Hello, reader!

Quantum #657 had an open rate of 46% and a click rate of 9%.

The most clicked link was my friend Kevin's Convene the Council AI service.

Last week, I had the bad idea of posting my Eurovision Scrollytelling on the infamous b3ta forum, explaining it was developed with LLM-aided coding. What was I thinking?

'till next week
Giuseppe

Topical

Charted: Rise of the candidate creator

Axios: "Potential 2028 presidential candidates are operating like creators, with social video operations, podcasts, Substack accounts and merch stores."

How The Heck Do Solar Panels Work? (An Interactive Exploration)

This is an amazing, interactive piece that explains visually how solar panels convert sunlight into electricity, and explore the economics of why they aren't more widespread in small installations. The author says: "the panels exist, the physics work, and the economics are sound. We just need the infrastructure to let it in." Obviously, there are loads of challenges (not necessarily technical).

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Tools & Tutorials

Building a GPT-5 quality classifier at BERT cost: Our first live distilled classifier

Climate Policy Radar's Kalyan Dutia explains how they deployed their first classifier built through LLM distillation, creating a BERT model that matches GPT-5's performance while remaining affordable to run across 30,000 documents.

RYBitten

"This site is an exploratory playground for RYB-inspired digital color using RYBitten 1.0. It remaps RGB values to behave more like the red, yellow, blue relationships familiar from painting and color theory. Use this page to compare presets across wheels, swatches, slices, and 3D views."

Polypane Snippets Store

This is a repository of CSS and JavaScript code snippets for web development and accessibility testing, that you can browse, filter, etc. Featured tools include the "1-Click De-crapulator" which extracts clean HTML by removing unnecessary markup, and a "Get Table Data" utility for extracting and formatting table content.

P4LETTE

"P4LETTE is a one-page color palette tool. Drag, click, lock, randomise, name, and export. No accounts. No newsletters. No "premium tier.""

Learn AI Layer by Layer

"Learn AI Layer by Layer" is an interactive educational guide designed to teach artificial intelligence concepts from first principles. The resource is structured as a 27-chapter course covering fundamental to advanced AI topics.
From computation, optimisation, and neural networks, all the way through to progresses through embeddings, attention mechanisms, and transformers.
Currently under development (in its later stages).

When the Uncertainty Is Bigger Than the Shock: Scenario Modelling for English Local Elections

This article presents a scenario analysis of the 2026 English local elections across 64 authorities. "Across 64 English authorities and six 2026 scenarios, even the strongest scenario shock was only 13% of the median uncertainty band.
In plain English: the model’s assumptions moved the result less than historical forecast error did."

Data Landscape

"An opinionated, interactive map of the open standards. The open standards that power a modern data architecture, organised by what they describe."
Created by Entropy Data and inspired by the CNCF Landscape and ThoughtWorks Tech Radar, each standard is rated as Adopt, Situational, Assess, or Caution based on maturity and production-readiness. Standards covered include SQL, Iceberg, OpenLineage, ODCS, Kafka, and more.

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML

An article by Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar. It also has its own website with examples.

A file tree rendering library

Trees is an open source file tree rendering library created by The Pierre Computer Company, designed for performance and flexibility. The library handles massive datasets through automatic virtualization, rendering "tens of thousands of items instantly".It features ARIA roles compliant with WCAG 2.1 standards.

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Andrew Quinn describes optimising his Finnish-English dictionary application, Taskusanakirja, by replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB finite state transducer (FST) binary, achieving a 300x reduction in space.

YOLO26 and SAHI for Small Object Detection

It looks like YOLO, a popular vision model, is getting much better at small object detection Official docs are here.
If you're interested, I shared this Colab notebook working on a previous version of YOLO. I should upgrade it soon, but there you have it.

traceway

Traceway is an open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that consolidates logs, traces, metrics, session replay, exceptions, and AI tracing into a single system.

Which Countries Are the Most Circular?

Milan Janosov presents a Python-based mapping project that ranks countries by their circularity.

Anime.js

Anime.js is a fast and flexible JavaScript animation library designed to animate web content. Key features include per-property parameters, flexible keyframes, enhanced CSS transforms with blend composition, and SVG utilities for shape morphing, line drawing, and motion paths.

Complete End-To-End Build of ETL Pipeline in AWS

An end-to-end tutorial on how to build a modular, scalable ETL pipeline in AWS using ECS Fargate and DuckDB. Reportedly, the entire demo cost "just shy of 50 cents" to run.

Data Thinking

Designing Visualizations for Things That Don't Exist Yet

Alberto Cairo's Open Visualization Academy discusses how to visualise the future.

Stop Starting Data Projects

A practical framework for data professionals to transform (vague) stakeholder requests into successfully adopted projects.

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Artemis II Photo Timeline

An interactive photo timeline for the Artemis II mission. The interface allows users to browse through a tagged collection of 220 photos and videos captured during the mission.

Palette Inspiration - Timeless Colors of the Great Masters

This is another sophisticated color palette tool that draws inspiration from over 120,000 historical paintings by master artists. The site features a Color Compositor that allows users to build "harmonious, museum-quality color schemes" based on actual color combinations used by great painters throughout history. I think it's more a dataviz than a tool... but you're welcome to disagree :-)

Apocalypse Early Warning System

"In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse."

GB Towns/Cities Quiz Game Development

Robin Linacre created a quiz game focused on Great Britain's towns and cities for his son's educational purposes.

Is foreign investment truly a force for good?

Kontinentalist: "Foreign direct investment has been heralded as a tool for fueling economic growth in developing countries like Cambodia. But its impact on local livelihoods and ecosystems leaves us questioning whether it is all that it’s made out to be."

Nearest Pint, Pub Density Map

"There has been quite a bit in the news recently about 2 pubs per day closing according to the British Beer and Pub Association. That got me thinking about which areas of the country were best served and where were the dry zones?"
The link is to the blog post explaining it, the final map is here.

vizz.fm

Vizz.fm is a web-based real-time audio visualizer application that transforms sound into visual representations.

Rebuilding Derek Watkins' New York Times Chart in Datawrapper

Lisa Charlotte Muth talks about her appreciation for a 2015 chart created by Derek Watkins for The New York Times, and rebuilds it in Datawrapper. She also wrote about it in 2017.

The world is warming despite natural fluctuations from the El Niño cycle

Global temperatures have risen approximately 1.4°C above pre-industrial levels by 2025, though this warming hasn't followed a smooth trajectory. This chart shows some of that, with more charts available at Our World In Data.

Rainbow Map

ILGA-Europe's 2026 Rainbow Map ranks 49 European countries on legal and policy practices for LGBTI people Spain tops the ranking for the first time, breaking Malta's decade-long hold on first place, after implementing comprehensive LGBTI and trans equality action plans. At the bottom are Russia (2%), Azerbaijan (2%), and Turkey (5%), with Romania remaining the lowest-ranked EU member state (19%).

Labour Tribes Mapped: Interactive guide to Labour's MPs

Labour Party-aligned media LabourList and communications agency PLMR have launched an interactive tool to map the 403 Labour MPs in Parliament in order to track a potential leadership challenge to the incumbent.

AI

A Theory of Deep Learning

Elon Litman presents a new theoretical framework for understanding why deep learning works, addressing the paradox of benign overfitting where neural networks fit training data perfectly yet still generalize well.

We Ran 250 AI Agent Evals to Find Out if Skills Beat Docs. The Answer Is More Complicated Than We Expected

Wix's technical writing team conducted 250 controlled evaluations to test whether AI "skills" actually outperform traditional documentation.

How to Work and Compound with AI

Eugene Yan presents a comprehensive framework for working effectively with AI models, emphasising that collaboration with AI should compound over time. The approach suggests five core principles: provide good context, encode taste as configuration, enable easy verification, delegate larger tasks, and close the feedback loop.

I tried Vibe coding an AI coding harness. Here's exactly how it went...

Paul Iusztin experimented with "vibe coding" by having Claude Code generate an entire AI coding harness in one shot, including a TUI, agent loop, tools, MCP support, skills, slash commands, and custom rendering. The initial approach failed, but this led him to create a si-agent Claude Code setup mimicking a real software team.

The economics of superstar AI researchers

This article examines why top AI researchers earn vastly more than their peers (potentially 10-100 times more than average researchers or postdocs). "$100 million annual compensation quite literally might not be enough." I won't say no if you offer, though...

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