Jonathan Minton

Public Health Intelligence researcher at Public Health Scotland. Recovering academic. Complex data viz enthusiast. Evidence-informed contrarian.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

Some sense checking: ONS life expectancy projections for the UK compared with observed life expectancy (black line). Six years of likely over-projection compared with decades of under-projection

[Ian Quigley @allmeasures]

I'm on a mission to make this plot as publicly recognizable as the one with the holes in the WW2 airplane

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

The single most important DataCamp course on Agentic AI isn’t about AI:

https://t.co/etdACMfN4S

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@SteveStuWill Interesting that the model from the company that has always emphasised multi modality and grounding systematically gets this type of question right whereas the others don’t

[Max Roser @MaxCRoser]

How will your country's demographics change this century?

At Our World in Data we built a tool to let you see for yourself.

The UN's assumptions are the starting point.

But then you can adjust the three drivers of change — births, deaths, and migration — to what you expect.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@maxmarchione @stianwestlake I think the obesity crisis as a population wide issue was much less acute in the early 90s, so the risk/reward calculation might have been appropriate at the time.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@robertskmiles Depends on the reasoning level of the Claude

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

New blog:
digital dogs in hats: bridging the senseworld/streamworld divide:

https://t.co/aJF1FAAKAJ

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@phlegmatticus @PAHoyeck @ANNVYSHINSKY I think that’s what rhizomes are trying to convey. A subterranean network

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@phlegmatticus @PAHoyeck @ANNVYSHINSKY Conjoined by the rhizomes

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

My cat rendered the way I think he sees himself. In this case a dormant firegod.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

The fact the y axis is per capita whereas the pessimistic scenario is human extinction makes this even funnier for stats pedants

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Probably the funniest graph ever published by the FT: our 3 possible futures are either 1) infinite wealth and abundance, 2) human extinction or 3) 0.2% faster GDP growth ���

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@jack_whitcomb_ False advertising unless it’s written on a Mobius strip

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

Vaguely reminiscent of Simpson’s Paradox

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

Musk’s Evil Detector is set off by being an AI guru who used to be a game developer who once made a game called ‘Evil Genius’

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Same here.

By way of background for those who care, I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed.

Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.

After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@NoahKingJr Fold laundry

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

It’s already happened. (And it’s a bit underwhelming)

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

@frenbilt @fabianstelzer The bedsheet phases through his legs

[steven hao @stevenkplus1]

Dear @RichardDawkins, you've always been an inspiration to me. I made this website for you.

My goal is for it to help you understand AI chatbots at a deeper level, and avoid getting fooled by sycophancy and other cheap tricks that models have learned through RLHF.

https://t.co/ViGYPupooX

[Jonathan Minton @JonMinton]

This is how LLMs with extended reasoning manage to one shot correct answers:
https://t.co/eA9xnPBy6S

[Jeff Huber 🇺🇸 @jhuber]

I've always been kind of annoyed I wasn't better at Rubik's cube solving. So a Gemma 4 design session while on a plane w/ no internet + a Claude Code ~one shot yielded this Rubik's solver/trainer.

Create your cube or paste a flat-net image of your scramble → it reads the colors, finds a 22-or-fewer-move solution, and animates the 3D cube through every turn. No backend. 100% in the browser.

Run it: https://t.co/xYAQ8EPsUq
Code: https://t.co/fmLgpoSJwh