iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yesterday’s NYT Connections had a huge hint to the purple category (Greek letters inside phrases) in the top row: DELTA HIDDEN INSIDE MODEL TANK. Bet Wyna loved coming up with that!

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 1h

My college class group chat was talking about this guy who walked in and delivered a bomb threat during one of our finals and this detail in the news report (by @vermontgmg.bsky.social and Adam Lalley) was funny to think about today - the guy wanted a cell phone to call the police and no one had one

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 29/09/2026

Reminder to myself: keep talking about books I'm reading! Currently in my reading rotation: Jemimah Wei's "The Original Daughter", Otessa Mosfegh's "My Year of Rest and Relaxation", and Harlan Coben's "Plot Twist". All of which I'm halfway through and enjoying

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Reposted by Daryl Sng

Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I remember a really frustrating conversation with a generally decent cishet white guy about a news story where a woman was roofied. he went off about wishing he could beat that guy up to avenge her, and I was like "how about start with calling out your friends' sexist tweets?" and he was like 😳

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 29/09/2026

Things I have used an LLM to help me do in the last couple of months: 1. Figure out how to set up a home media server so I can digitise my DVDs from multiple regions and watch shows that aren’t available on streaming (mostly arthouse films and British TV series, I’m pretentious that way)

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 29/09/2026

A lot of today's discourse on AI/LLMs handling tasks feels to me like people who have little problem with executive function not understanding why people who have major issues with executive function can't just do things they see as very easy

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 28/09/2026

Big fan of Jamelle but I speak to my spouse and kids all the time when we’re in person together and I can’t imagine not having my group chat with them. It would be very hard for me to manage my family stuff and schedules without it

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 28/09/2026

The whole "I've never heard Choosin' Texas" / "I don't believe you've never heard Choosin' Texas" thing goes to show that bubbles aren't just confined to MAGA or left-lib. Lots of people saying either assume they are part of some universal experience just because their bubble feels more normie

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 26/09/2026

Digitising my DVD collection to create a home media server and it’s been a trip down memory lane. I had forgotten how much I loved This Life

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 25/09/2026

Fun side project I just completed: transferred all the email in my Eudora mailboxes from college and the early 2000s to my Gmail. For better or worse I now have a fully searchable archive of all the emails in my adult life

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 24/09/2026

1) This is awesome, more people should see opera 2) I never really thought about it but isn't it odd to name a theatrical performance location after Lincoln? Kind of like the Aussies naming the Henry Holt Swim Centre after the PM who went missing while swimming

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 23/09/2026

I once referred to a failed thirst trap attempt as an Instagraham but sadly it required knowing that the Graham cracker was invented to curb horniness for the joke to work

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Reposted by Daryl Sng

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I think the mistake here is again an assumption - pardon me, but a *racist* assumption - that only the United States (and Europe) has real agency and the rest of the world are mere passive recipients of American policy rather than active agents in their own story *who can decide to do bad things.*

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 18/09/2026

I added a fun feature to my reading journal app that allows me to capture my bookshelf. The practical part is this allows me to stop accidentally buying 2 copies of the same book. The fun part is I can also scan books into the app with a barcode scanner. Beep! New book in. Beep! Beep!

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 17/09/2026

Good to see Mark Carney and Andy Burnham celebrate today’s Everton goal

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 16/09/2026

I made exactly one (1) joke a couple of years ago about the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and now autocorrect thinks American Pest should be Mercian Pest like I’m Alfred the Great talking about Ceolwulf II

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 14/09/2026

Got my annual COVID and flu shot today together with my family

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 12/09/2026

Just finished Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World. It’s really good (and I was going in expecting to hate it). A sharp examination of Stanford and the rise of corporatism and the worship of money in academia, paired with the replication crisis in science and the downfall of MTL, President of Stanford

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 11/09/2026

Finally finished a few books yesterday. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot; Steve Cavanagh’s Kill for Me, Kill for You; and Ashley Poston’s The Someday Garden. Nice mix of genres, literary autofiction, psychological thriller, and romcom with a touch of the fantastical respectively.

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 09/09/2026

I have an idea for a novel that draws on my days as a diplomat. Might as well say it out loud and force myself to commit to at least trying

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 09/09/2026

I like that today’s NYT Connections board has words 16 to 1 letter long in descending order

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 09/09/2026

This year my son goes from being on the younger side on his travel soccer team to being one of the oldest because US Youth Soccer has switched from calendar year to academic year for age groups, and all I can think about is this is a great natural experiment of that Gladwell idea around age cohorts

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

so much attention space was devoted to the specious thesis that coordinated online harassment was somehow a creation of right-wing backlash rather than a generic property of communication mediums like this one

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

its really becoming obvious from looking at online disputes here -- where there are zero right wingers present -- that consensus narratives about online harrassment in the 2010s were totally wrong

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 08/09/2026

Decided to solve the NYT Tuesday puzzle normally instead of downs-only and set my Tuesday puzzle time record, even with few fat finger typos. 2:33

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 04/09/2026

I’m curious about what the authors of this paper think the policy implications here should be, if schools like Kumon significantly improve math and reading scores for lower costs than public spending, but do so mostly for the wealthier families that purchase tutoring

Kumon Up:
Private
Tutoring
Centers and Student
Achievement
Joshua Goodman &
Samuel Nitkin
SHARE
in
WORKING PAPER 35671
DOI 10.3386/w35671
ISSUE DATE August 2026

Private tutoring chains like Kumon and Sylvan have expanded rapidly in recent decades.
Combining data on business locations, household spending, and district test scores, we study who uses these centers and how they affect academic skills. Nearly half of tutoring users are from the top income decile, with Asian and White households five and two times as likely to purchase tutoring as Black and Hispanic households. A staggered differences-in-differences design shows the opening of a district's first chain center raises district-wide math and reading scores by 0.02-0.03 standard deviations, at a much lower cost than public spending typically producing similar gains. Math effects are largest for White and Asian students, so that center entry widens racial achievement gaps, though less so in more racially integrated districts. These private investments help their users, deepen educational inequality, and shape outcomes by which state accountability systems and families judge schools.

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 03/09/2026

One thing I noticed visiting London a couple of times this year after almost a decade away was the fact that my boogers/bogeys were no longer black (I know this graph is NOx and not the PM that actually stains the boogers, but I assume PM levels similarly dropped)

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 03/09/2026

RIP Gloria Steinem, whose death I learned about from seeing the dedication in My Life on the Road posted today. A very moving dedication

THIS BOOK IS
DEDICATED TO:
Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.
Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, "You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life."
Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust,
would not mind if I say this so long after your death:
I've done the best I could with my life.
This book is for you.

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 03/09/2026

Going down the rabbit hole of micro dramas it turns out there’s a whole set of dramas about alphas including “Fated to My Homeless Billionaire Alpha” and “Mated to the Alpha and His Beta”

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 03/09/2026

Been on a bit of a Steve Cavanagh binge ever since my mystery and thriller book club chose Fifty-Fifty as its book for last month. Eddie Flynn as the swashbuckling lawyer who defends the innocent in outlandish crimes with gratuitous murders along the way seems to be the common theme

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 02/09/2026

There’s a category called Microdramas on Peacock and every show just looks bizarre. Like the streaming equivalent of a B-movie or pulp fiction, except without the kitsch/camp

Peacock Microdramas

STRAIGHT
A PREGNANCY
Straight A Pregnancy

30 DAYS
TILL I MARRY
MY HUSBAND'S
NEMESIS
30 Days Til I Marry My Hus...

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 02/09/2026

Back when I was an editor, I used to nitpick about italicised full stops / periods. They changed the spacing ever so slightly, but enough to be noticeable. Especially obvious if the typeface used a square instead of a circle for the full stop. Here’s an example I created using Verdana

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 01/09/2026

NFL fans in Chicago should chant “UR - S - A! UR - S - A!” It’s Bears repeating

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 31/08/2026

Every now and then I get reminded just how amazing Kelly Clarkson’s pipes are. Golden has to be one of the technically hardest pop songs to sing youtu.be/py_P2TI-gNg?...

youtu.be

'Golden' from Kpop Demon Hunters | Kelly Clarkson Kellyoke Cover

YouTube video by The Kelly Clarkson Show

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 31/08/2026

Opened Bank of America savings accounts for my kids this weekend and we had to fill in their job. Obviously since they're 6 I chose "Unemployed", but I did notice that while there was no option for "Consultant", there was an option for "Arms Dealer"

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 31/08/2026

I’ll abandon the books mega-thread and just post about each book I’ve read. Re-read Song of Achilles after watching the Odyssey. The Patroclus / Achilles relationship I found still as beautifully delineated as ever, but this time around I found Briseis even more compelling & was incensed by Pyrrhus

Cover saying;

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The
SONG OF ACHILLES

A NOVEL

MADELINE MILLER

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 30/08/2026

I learned today, after a total of almost 20 years or so in America, that apparently you Americans have a different meaning of “oblong” from me and from Brits and most of the rest of the English-speaking world

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 27/08/2026

I don’t usually pay that much attention to blurbs but I just picked up Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House because of an @xlo.bsky.social quote on the back cover

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 27/08/2026

Even if you know the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, you may not know the image is a 1969 photo by Peter Hujar, titled Orgasmic Man

Book cover featuring a black and white photo of a man, saying

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST

A LITTLE LIFE

HANYA YANAGIHARA

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Philippe Auclair @philippeauclair.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

To anyone who does not live in Paris but visits the city at regular intervals (as I do), the transformation has been staggering: Paris has been reclaimed from cars. It can be done, and could be done in London too. It is all about political will and taking the risk of being unpopular - for a while.

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 26/08/2026

I find this is especially bad when it’s an argument that doesn’t fit into a typical American left-right spectrum. People desperately push an argument to fit the contours of an argument they already know, and then argue for or against that, instead of what was actually said

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 26/08/2026

Casablanca subtitle: “I bless Claude Rains down in Africa”

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 26/08/2026

Anyone else have art exhibitions from over 20 years ago that still stick with you? The ones pre-smartphone and so long ago that there aren’t lots of great pics online Two for me: Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Serpentine, London, 2000 Keith Haring at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1996

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CJ Fogler @cjzero.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Jordan Southerland won the dunk of the contest by combining a 6 foot high jump with a dunk 🤯

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 26/08/2026

If you haven’t heard Dolly Parton’s cover of Collective Soul’s “Shine”, it’s one of my favourite covers. She finds the bluegrass heart of the song, banjo fiddle and all youtu.be/plUD6vN80dg?...

youtu.be

Dolly Parton - Shine (Official)

YouTube video by DollyPartonVEVO

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 25/08/2026

Can't name just one favourite Dolly Parton song - just too many - but her vocal performance in "I Will Always Love You" is near-perfect: teetering on the verge of heartbreak and yet summoning the will to wish her loved one well, a voice of vulnerability and strength at the same time

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 25/08/2026

RIP Dolly. A great singer, and an even greater person

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 25/08/2026

U.S. youth soccer is switching from a calendar year-based system (oldest kids on team born in January) to a school year-based system (oldest kids born in August). Could be a natural experiment to test the Malcolm Gladwell piece about hockey players tending to cluster at the top of their age bracket

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 24/08/2026

Well, I for one, and V for five, like Roman numerals

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 23/08/2026

Free association time: The Browns are in Cleveland, Ohio. McKinley is from Ohio. Mt McKinley was renamed Denali. Therefore the Browns are living in Denali.

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