Tom Dewar

@tomdewar.dev

232 Followers 562 Following

Data science since before it was trendy. Ex-NHS, ex-civil servant. Wants you to use evidence to make better decisions. Formally @tomdewar_ on the old bird site. More frequently lurking on Mastodon as @tomdewar@mas.to

Close up of Tokyo’s excellent calendar showing the beginning of April 2026. Highlighted are entries for 3rd and 4th April noting they are the 30th anniversary of films The Twister and Dead Man, the 25th anniversary of The Mummy Returns, and the 50th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope!
Screen shot of the title of Ian Dunt’s latest podcast on an in-car Airplay. Title reads: “I buggered up the podcast - here’s the…”
Screenshot of a voicemail left with the message converted to text: “no you silly sausage”.
Scoreboard showing final result in the Six Nations game between Scotland and France: 50 to 40.
Graph of US dollar as a percent of global currency reserves between 2000 and 2025 (now-ish). Shows a decline from around 60% to 40%.
Screenshot of UniFi app showing option to customise the WiFi transmit power
Chart showing the dramatic decline in questions posted on Stack Overflow since LLMs came into widespread use. This chart courtesy of a blog at practicalengineer.com.
Sleeping Bengal cat, head resting on paw, on a blue-green cushion
Clip from gov.uk website stating that “doctor” is not a recognised profession to countersign a passport application.
Smoke rising from something on fire in the distance beyond the north east of Heathrow airport.
Excerpt from FT article about the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. It includes an inline music clip player seamless writhing the written words.
A large language model is never going to do a job that a human does as well as they could do it, but that doesn't mean that they're never going to replace humans, because, of course, decisions about whether or not to replace a human with a machine aren't based on the actual performance of the human or the machine. They're based on what the people making those decisions believe to be true about those humans and those machines. So they are already taking people's jobs, not because they can do them as well as the people can, but because the executive class is in the grip of a mass delusion about them.
Post from Mastodon. Image of the plasticine penguin from Wallace and Grommet with the caption “The ambassador from the Heard Islands sets out to Washington to discuss the tariffs”
Search for an known FT headline with no results in iOS mobile app