Links on Tom Guernier's Blog

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?

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!

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?

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.

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.