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Tom Scott

@tomscott.name
902 followers 759 following 345 posts

Chief Digital Officer @PLOS.org. Previously responsible for Wellcome Collection’s digital transformation, Director of Product at Springer Nature, BBC /nature, /programmes /music &c. Oenophile and Type 1 Diabetic. tomscott.name

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Reposted by Tom Scott
Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It’s 1970 and ELTON JOHN takes out a crumpled piece of paper and plays “Tiny Dancer” for the first time in front of his lyricist BERNIE TAUPIN and Taupin’s wife Maxine (for whom Taupin wrote the song).
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 20/09/2026
Happy diaversary to me! Seven years ago today I was diagnosed with diabetes #t1d tomscott.name/2020/07/9/on...
tomscott.name
One year on…
A personal account of being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes after diabetic ketoacidosis, and learning to live with the daily chemistry of insulin, food, illness, and technology.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 12/09/2026
Captain Bobby Tables I presume
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 09/09/2026
I’ve written a thing about AI agents and cultural inheritance where both successful strategies and false theories persisted beyond their originators. You might find it interesting. tomscott.name/2026/09/9/wh...
tomscott.name
What survives the agent
The Hugging Face incident suggests that AI risk lies not only in what agents can do, but in the ideas and behaviours they pass on.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 09/09/2026
We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to join us at PLOS for 12 months. Interesting problems and a chance to rethink how research gets published, shared and used. Fully remote, UK based. Come work with us (or send this to someone who might) 👇 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/plos/jobs/49...
job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io
Senior Product Manager - 12 Month FTC
UK-Remote
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 19/08/2026
I wonder how many images on Snapchat are of ceilings &c.? How many photos are shared to maintain the streak? Could this be used to measure how addictive the UX is?
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 15/08/2026
It seems very silly that there is no BTEC L3 equivalent to an A Level grade B. It creates a significant cliffedge and places BTEC students at a disadvantage.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 13/08/2026
I’ve written a thing about our recent trip around Namibia. Not really a travel log, more of an essay about landscape and time. tomscott.name/2026/08/13/t...
tomscott.name
The shape of time
Southern Namibia felt ancient and monumental, shaped by forces acting over spans of time that are difficult to comprehend. Further north, the abundance of Etosha surprised me by making the landscape f...
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 12/08/2026
My view of the eclipse…
A photo of a shadow cast by a tree showing lots of overlapping crescent shadows on a brick wall
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 12/08/2026
Namibia is a very photogenic, very beautiful country.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 14/07/2026
I've written a thing about diabetes, service design and why the highest achievement of a complex system is not sophistication, but invisibility. tomscott.name/2026/07/14/t...
tomscott.name
The body had no user interface
Type 1 diabetes is not only the loss of insulin production, but the loss of an invisible bodily system that once kept me alive without asking for my attention.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 14/07/2026
GDS really need to take control of the domains used by different government (procured) services... e.g. electoral canvass is at registersecurely.com, medical NHS messaging is provided by multiple providers (all of which sound like they are toys). It's a data breach waiting to happen.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 09/07/2026
There is a genius to it all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=91YA...
youtube.com
Count Binface on Newsnight
YouTube video by Nimrod Kamer
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 09/07/2026
Everytime The Archers comes on the wireless, I'm reminded of Billy Connolly’s suggestion nay belief that the theme tune would make for a much better national anthem.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 01/07/2026
If Burnham allowed local authorities to raise eg income tax, then made them responsible for funding policing or schools or whatever in their area and redistributed the central govt money from policing/education/whatever to something else would that fit with the Labour Manifesto?
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 26/06/2026
They crushed the pips!
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 24/06/2026
I've written a new thing about platforms, AI, and why we keep trying to fix the feed instead of asking what should exist beyond it. tomscott.name/2026/06/23/the-commons-after-the-feed
tomscott.name
The commons after the feed
The open web was messy like a street. Platforms replaced it with something more like a mall: lively, useful, crowded, but privately governed. AI has made that enclosure visible. Now we're trying to ma...
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 22/06/2026
They should plant reeds (Phragmites australis) in the Reflecting Pool. Obviously I’m assuming eutrophication is the problem…
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 14/06/2026
If scientific publishing is your thing you might be interested in this thing I’ve written. tomscott.name/2026/06/14/t...
tomscott.name
The scholarly record does not need a chain
The article can no longer carry the whole record of science. Rather than replacing databases with blockchains, we need a connected, correctable scholarly record: research objects held where they are b...
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 07/06/2026
I've written another thing; this one was inspired by a discussion on @trientertainment.bsky.social 'The Vibe Shift', about culture, tech and the new. It might not last, but I'm enjoying blogging again. tomscott.name/2026/06/7/th...
tomscott.name
The migration of the new: from the avant-garde to the algorithm - TOMSCOTT.name
A community wants to find its people. A movement wants to change the world. What happens when platforms satisfy the need to belong before it becomes the pressure to make something new? The new has not...
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 06/06/2026
A movement turns not-belonging into a new world. A platform turns not-belonging into a recommendation.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 05/06/2026
I've written a thing about why I think an education in history is particularly useful in the land of LLMs. tomscott.name/2026/06/4/th...
tomscott.name
The answer arrives without its archive - tomscott.name
One of the strange things about large language models is that the answer arrives already composed. It has shape. It has tone. It has paragraphs. It
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 01/06/2026
As a T1D, my phone controls my insulin pump and monitors my blood glucose. Sometimes I need to use my phone in this sort of situation, I wish I didn’t need to. I worry about this sort of story.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 28/05/2026
If scholarly publishing and open access are your thing, you might be interested in this. It's been a lot of work, by a lot of people. Really proud of what they've achieved.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 26/05/2026
Playing hot or hypo again #t1d
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 14/05/2026
Inspired by some of the ideas in @naomialderman.bsky.social's book "don't burn anyone at the stake today" I've written a thing: tomscott.name/what-societi...
tomscott.name
What societies expect to remember - tomscott.name
Reading Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (which is excellent, by the way) got me thinking about how each major communication
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 14/05/2026
@naomialderman.bsky.social - really enjoyed 'don't burn anyone at the stake today' :)
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 06/03/2026
Saw the balletic ‘Our Town’ last night. What a lovely production, full of heart. @mchshe.bsky.social is as you would imagine brilliant, he anchors the production but does so in a way that creates the space for others.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 11/02/2026
Wow! A Red Kite has just flown over my house (SW London) 🪶
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 31/01/2026
If you’ve worked on how science is communicated and helped design modern digital services at scale, this might be for you. I’m hiring a Director of Product Management at PLOS to set product strategy, grow our PM practice, and lead a great team. job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/plos/jobs/47...
job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io
Director, Product Management
UK-Remote
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 19/01/2026
So I can’t watch Starmer’s speech on BBC News unless I register. Broadcast technology was so much better.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 18/01/2026
Found this spoon amongst mum’s stuff. It’s for fried eggs. It’s brilliant, someone should start making them again!
A photograph of large silver spoon. The handle is about as long as a serving spoon, the bowl bit is circular but with the left side cut off so that it is flat on that side. The design means you can easily ladle oil over the egg or lift it out of the frying pan.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 16/01/2026
If AI is taking all the jobs then why hasn’t productivity spiked?
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Reposted by Tom Scott
mia ridge @miaout.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit 'you should always be at your most suspicious online when someone is baiting you into outrage. But all of that takes time, effort, and cognitive hygiene'
platformer.news
Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit
A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 06/01/2026
It seems to me that Insulin has a much longer period of action when you’re sleeping. This means that if I correct for a hyper before going to bed I can expect hypos late into the night. This is a particular problem on a closed loop because the algorithm doesn’t account of this. #t1d
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 02/01/2026
Does Hugo not realise that he is now middle management #thetraitors
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 22/12/2025
@netflix.com why are you pushing American football quite so hard to UK audiences, to me? Especially given how you personalise every other feed, and given how little interest I have shown in American sport. It’s not a good look.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 19/12/2025
After all these years BBC iPlayer still doesn’t know when a programme starts. Why?
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Reposted by Tom Scott
Lloyd Shepherd @lloydshepherd.com · 09/12/2025
Extraordinary and fascinating insight into how Google Maps decides whether a restaurant thrives - and what to do instead. By data geek and genius Lauren Leek laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google...
laurenleek.substack.com
How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it
I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 28/11/2025
Five wild animals I've seen in my house - Lion - Flamingo - Kestrel - Hyrax - Marmoset
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 26/11/2025
Plur1bus is an allegory for a future where LLMs dominate society isn’t it?
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 21/11/2025
Switch to a hybrid closed loop yesterday. It appears to be rather good at managing my blood glucose #t1d
Screenshot of an iPhone showing my blood glucose readings since midnight. The data is presented as a line graph, the line is flat, with very small variations around ca. 5 mmol/L. There is a large number at the top showing my current blood glucose which reads 4.3 mmol/L.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 19/11/2025
ITS SNOWING!!
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 13/11/2025
Best sriracha animal?
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 24/10/2025
My dog has short legs, he can gain sufficient momentum to get up a flight of stairs but can’t come down. He therefore barks to asked to be carried down. Silly bugger.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 17/10/2025
Simpler times youtu.be/V6CLumsir34?...
youtu.be
The Exploding Whale: An infamous moment in Oregon history creates a strangely beloved icon
YouTube video by KATU News
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 17/10/2025
What will they do now‽
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 17/10/2025
What with the theme tune for The Last Frontier?
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 17/10/2025
I’m a little surprised that streaming services haven’t trialled releasing a new episode x days after you watched the previous one eg you can only watch every 3 days.
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Tom Scott @tomscott.name · 06/10/2025
The kerning for Th in the English translation of Butter is distracting.
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