Blog on Tom Guernier's Blog

Kitbashing a QR Code Alarm in Android Tasker and val.town

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:56:24 +0000

Recently I built my own bespoke sleep tracking system using Beeminder and Tasker. At the time I wrote my first post on the system, it was working but it had a few awkward elements to it. For one thing, all the maths was done in Tasker’s extremely awkward XML-based scripting system, meaning that any modifications to the formula would involve either editing it on the phone itself¹. Also, the alarm app I was using started showing me ads. So, not my ideal system by any means.

Moving soon!

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:17:00 +0000

A short one today. I’ve had a busy last couple weeks, but I’ve been thinking of what to do next with this little blog and now that I’ve been posting here for over 6 months I feel it’s gotten to the point where it can graduate from its current host¹ and move to its own domain next to all the other things I have scattered all over the internet. So, coming soon is:

Links and Fable

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:56:37 +0000

Like seemingly everyone else with a Claude subscription, since the start of this month I’ve been squeezing as much Fable as I can¹ out of my little USD$20 subscription. And most of that has gone towards my little side project / informal frontier AI coding test case: a top down railway company simulator game a la OpenTTD. So what have I got out of the big code machine so far?

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 Beeminder Sleep Tracking System

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:40:16 +0000

Lately I’ve been having to get up earlier than I am used to (around 6:30am to 7am) for work reasons. I’m usually fine with getting up early, but the problem is I like sleeping in too much, so over the weekend I stay in bed a couple hours later (even past 10am sometimes) and completely mess up my sleep schedule for the oncoming week.

I could just set a flat wake up time that I stick to every day, but the thing with sleep ins is that I genuinely enjoy them, and so I don’t want to give them up completely¹. Luckily, I have a convenient system that can track any values I want into it and binds me (with real money!) to sticking to whatever goal I want to track. But then I need a way to reliably track the time I wake up. I could just enter in data points manually each time I wake up, but…

Notes on Okinawa, Hong Kong and China

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:03:00 +0000

A spooky looking empty street in Chikan, China

I was recently travelling around Okinawa (with family), Hong Kong (by myself) and Guangdong Province in China (with a Mandarin-speaking friend). Here are some thoughts and observations I had during that trip.

The airport in Taipei (which I connected through to get to Okinawa) is incredibly nice and certainly the best airport I’ve ever been to. Pretty much all the stuff discussed in Dan Frank’s (very good) post on Taiwan applies in microcosm to the airport: everything was extremely clean, pristine looking and logically laid out; all the convenience stuff you want when you’re waiting around but are totally lacking and/or hard to find in other airports (like charging points, water refill stations) were plentiful (and working!); and most importantly, you get an uninterrupted view of the planes from pretty much every gate.
- Also, there’s a library area (in an airport!) near gate D8 which has a book on circa-2000 Japanese web design with pictures, which might make going through the airport worth it on its own.
The food in all the places was good to excellent in all the places I visiting, but I would say the best food was mostly in Okinawa. Which kind of breaks my theory on why food in Japanese is so much better than in most Western countries, which is that in most places its easy to get around on your feet or by train / bus, so restaurants have more competition and thus more incentive to cook good food. But Okinawa uses cars way more and has a much more skeletal public transportation system, and the food is just as good as on the mainland. This might be just because me or my family is better at picking out good restaurants in Japan, but we were pretty much eating at random restaurants we came across around our neighbourhood or in shopping malls. Also, Okinawan cuisine might just be to my tastes (I managed to get quite a taste for bitter melon, which shows up in a lot of Okinawan dishes, in my time there).
Overall, Okinawa didn’t feel all that much different from mainland Japan (though we stuck to mostly tourist areas and shopping malls, which would obviously be more homogenised), though the landscape looks a lot different, with no rice fields and buildings mostly made out of rather weathered looking concrete. The US military bases were very noticeable, but mostly were just annoying and time consuming to have to drive around to get anywhere.
Hong Kong doesn’t feel particularly British anymore, apart from vestigial bits of street furniture and infrastructure like the double decker buses and the tram, and the occasional old colonial building (which aren’t even that unique in Mainland China). But it still felt quite different from the mainland, and that’s mainly because it feels a lot more Japanese. There are plenty of familiar (to me) Japanese chain stores and restaurants, you can buy a vast selection of Japanese goods from Don Don Donki, and Japanese pop culture is especially prominent, even stuff that doesn’t really get exported to the west like Crayon Shin-chan.
The (mainland) Chinese infrastructure was as impressive in scale and operation as I expected it to be. The metro system in Guangzhou has 19 lines and enough frequency of trains that you never have to look up a timetable as a train shows up within a minute or two of arriving. The high-speed rail was perfectly on time always, and the stations are like airports in scale. Things seem to get rougher when you go beyond the ‘official’ physical infrastructure though. The Chinese apps were noticeably clunkier and slower than western ones, and the map apps really don’t tell you much about what there is in a particular area. In the nicely done up areas of Shenzhen and Guangzhou with lots of glassy skyscrapers its fairly easy to walk around, but in more mundane areas the footpaths are filled with all kinds of random obstacles: bins, cars and mopeds parked all over forcing you to squeeze between them, mud and debris from construction sites etc. Even in Guangdong, which is one of the (or possibly the most) developed provinces in China by whatever metric you choose, a lot of places have a distinctly ‘half-done’ feel to them.
Relating to the above, the strangest experience I had on this trip (and maybe across all the travel I’ve done) was in China. I’m going to provide my account of that evening with as little commentary as possible, as I’m honestly still not sure what to make of it:

I was with my Mandarin speaking friend in our guesthouse after having a pleasant day looking around the Diaolou of Kaiping (a town about a 1 hour train ride from Guangzhou). We looked around on the map and found a cluster of restaurants in a historic town called Chikan a couple of kilometres away. We decided to take the bus there. Due to being confused by the map app, we ended up getting off one stop early and having to walk some distance to get to the actual restaurant area. We walked through, seeing some of China’s infamous 99% completed but totally empty apartment complexes and a mysterious distant theme park looking thing along the way.

The Former Site Of review

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:11:24 +0000

The Former Site Of The New Pornographers

I have a confession to make. Despite being a 26 year old who came of age with YouTube Let’s Play videos and Tumblr blogs, I actually have the music taste of a circa-2006 hipster. I listen to more recent music as well of course¹ , but most of the music I listen to is firmly rooted in the 1990s/2000s indie rock scene. To justify which I could possibly construct a argument that the technological and cultural factors of that era were particularly conducive to a flowering of multifarious cultural movements and genres (and by contrast, the current ultra-omnipresent social media mediated world really kinda isn’t in a bad way), but that’s a post for another time. This time I’m just here to do a humble album review.

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.

Some Links on LLM (and Human) Writing

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:51:14 +0000

I’ve had a crazy busy last couple of days and my sleep schedule hasn’t quite recovered, so this will just be a link dump post. At least it’s all ‘on-theme’, albeit a rather over saturated theme these days. If you’re tired of hearing about AI, I don’t blame you!

There have been quite a few good posts on the topic of using LLMs for writing recently: here and here. Both of them land pretty close to my position, which is that there’s plenty of background tasks that LLM-based systems could be useful for (e.g. grammar checks, collating notes¹) but using it for the actual task of writing as in letting the LLM put words in your mouth is too far for me personally. To be clear, every word here is strictly typed with keys on a keyboard, and I have no plans of changing that.
Speaking of writing aids using LLMs, there’s a skill (a.k.a. a Markdown text file, I still don’t quite understand why that took so long to figure out) which acts as a writing coach, providing questions to try to tease out the writer’s ideas and improve the clarity of their writing (while never actually doing any of the editing for them, thus keeping with the above bullet point). I tried it on one of my old (already published) posts and… though it’s certainly not overly sycophantic (it grilled my post pretty hard) it seems like it wants to squeeze out all the uncertainties and idiosyncrasies for the sake of a clearer, more streamlined post. I couldn’t help but think it wants to make my post more… LLMish. Perhaps there are cases where its guidance would be helpful, for instance if I wanted to tailor my writing for a specific audience, but for now I’d rather keep my human-generated idiosyncrasies. Hopefully you find them endearing, or at least sufficiently non-LLMy to seem authentic.
And for some more general reading on similar themes to above, here’s Dynomight on prose vs. formatting.

Have thoughts? Post them in my feedback form!

Not note taking with Claude

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:17:41 +0000

TL;DR: Don’t use AI to produce notes, but using it for semantic search and knowledge synthesis seems fine. Don’t use it until you have a well ingrained note taking habit and at least 1 month of daily notes. Keep AI and human generated notes as separated as you can.

So a little while ago I finally relented and started paying for a personal Claude subscription, mostly to get access to Claude Code. As an Obsidian vault is just a directory filled with plain text Markdown files, Claude Code can seamlessly interact with the vault just by starting the CLI application in the vault directory. So am I freed from the burden of writing my own notes, now that I have a text generator that can do it all for me? Obviously not, but I think there’s still some uses for it.

My 100 Day Journaling Anniversary

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 04:49:04 +0000

As of yesterday it’s my 100 day anniversary of my daily journal goal. Through that and the word count goal I started slightly earlier, I have written over 26,000 over the last 4 or so months, much more than I have written before then. Some of that writing has made it here onto this blog, some needs some more marinating time, but overall I think all this writing has helped improve my thinking (and my writing as well) and let me note down a lot more of my thoughts that otherwise would have slipped out of my memory forever.

Speaking Practise

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:03:00 +0000

What has been going on in my life lately? Well, I’ve been attending various Japanese conversation meetups in Auckland¹. These sessions have been very fun and have allowed me to meet many new and interesting people (not just Japanese!) who have helped out not just my Japanese skills but my general world knowledge as well.

However, it has forced me to grapple with one awkward thing - my near total lack of practise speaking in Japanese.

Pre-existing forms

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 05:39:33 +0000

Turns out I kinda misunderstood how Beeminder’s rate modification works, so I’m still on the hook for one more weekly post before I can shift my posting rate down to once every two weeks. Still, here’s an off the cuff mini post to keep the system satisfied.

While browsing around for AI predictions a little while ago I stumbled upon this post on Rodney Brooks’ blog talking about a rather prescient poem from 1961 by the poet Adrienne Rich. The whole poem is worth reading, but the most striking part is its last stanza, managing to sum up my thoughts on AI creativity right now in 2026:

Links for January 2026

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 04:23:16 +0000

Announcement: I’m going to be posting once every 2 weeks from now on. I’ll still have Beeminder to make sure I stick to the posting schedule, though. I feel like I’ve burnt through most of the topics I can write about in one big writing session (hence me punting with a link post), and I would like a little more leeway to write stuff that requires actual research, or perhaps even multiple drafts?

Kvetching about Discord

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:51:24 +0000

I’ve been thinking of getting back on Discord.

This is despite my decidedly mixed experiences with the site (which I’ve barely touched in several months, despite using it quite heavily in the past), and all-online pseudonymous communities in general. For me, and I presume plenty of other people, anything that is that constantly present and inviting you to check it becomes a time leech. Throughout the last couple of years I’ve been cutting those sorts of things out of my life, one by one, until I have mostly pared down my (non-IRL adjacent) web presence to this little blog and some adjacent small, subject matter specific forums and comment sections. This has done a great job of cutting down on unnecessary stress and recovering my Slack¹, but at the cost of feeling somewhat isolated. Maybe it’s FOMO, or the fact this blog isn’t exactly breaking view count records, but I have maybe slipped too far into a fairly comfortable but lonely corner of the internet. There are certainly much worse ways to use the web, but arguably there could be better if I manage to find a smart, high-quality community (and I have some leads), and I want to avoid confusing the status quo with the best I can possibly achieve, one of the things that kept me in those stressful places in the first place.

End of Year Media Roundup Review Thing

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:50:00 +0000

Port Waikato beach, New Zealand. The rainclouds weren’t looming over us the whole time, thankfully.

It’s the last day of the summer break for me, and I’ve been actually doing appropriately New Zealand-ish summer stuff! (a.k.a. going to the beach and drinking alcohol). This has somewhat impinged on my blogging time, so this is why the blog post is a little later this week. If you want to see when my next post will be you can check my about page.

End Of Year Thoughts

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:02:00 +0000

Last blog post for the year! Merry Christmas, happy New Year etc. Here are some reflective end of year thoughts, some jolly, some less so:

1.

It seems for me that this year, especially the latter half of it, has been the year of agency. On the one hand it has definitely allowed me to do more in the whole ‘You Can Just Do Things’ spirit, not necessarily crazy out there stuff which I would’ve never thought of myself doing, but more so things I could imagine myself doing but at some unspecified future point which never seemed to solidify into any real action. For instance: actually writing my thoughts down and starting a blog, reading actual physical books in Japanese and actually getting through my thousands of unread emails and getting a clean and spam-free inbox. Not to harp on about Beeminder any more than I already have on here, but it helps a lot and neatly avoids having to rely on the slippery and unreliable concept of ‘willpower’.

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

My Beeminder + Obsidian + Shell scripts setup

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:12:00 +0000

Disclaimer: The methods described in this post involves fiddly complicated scripting stuff that probably need some prior experience with shell commands and automation to understand. Also this setup has also only been tested on my Linux machine. You might be able to get this working on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux or else translating the shell commands to PowerShell, but no guarantees.

This post also won’t really make any sense if you don’t know how Beeminder works.

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.

Miscellaneous blogging #1

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 01:14:00 +0000

Somewhere along the road between Wyuna Bay and Coromandel town, New Zealand. Photo by myself.

A busy week this week: a lot of things done, but not as much time to get my thoughts in order. So this may end up being a list of things more than a single post with a single cohesive topic. Though that might not be a bad thing?

I’m back from my trip to Thames and the Coromandel peninsula, looking at pretty trees and old gold mining history. Not much to say about it, except that it is a very beautiful part of the country and small town museums are quite a bit more interesting than you might think.

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!

The power's out in the heart of man

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 08:54:00 +0000

Beeminder says this post isn’t due until tomorrow evening, but the power went out and there’s not much else I can do, so I’m writing this post by torchlight. How romantic.

Interesting piece in Asterisk this week about the percieved decline in culture since the start of the 21st century, and the inarguable decline in published, professional reviews and essays, and therefore of criticism as a vocation. Of course, ‘critics’ (complainers, nitpickers, haters etc.) aren’t hard to find, but deep analysis, or even the brief but neatly crystalised reviews of someone like Robert Christgau seem harder to come by. Not impossible to find, of course, but almost always tucked away on niche sites and individual blogs and never surfaced by any algorithmic process or ranking by like count. Perhaps the writing from these disparite sources has a greater breadth than what you would find in a print magazine back in the day, but I feel like miss the era where finding good culture writing was more like hunting for diamonds in a few neatly formed piles rather than a massive, desolate field with rubbish dumped on it by the ton.

Might add some more thoughts later. Turns out writing stuff out longhand in the dark and then tapping it out on my phone is a lot more tiring than doing it on the computer. I guess I can count mains electricity as an uncomplicatedly good technological advance for the production of writing, at least.

Furret Blog - Now weekly! (or I lose my pie money)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:45:00 +0000

I’ve been very intrigued by the concept of Beeminder, a goal tracking service that keeps you committed to your goals by charging you actual money if you don’t stick to them. Which sounds like something no rational person would agree to (why stake your hard-earned cash on something you might not do when you can just keep it in your bank account?), but as they explain in one of their extremely detailed blog posts on the matter, you can exploit our predictable inconsistency on how we think about our preferences over time. Or in other words, I can move my intention to write a blog post Soon™ to a specific point (e.g. 12am this Saturday night), and have more riding on it than just the vague guilt of abandoning your goal to become a Cool Blogging Guy.

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.

Some musings on AI creative writing

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 06:39:00 +0000

Every so often someone (e.g. Scott Alexander here) posts an ‘AI Art Turing Test’ where people guess whether a picture was made by a human or by a Stable Diffusion-esque generative model. A little while ago fantasy author Mark Lawrence did the same¹ for creative writing with GPT-5. The results seem to show that on average people get identify about half the pieces correctly, a.k.a they don’t do any better than random chance².