Ideas on Tom Guernier's Blog

Taste, Scarcity and Curation

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 04:51:23 +0000

Whenever I’m sitting at home looking for something to read, or watch, or browse; these thoughts tend to pop into my mind: I could read / watch / listen / browse something I’m already familiar with, or look for something totally new. If I find something new that I deeply enjoy, this will bring a lot of happiness to me and could potentially improve my life over a long period. However, most (but not all!) stuff isn’t worth the time to consume it, and there’s an effectively infinite flow of stuff of dubious quality that either makes no difference or may actively reduce my happiness out there.

My attempt to explain Infinite Jest

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:09:04 +0000

I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Infinite Jest again after reading the Matt Lakeman post about it, having somehow made my way through it¹ some time during high school. Like most other things involved with the author David Foster Wallace, the book is deeply insight laden but also at times incomprehensible, puerile or just plain distasteful. But somehow it has stuck with me through the decade since I’ve read it, and despite, or perhaps because of its density and fractal detail it has become a foundational text for me. And with time its deepest ideas have not merely stuck with me but have started to feel even more prescient each time I come across them again.

Notes on Facadism

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:15:13 +0000

If you wander around central Auckland, before too long you’ll notice a strange architectural phenomenon. There are plenty of old buildings, and some newer ones, but also some strange mutated combos of the two, with a thoroughly modern building having the facade of an older one seemingly glued onto it.

A particularly blatant example 396 Queen Street, Auckland; image from Google Streetview

Cyborg Motivation

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 03:18:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been making my way through the reams of posts from Inkhaven, the daily blogging residency/challenge/convention that took place last month. Participating blogger Lucie Phillipon has written some good posts on the tools you can use to align your commitments to your goals, which given my recent Beeminder obsession I have been thinking about quite a bit.

One big question is: is it better to align your short-term actions and long term goals using external commitments and incentive systems or try to align yourself internally by shifting your thoughts? Or to put it differently, should you be a Cyborg or a Mentat? As you can probably predict as someone with a strict (but effective!) blogging commitment, I’m on largely on team Cyborg.

Links for November 2025

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 22:45:00 +0000

This is my first linkpost! The classic fallback for bloggers without a cohesive idea to write about and a deadline to meet. Though I believe curation is one of the ways us writers can stay relevant in these days of AI, so it might not be so much of a cop-out.

The frequentisation of Tāmaki Makaurau (Adventures in Transitland Substack)
- A great article on how much better buses have gotten in Auckland, especially in the outer suburbs. Aucklanders love to complain about public transit (and the train services have been getting suspended a lot, though for good reason) but there has been many unshowy incremental benefits over my lifetime.
Common Ground between AI 2027 & AI as Normal Technology (Asterisk Magazine)
- What the AI 2027 and AI as Normal Technology people agree on. I’m not quite ready to take a firm position on the whole AI safety debate, but this seems like a good calibration point.
The Great Downzoning (Works in Progress Magazine)
- How and why stringent zoning policies got imposed all over the western world in the late 19th and early 20th century. See also the excellent Upzoning New Zealand article from the same magazine about the (still continuing) fight over upzoning in our cities.
Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts (Dynomight)
- ‘Everyone’ (or at least everyone in my techy professional circles) seems to agree that dating apps are horrible, soul-sucking and terrible for their intended purpose. But alternatives to them never seem to gain any traction. This article looks into why that is.
If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying (Sasha Chapin)
- The contrarian title hides a good point about diagnosing your difficulties in writing: are you blocked on ideas, or just on trying to explain them in a way you think will make your audience think you’re clever and well-adjusted?

Here’s a little bonus personal anecdote related to that last link: in the early years of my high school we only got to do creative writing once a year and only for the length of a few assignments, basically for the sole purpose of teaching us what a simile is. However, I enjoyed these assignments and had no trouble coming up with story ideas¹. Now that I’m writing on this blog into the void², I’m wondering am I recapturing that freedom. I could write about anything! But choice paralysis is a real thing and you do have to inhabit a point of view to write anything worth caring about, and that means inevitably narrowing down the scope of what you write. And maybe what this self-enforced writing is all about is finding that point of view that feels honest to myself.

Beeminder & Bibliographies

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 05:14:00 +0000

I’m writing this blog post a little earlier this week because I’m out of town for the weekend and Beeminder demands (well, politely but firmly requests) I get this done by Saturday evening. Speaking of Beeminder, last weekend I pushed something to my public GitHub for the first time since university, and it’s something to do with it too (it’s a Python script to count up the words I’m typing for these posts as well as my general notes). Turns out I do like seeing the pretty graphs go up!

On Frame Messages

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:53:00 +0000

So I’ve been reading everyone’s favourite discrete maths textbook/metatextual paean to a Baroque composer Gödel, Escher, Bach for the first time actually, despite how influential it has been in the last 40 or so years since it was published and its relevance to the dorky subjects I’m interested in¹.

In chapter 6 there’s a discussion of the concept of ‘Frame Messages’, which exist on three nested levels: the inner message, the intentional message transmitted by the writer; the outer message, the environment which provides context to ‘decode’ the inner message; and the frame message, the message that there is in fact a message to decode.