No. 110 The unknowable future is gonna rule?
No. 110 • 6/5/2025
Dear readers,
Whenever I’m busy working on books, articles, or the property, writing newsletters tends to fall to the wayside. Mostly cuz so much of what goes into the newsletter does not go into either of the above. Alas, I am, and it seems will always be, very much involved in books, articles, and property stuff. So, if I wanna keep writing my newsletter, which I do love to do, I need to just make it happen. So, this is me attempting to do that.
What I’m up to writing and teaching and speaking….
Working on not one, but two book manuscripts. Both are in the realm of reading and writing. I’m hoping one of these bad gyals will become a rough draft by end of year, so I can clean-draft it into a book by summer of 2026. Expect excerpts between now and then.
Working on an online course tentatively called "Tactics for Reading"
An interview I sat for back in March: Bob Doto: The Genie of the Zettelkasten Subreddit
The PKM Summit in Utrecht was wonderful. My talk on writing with a zettelkasten was a huge hit. I signed dozens of books, and never came close to acclimating to the time, so I was in a psychedelic haze for most of it.
What we’re up to on the property….
Making stone paths from stones dug up out of the ground. Put doors on the barn. Planted some Norway Spruce to screen our neighbor's love of spotlights and enormous blue tarps. Cleared an area for B's office studio. Excavating like beasts.
How’s my book A System for Writing doing?
So good. Book sales remain steady. Recommendations and (really positive) reviews keep coming in. PS, please add yours to the fray on Amazon and/or Goodreads. I consistently earn a couple thousand bucks a month off sales, which is effing insane. I can’t live off it, but I can half live off it, which is an entirely new concept for me. Never in my thirty years of music-making, writing, art stuff, zines, etc. have I earned any income that could make a dent in daily living. Of course, I never tried to make a cent, thanks to Gen-X success guilt. So, count me extremely grateful to all the millennials for teaching me that it’s ok to want to make money from your creative pursuits.
And, now the high ponies…
Do LLM's suck at coding or do you suck at coding?
The extent of my coding abilities are tweaking some basic html and css, along with working in markdown for all my writing. So, take this for what it's worth. But, "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts" makes some decent and convincing points about where the "suck" in "LLM's suck at x" should be placed. One point that was made in the piece, and is made in almost every “LLM's are great” piece has to do with dolla dolla bills:
"Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs."
To which this commenter on Hacker News retorted:
"[T]he future coders who aren't being hired and trained because a senior dev doesn't understand that the junior devs become senior devs (and that's an important pipeline) and would rather pay $20/month for an LLM, are going to become a major loss/ brain drain domestically."
The cavernous divide between these two takes has to do with whether you believe people should actively not use LLM's in an effort to maintain a social contract whereby elders teach non-elders for a premium, or people should ignore this social contract, not be on the hook for paying high wages, and still get some semblance of "good" work done.
Each side of the argument thinks they're Super Really Right, and I'm way too "We're living in the apocalypse! Save yourself!” to care?
Also, another take on HN sums up the very sad state of schools and LLMs:
"I had a rather depressing experience this semester in my office hours with two students who had painted themselves in a corner with code that was clearly generated. They came to me for help, but were incapable of explaining why they had written what was on their screens. I decided to find where they had lost the thread of the class and discovered that they were essentially unable to write a helloworld program. In other words, they lost the thread on day one. Up until this point, both students had nearly perfect homework grades while failing every in-class quiz."
I coulda told you this ten years ago when I started using GPS for driving and immediately saw my sense of direction collapse into nothing.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog
My smartest friends have bananas arguments about LLM coding.
Don’t worry about climate change now, cuz AGI will fix that in the future
Speaking of social contracts tech bros really want us to abandon cuz Fuuuuuuuture:
“[C]laims of “AGI” are a cover for abandoning the current social contract. Instead of focusing on the here and now, many people who focus on AGI think we ought to abandon all other scientific and socially beneficial pursuits and focus entirely on issues related to developing (and protecting against) AGI.”
Is there any Actually Viable Option for resistance? No? Yeah, I know.
The Myth of AGI | TechPolicy.Press
Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender write that claims of "Artificial General Intelligence" are a cover for abandoning the current social contract.
Breaking the crypto influencer fourth wall
I'm crypto illiterate, and really couldn’t give two bananas about what goes on there, but I always find Zeneca’s writing interesting, funny, informed, and accessible for said illiterates like moi. Over the years, Zeneca has become kinda “big," and wrote a long piece on how that actually happened, the reality behind being a "Key Opinion Leader" or "KOL" with 400k followers, and an ability to upend markets with a single Tweet.
For creatives wondering how they got there....
“At the end of every day I would post my spreadsheet [on NFT prices] and write a thread talking about what happened that day. People liked it. My follower count started to go absolutely ballistic. It was a perfect storm of creating content people liked + the entire sector blowing up. Every day there were thousands of people joining Twitter going “who are the people to follow?” and my name got thrown in the hat along with a bunch of others.”
For people who also wanna “get big,” pay close attention to:
“It was a perfect storm of creating content people liked + the entire sector blowing up.”
This is the magic equation. You need to provide valuable, well-liked content to members of a scene about to flip into the mainstream. (I'm using “mainstream” relatively here, as in any level above insider-only subcultural spaces). This way, when people get really into you, and newbies wanna know who to also be into, everyone points their finger your way.
Mind you, this isn’t the only way to get big. Being good at what you do and providing a relatively easy way for like-minded people to appreciate it (or hide yourself behind a wall of scene insularity that makes them want to claw their way toward you cuz fomo) is still a tried and true approach. But, if you want “big quickly,” the former is the way. It’s how my writing for The Babarazzi got big, and how my book on zettelkasten got kinda sorta big, but not huge, but still big, cuz although I missed the flip, I filled the gap.
A behind the scenes look at having 400k+ social media followers
A day in the life of an influencer, or, eugh, a "KOL"
AI is coming for your em-dash
If I had a nickel every time something I did or was into got picked up by normies, turned into normie crap at the normie crap level of society, eventually made to seem cliché or passé by normies, and then had to wait it all out while the normies argued among themselves about what’s cool or not, only so I could continue doing my own thing without much fanfare again…I'd be a gazillionaire.
“A few Fridays ago, there was an awkward silence at Every’s editorial meeting. Six floating heads of writers and editors on Zoom blinked at each other, petrified by a punctuation mark—the em dash. ChatGPT loooves the em dash—arguably, a bit too much—to the point that it’s become a tell-tale sign of AI-generated writing. (See what I did there?) On the call, we worried—should we avoid using it because it makes our writing sound like AI?”
Here we go again.
I use em dashes. Always have. Always will. And yet, now I need to wait out the suck-fest that is, "Ooooo.... I see Bob uses em dashes. I wonder if he had AI write all his stuff?" long enough for no one to care anymore, and I can go back to using em dashes and people just thinking I'm super smart for doing so.
.png)
What the Em Dash Says About AI-assisted Writing—And Us
Good writing is about more than a punctuation mark
The world's largest punk archive
Speaking of scenes and things you were into becoming norm-i-fied….
"[Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music's] archive includes an estimated 60,000 vinyl records, photos, zines and documents spanning decades of punk rock’s global evolution. Weighing in at around eight tons, the collection is a defining piece of music history — and it will now be part of the Center for Popular Music’s research legacy inside the College of Media and Entertainment Building."
This all sounds sadly quaint. I’m old.
World’s largest punk archive to find new home at MTSU’s Center for Popular Music – MTSU News
The world’s largest collection of punk records — the iconic Maximum Rocknroll, or MRR, archive — is relocating from the Bay Area in California to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Bonus poné
And, that's that! See ya next week.
Please share this newsletter far and wide. Without social media, you are how I reach the world. Help me extend my reach.
Get my book
Pick up my latest book, A System for Writing, [here], which will radically transform your system-less approach to writing into an anarcho-rhizome approach to wild thinking and writing!
What people are saying:
"It's one of my favorite things to see in my Inbox." —JS
"I love everything you speak on!" —MA
"I'm fine with it." —MG
Got a question or something you'd like me to write about? Send me what you're thinking!