iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This is the Minecraft End Poem. Lord knows why the AI is quoting it though

Meanwhile, I'm listening to the Coben as an audiobook because I enjoy his voice, but will probably get the text as well; I enjoy Coben books, outlandish as they sometimes are, and I think his adages on writing are a good motivator for me to Just Write My Damn Book Already

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Mosfegh's work so far has been a nice parallel to Elif Batuman's "The Idiot" which I read a few weeks ago - set in 2000, and captures the sense of what it means to be in your 20s in pre-9/11 America (though I'm assuming the book will get to 9/11 at some point)

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"The Original Daughter" spoke to me in an unexpected way - it's not just that it's set in Singapore, lots of it is set specifically in the Fengshan estate, which is basically where I spent my life before college. So far it captures the student rat race in Singapore very well

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 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

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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Could I have done all of these without an LLM? Maybe, but the amount of time it would have taken makes me suspect not. And that’s before I even come to all the executive function things (breaking down to-dos into step by step tasks, writing scripts for phone calls, etc.) that I’ve found helpful

8. More of a fun project than one with much utility now but created a travel log of every flight I’ve ever taken since 2000 (this would’ve been great during various stages of my immigration application process, where I had to present a log of every time I had left and reentered the U.S.)

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7. Learned many house repair and maintenance tasks: how to replace the O ring filter on a whole home filter, how to drain my washing machine, how to decipher the bitting numbers on closet keys etc.

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6. Converted all my Eudora email boxes from 1997-2005 and uploaded it into Gmail so now I have all my college and post-college mails in one place. Cringe and nostalgia!

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5. Create a complete inventory of the books I own that I can now search to make sure I don’t buy repeats next time I’m in the second hand bookstore (and also frankly it’s just nice to have a catalogue of my books) - I’ve since supplemented that with a barcode reader that reads ISBNs

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4. Create family trees to map the genealogy of both sides of my and my wife’s family. The LLM’s ability to read obituaries and headstones in Chinese and understand how the info was presented was invaluable here

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3. Write a new printer driver for my 13-year-old Brother colour laser printer after my MacBook stopped recognising its ability to print in colour (Brother stopped issuing drivers for the printer years ago)

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2. Diagnosing how to make my Lenovo laptop work after my son dropped it, leaving the screen dangling and nothing working. It involved opening the laptop casing and removing the display cable. No actual guide on how to do this existed in Google

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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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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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You would think the CEO of United would know a way to sit next to his kids for a couple of hours! But seriously, it’s so helpful with scheduling and I don’t even think my son is one of those over scheduled kids

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Yeah having young kids is different. I can’t imagine what the model of no group chat would look like with my teenage son and all the things we have to do or schedule just to coordinate our lives

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Like what he describes here clearly works for him, but I don’t think (or at least I hope) I’m not that unusual for having a family group chat and a family calendar

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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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My family has its private language, yes, and it's not the same as the language the grocery stores I'm shopping at, so the LLM's super-translator abilities have been great.

My experience of using an LLM for grocery shopping is it is much better than me at taking things I was used to buying in Singapore and figuring out what the Asian grocery stores near me in Maryland call them, and it's very helpful when I go to the Japanese supermarket and need help reading labels

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As a parent with kids in 3 different schools, having an agent act as essentially an executive assistant to remind me of various things has been amazing

Indeed! Though this topic being debated alerted me to the fact that there's a sequel to The Great Good Place II coming out this year

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And in fact, you could argue that if you were of a revolutionary bent, you specifically need spaces that aren't state-provided to congregate

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Building on what @dov.bsky.social said - the book that defined the term Third Places (and I don't know when that became "third spaces") is literally titled "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community". All for-profit

I love that the full title of the 2nd edition is "The great good place: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community"

It's so ridiculous. Like you said, The Great Good Place lists cafes as third spaces, and in fact I'd say the big examples of third places that the book gives are largely for-profit places: taverns in the American Revolution, cafes in the French revolution, etc.

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And the most possible way to deal with that fact is to find ways for such people to feel or understand that issues matter to them personally, rather than try to get them to change their moral framework

On a related note, I know a lot of people sneer at conservatives who only have a change of position on things like gay rights when it affects their family, but you're never going to change the fact that a significant portion of people in any society only change positions when they feel it personally

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 27/09/2026

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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I think Meta’s Muse agent approach might be the one to introduce the value of AI as exec function support

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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

Surely "Airport!" is better than "Airplane!"?

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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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So you’re saying that the path to being a grubby yet roguish journalist is BA, BA, black sheep

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Daryl Sng @darylsng.com · 23/09/2026

And it's _so_ local too, like you read it and it's clearly "only in Western Mass."

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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

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

Reposted by Daryl Sng

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 · 23/09/2026

Judging by my kid’s homework over the years, Americans still use too much natural language in math for my taste

Kudus to you for noticing

Would've thought this was more of a Nextdoor ad thing, since it's about your neighbourhood

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Makes sense, Swole Nilgai is certainly worth beholding every so often!

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