674: quantum of sollazzo

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        September 8, 2026

674: quantum of sollazzo

Quantum of Sollazzo
NO. 674 · 
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Things that caught my attention
Hello readers, I don't have a lot to share this week, so I'll take a break from writing. But I'm preparing to be on the kick-off panel at the AI, Communities & Coops at Space4 in London, where we'll focus on ethical AI, trying to address the question "Who builds AI, who controls it, and how do communities take their seat at the table?". As the invite says, "*Come ready to think, disagree, and leave with something useful."
One thing worth noting is that while this issue of QoS was being drafted, Dolly Parton passed away. This news was received with universal mourning. You'll see a dataviz that captures just how universal her popularity was. Find it in the "Topical" section.
·Quantum #673 had an open rate of 43% and a click rate of 8%, and the most clicked link was this well-desinged touch-typing trainer.
·A quick ask from me 😃 Can you please share Quantum on your favourite social media? Something along the lines of "I read Quantum of Sollazzo, the weekly newsletter about data by Giuseppe Sollazzo. Subscribe for free at https://quantumofsollazzo.com" and feel free to edit.
'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
Topical
Six Culture Trends: CDs, Dolly Parton, R-Rated Movies, and More
Stat Significant looks at six data-driven trends in entertainment and media. The best of which is a tribute to Dolly Parton.
Mapping vulnerability to extreme heat
OCSI has developed a new Extreme Heat Vulnerability Index for England, with a neighbourhood-level susceptibility to extreme heat across all 33,755 Lower-layer Super Output Areas (which are England's basic areas for census purposes).
The index measures five domains: low ability to respond or prepare for heatwaves, access to cool spaces, enhanced physical risk, the outdoor environment, and housing.
Sponsored by Jane Street
Jane Street depends on all sorts of messy, real-world data to understand financial markets and the global economy: think world news, decades of weather patterns, deidentified credit card spending, or packet captures of stock exchange market data feeds.
We're hiring Data Engineers to turn datasets like these into reliable inputs for trading. Working closely with our researchers, you'll evaluate unfamiliar datasets, build robust ELT pipelines, develop deep domain expertise, and decide what's worth exploring next. 
The job requires a mix of engineering, data analysis, and product sense. If you love the detective work of investigating a weird dataset and figuring out what it actually means, we want to hear from you. No financial background is necessary.
We have openings in New York, London, and Hong Kong.
Tools & Tutorials
Normal tools for normal tasks
"Open a tool, do the thing, leave. No account, no download, and nothing between you and the answer."
193 tools on the list.
My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac mini
Kevin Lewis' local LLM server setup on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 48GB RAM.
Why ACF Is More Than Just a Plot
"*An intuitive guide to lags and the autocorrelation function, using reproducible simulations and U.S. industrial production data to separate genuine persistence from non-stationarity."
Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
Data Colada analyzes the original data from Ariely and Wertenbroch's influential 2002 paper on procrastination and deadlines, which recently failed to replicate.
LatticeDB
"LatticeDB is an embedded, single-file graph database that lets local applications query the same data by relationship, semantics, and text, then consume durable graph and application events from the same file. Workloads like Graph RAG, agent memory, and local knowledge tools are examples built on those primitives, not the definition of the engine."
How to Build Tile Patterns with CSS Grid
This article explores recreating traditional Catalan hydraulic tile patterns using CSS Grid and modern web techniques. The author draws inspiration from Barcelona's Modernisme movement and the original cement tiles in their home, each room featuring different geometric motifs. Six patterns—Fan, Lens, Wedge, Star, Bloom, and Weave—are rebuilt using CSS techniques like radial-gradient(), border-radius, and rotation properties. The key insight is that "four tiles, rotated by a fixed rule" create complex patterns through symmetry and repetition. The article demonstrates advanced CSS features including subgrid for painting elements across tile seams and trigonometric functions like atan2() and sin() for dynamic rotation and grid warping. Historical context about pigment costs explains the traditional color palettes, with iron oxide and ochre being cheaper than cobalt and chromium. The piece combines technical CSS tutorial with cultural history, showing how century-old design principles translate to modern web development.
dataco-late-delivery-audit
This repository analyses a problem in supply-chain machine learning: the widely-reported 97% accuracy for predicting late deliveries on the DataCo SMART Supply Chain dataset is based on data leakage, not genuine predictive power. The author demonstrates that the dataset's target column Late_delivery_risk is a derivation of two other columns in the same table (capturing whether actual shipping days exceeded scheduled days).
Data Thinking
How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts
This article introduces a zine collecting memorable quotations about data visualization from various experts in the field. Made by Bradley.
I'm not learning coding from LLMs, but product design
Randy Au's on what he's increasingly using LLMs for.
Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Dieci minuti
Danilo De Rosa spends some time looking at... something (no spoilers), and recording his heart rate.
Violence is a male problem
Julius E. O. Fintelman for The European Correspondent argues that violent crime is overwhelmingly a male problem, and it is so regardless of nationality or immigration status. Men are convicted at roughly six times the rate of women across all groups studied.
Let's normalize debunking each other
Amanda Shendruk looks at how misinformation spread and shares data about which groups are affected the most.
All 199 passports
An interactive exploration of all the world's 199 passport covers and their global mobility power (as of September 2026).
How The Heck Do Record Players Work? (An Interactive Exploration)
Shri Khalpada for PerThirtySix has created a new interactive article showing the inner workings of vinyl records and turntables.
Movie Scene Map — The Filming Locations Map for Film & TV
Movie Scene Map is a free interactive atlas documenting over 15,000 filming locations. The project takes its data primarily from Wikidata filming location statements, supplemented by information from Wikipedia articles.
AI
Teaching an AI My Taste
Lon Riesberg: "What it takes to teach a machine judgment, and how I checked whether it learned." Lon describes building an LLM-powered curation assistant for his Data Elixir newsletter, which filters through hundreds of weekly posts from RSS feeds, social media, and aggregators. (Note: Quantum is manually curated 😉)
Surpassing Frontier Performance with Fusion
OpenRouter: "We’ve found that synthesizing the results of multiple models can significantly outperform what individual models are capable of. Introducing Fusion: a tool for getting these combined results just as easily as calling a single model. It allows you to choose a panel of participant models alongside a judge model responsible for fusing the individual results together." (via Kevin Lewis)
LLMs: Intelligence vs. cost
OpenTeams' Guido Imperiale critiques how ArtificialAnalysis benchmarks LLM intelligence versus cost, arguing their approach, based on a plot, is somewhat misleading. He offers an alternative plot.
Using Models to Create Models of New York City
After leaving his job at 4 World Trade Center, photographer Peter Sobot captured over 1,000 photos from the 71st floor to create a 3D model using Claude. While acknowledging the final product looks "kind of okay," Sobot reflects on the difficulties of using AI for tasks requiring human artistic judgment and visual discernment.
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quantum of sollazzo is also supported by Andy Redwood’s proofreading – if you need high-quality copy editing or proofreading, check out Proof Red. Oh, and he also makes motion graphics animations about climate change.
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Quantum of Sollazzo. · The data newsletter by Giuseppe Sollazzo
(c) 2012-2026 Giuseppe Sollazzo · London · UK
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