to be fair, you don't need to start the y-axis at zero [0] but for some of the graphs where the lowest value is close to 0 the best practice is to do so

there's a fun Excel artifact where it auto-selects the 'relevant' range with no adjustment for how proportionally close to 0 the values are - a professional researcher publishing to a journal should know better (and should be ridiculed for not incorporating best practices) but for a personal blog by an SWE this really isn't the worst sin

[0] https://digitalblog.ons.gov.uk/2016/06/27/does-the-axis-have...

Starting at 0 is really only useful if you’re plotting a ratio measure and not just an interval one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Interval_... ), which I’m not sure this “intelligence index” is.

Not at all, as long as it's labeled as such. Coming from engineering/science, this is common.

What is bad is starting at 0, showing an indicator of a gap, and suddenly starting at 30 or whatever after the gap.

Yeah, this doesn't include older models, some of which were already saturating many common tasks a year ago. I'll often add them to the AA graph for reference.

Yeah this is really funny and annoying. They get better later on in the article, but it is questionable.