they’re turning the fonts gay

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic that can be magically fixed by turning off and on again

Hamlet?

I designed a story. (Origin story to the story to follow)

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

Jon Minton’s Blog - When Tech Incrementalism Fails A Steam-powered Parable

New blog post:
“When Tech incrementalism fails: a steam-powered parable”

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

New (quickish) blog post:
I've been using Claude for digital archeology: It found a really simple social agent-based model I wrote in R almost 20 years ago and rebuilt an interactive version of it in Python.

Nominative determinism

My hand drawn attempt to explain the difference between the standard chatbot style AIs most people are familiar with, and agentic AI (AAI)

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

Adding ‘Machine’ alongside chat window to the ways Human and Bot can work together is underrated, a game changer.

Feedback forms should be active, even linked to github accounts if you have one. These will then be added to github issues logs, processed, and very likely implemented!

This is broadly how I think about recipes and cooking: at the start there's a list of ingredients; at the end there's a finished dish; and in between there are various processes happening that transform and combine the ingredients in various ways: mashing, frying, baking etc

Another Claudic implementation of an idea I've been playing around with for years:

Flow Kitchen

jonminton.github.io/recipes-as-mus…

(Formerly 'recipes as music')

They’re now ‘an’ opposition party

Mirroring GalGael: An Ethnography of Repair and Belonging - Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Repair can be understood as a civic practice and an essential form of care, particularly in the face of ecological crises and the need to move towards a circular economy. Most research on repair tends...

New @sgsss.bsky.social funded #PhD opportunity to undertake an #ethnography at #galgael in Glasgow with @giopicker.bsky.social and myself. This is a fully funded #Scholarship / #Studentship, which includes a stipend, fees and research expenses. Closes 24th March. www.sgsss.ac.uk/studentship/...

Eg CARs which do some accounting for ‘neighbourliness’ of observations. I think Girosi and King moved in that direction by talking about Bayesian smoothers or similar, and the CBD effectively brings something like this through the predictor terms used

On the broader sentiment of the original post. I think Andy tends to lean into APC as something very flawed but potentially amenable to some fixes. My position’s that it’s often better to start from thinking of the Lexis surface as a real as-if-spatial surface, and using spatial modelling approaches

Similarly Italian data has a pronounced decades waffle like pattern in single year lexis surfaces, likely due to heavy correction of population counts with each census. Again no signals in this 1948 cohort pattern of it being an artefact

We couldn’t find an artefactual explanation. Examples of which include: discontinuities at age 80/90 or so, as this is when the methods in HMD shift and reported raw data often pools into a single age; period only changes, as when a country’s methods change. This was multiple countries, and cohort

And the importance of positive cohort effects in the UK context was argued by Willets in (I think) the 2000s or maybe earlier

On the original point it’s worth noting UK actuaries’ version of Lee-Carter (Cairns-Blake-Dowd) already includes terms for cohort effects. (Not a direct ancestor but close enough)

Thanks, the 1948 signal is intriguing. With this dy/dt display a ‘shock’ is red followed by blue (vertical for period; diagonal for cohort); but with this cohort it’s blue alone. Presence in multiple countries suggests it’s broader than just the NHS

Since its release on Thursday, I’ve been putting Opus 4.6 through its paces. No specific research task, evidence synthesis or review, or even philosophical conversation seems to challenge it, not even remotely.

So instead, I’m vibe coding a game!

jonminton.github.io/boomer/

Jon Minton’s Blog - How I Now Write My Blog With reMarkable and Claude Code

How I now write my blog (with reMarkable and Claude):

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

Very meta. Hopefully specific and detailed enough to show this is a workable pattern for producing online content.

#claude #vscode #Remarkable #writing #cats

The Dilbert Future in retrospect

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/posts…

#dilbert #ScottAdams #predictions

I asked an Agentic AI to develop a course on how to understand and use Agentic AI. This is what it came up with:

jonminton.github.io/working-with...

It has a core section, then five parallel tracks for different kinds of knowledge worker.

Suggestions and feedback very welcome!

📄 New paper out in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine with @robaldridge.bsky.social, Rachel Burns, and analysis led by @jonminton.bsky.social

❓How does mortality compare by country/region of birth in England & Wales, 2007–2021?

doi.org/10.1177/0141...

🧵⬇️

Jon Minton’s Blog - David Sconce and the benevolence of evil? Some discomforting thoughts on The Mortician

New AI cowriting experiment. Are my blog posts better if I don’t write them?!
jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

I’ve done a cliche! Here’s a Gemini produced infographic of my end of year blog post:

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

New blog post. A reflection on 2025, and why it might be the last year we think “nothing’s changed”:

jonminton.github.io/jon-blog/pos...

I thought this was about whale oil!

New experimental stats website (Alpha stage). Interactive tutorials for helping understand GLMs:

jonminton.github.io/glm-dashboar...

Please explore and make use of the bug and feature request options!