

Amanda Shendruk's new data-driven analysis examines summer 2026 reading recommendations by aggregating 49 summer reading lists from English-language publications, resulting in 1,069 book recommendations.

How Does Our Taste in Movies Change With Age?

Daniel Parris (StatSignificant) analyses the MovieLens dataset (containing over 1 million movie ratings from 1995-2003), to explore how film preferences evolve over our lifetime.

Analysis: China's new carbon metric leaves Germany-sized gap in its emissions

Lauri Myllyvirta (CarbonBrief): "A major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years." (via Peter Wood)

Welcome to the ATP Top 50 Player Performance

Dataviz and tennis fanatic Danilo De Rosa has created this impressive dataviz of the Top 50 Players in the ATP league.

AI

How LLMs Actually Work

"This post is a walkthrough of how LLMs work. Modern LLMs are mostly built by stacking transformer blocks over and over, so understanding the transformer machinery gets you most of the way there.
I’ll cover the core mechanisms inside modern transformer-based LLMs, without all that sticky math stuff. Don’t get me wrong, you should learn the math, but this can serve as an introduction."

Making Claude a chemist

"We’re working with world-class synthetic, computational, and analytical chemists to make Claude better at chemistry. In this post, we share our first work as part of this effort, in which Anthropic chemist, David Kamber, examines how Claude performs on a chemist’s most common analytical input, an NMR spectrum."

Arithmetic Without Numbers

"What happens inside an LLM when it tries to calculate with nothing but matrices."

Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting

Consumer advocate Erin Brockovich (made famous by Julia Roberts a few years back) has started this initiative to critically examine the impact of data centres. (via Karen Barber)

Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

Another good essay by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor as part of their "AI as Normal Technology" newsletter examines why AI has not caused mass software engineering layoffs despite rapid adoption, and argues that this pattern will continue.

Fable5-mc

Fable5-mc is a Minecraft clone built entirely in the browser using Three.js, requiring no build steps or external assets, and developed using Claude Fable. I've read somewhere that it took Fable only 38 minutes to develop this.

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