Tom Dewar
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tomdewar.dev
Tom Dewar
@tomdewar.dev
180 followers 510 following 260 posts
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
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tomdewar.dev
Anyone know what’s on fire to the north east of Heathrow?
Smoke rising from something on fire in the distance beyond the north east of Heathrow airport.
November 25, 2025 at 10:24 AM
tomdewar.dev
Way back, Edward Tufte invented sparklines, a data visualisation that would fit inline like a word in a written sentence. Often used to show stock price trends alongside ref to a company’s shares. This, in the FT, is like a sonic equivalent for referncing songs in the app age. Novel and I like it.
Excerpt from FT article about the band Creedence Clearwater Revival. It includes an inline music clip player seamless writhing the written words.
October 26, 2025 at 7:52 AM
tomdewar.dev
My new fave AI fail story: colleague used a latest gen LLM to try and retrieve a financial number from the latest published version of a report. It failed to find it on the internet, said “don’t worry I can source it from an alternative” and then proceeded, very slowly, to draw the following image.
August 7, 2025 at 11:59 AM
tomdewar.dev
Excellent analysis. This part in particular.
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.
May 11, 2025 at 7:04 AM
tomdewar.dev
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”
April 4, 2025 at 6:08 PM
tomdewar.dev
“Leave it, mate. He’s not worth it.”
February 28, 2025 at 9:15 AM
tomdewar.dev
Why do they care about SQL? I was reliably informed no US gov department used SQL 🤔
February 12, 2025 at 12:43 PM
tomdewar.dev
Is this not available to read in the FT’s mobile app? Searching the headline turns up air.
Search for an known FT headline with no results in iOS mobile app
December 10, 2024 at 11:37 AM