Hello internet person,

Welcome to a new transmission from the ToasterBotnet.

Last month I spent way too much time on:

• Automating ridiculous amounts of my life

• Building better infrastructure for ToasterBotnet

• Experimenting with unfiltered videos

• Questioning whether I should automate one more thing or actually make a video

• And, occasionally, actually making videos

The grind is still very real.

A lot of work. Not a lot of feedback yet.

But things are moving.

Let's begin.

🌶️ HOT TOPIC

Stop Optimizing the Wrong Layer

I went on a bit of an automation rampage this month.

Small recurring tasks. Backups. Monitoring. Downloads. File cleanup. Social media posting. Random maintenance jobs.

Things that individually take two minutes here, five minutes there, once every few weeks.

Previously, automating some of these would have been stupid.

You could spend hours writing a script to save five minutes every three months.

But AI has changed that equation.

When you can create a small shell or Python script in a few minutes, the threshold for what is worth automating becomes dramatically lower.

So I kept going.

Eventually my personal automation system got complicated enough that I had to implement actual error handling.

If one of my scripts fails, it can now notify me and even create a Todoist task in my inbox telling me what broke.

Which is objectively ridiculous.

But also extremely useful.

Instead of remembering dozens of little maintenance tasks, I mostly monitor the system that monitors the maintenance.

It's like moving one layer higher in the reality stack.

Of course, there is an obvious problem:

I probably should have spent some of that time making more content.

Automation can very easily become productive procrastination.

There is always another script to improve. Or Another cronjob.

But historically, investing in systems has worked well for me. You pay the cost once and hopefully buy back attention for years.

So I decided to ride the automation spree while the motivation was there.

Now the infrastructure exists.

Which means it is time for it to actually do its job:

Give me more mental RAM for making better things.

🎬 New Content

New Video: Social Hierarchies — Reject Groupthink

Groups create their own invisible rules.

Opinions become social signals.

People learn surprisingly quickly which thoughts earn approval and which ones make the room uncomfortable.

This video is about groupthink, social hierarchies, conformity, and why thinking independently is much harder than simply believing that you do.

Watch here:

New Videos: The Unfiltered Experiment

I also tried something very different:

I sat in front of the camera and just talked.

No elaborate script.

No obsessive editing.

No hiding behind twenty layers of production.

Just me talking.

The resulting videos are not particularly great.

And that is kind of the point.

Speaking naturally to a camera is a skill, and the only realistic way to get better at it is to repeatedly be slightly bad at it until you aren't.

Highly scripted videos let me carefully manufacture every sentence.

Unfiltered videos expose all the uncomfortable stuff instead:

Timing. Storytelling.

How quickly I can formulate an idea.

Whether I can actually hold someone's attention without fixing everything in the edit.

I'm not replacing normal ToasterBotnet videos with this format.

I'm using it as training. Consider it the YouTube equivalent of doing reps at the gym.

New Short: The Struggle Is Real

A small contribution to humanity's rapidly expanding archive of people suffering as content creators trying to make it.

Watch here:

🧠 Things I Learned Recently

Depth Is Probably the Better Bet

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what ToasterBotnet videos should actually become.

Shorter? Faster? More immediately clickable?

I increasingly think the answer is the opposite.

More depth.

The production pipeline is finally becoming routine.

Editing doesn't feel like fighting the software anymore.

My workflow is better.

The videos are slowly getting better.

Which means production itself is becoming less of the bottleneck.

The next bottleneck is the thing that actually matters:

Is the idea interesting enough to deserve someone's attention?

So I want to spend more time researching subjects properly and creating educational deep dives instead of constantly trying to compress everything into shallow little packages.

🖥️ Behind The Scenes

🎬 Growing ToasterBotnet

Growth continues to be stubbornly slow.

That is probably the least exciting sentence I could put into a newsletter, but pretending otherwise would be stupid.

I'm still putting a significant amount of work into this project while receiving relatively little feedback from the outside world.

That can screw with your perception.

When numbers barely move, it is tempting to assume nothing is improving.

But there are actually several different things happening underneath the visible metrics.

The editing is improving.

The workflow is improving.

I'm more comfortable publishing.

The technical infrastructure is becoming increasingly automated.

And I'm finally reaching the point where I can spend less attention figuring out how to make videos and more attention figuring out which videos are worth making.

The next phase needs to be less about polishing the machine and more about feeding better ideas into it.

⚙️ Building the ToasterBotnet Machine

I've also improved the machinery behind the project.

Some social media posting can now happen automatically instead of requiring me to manually upload the same thing to five different places.

I've been cleaning up scripts, adding monitoring and removing recurring maintenance tasks from Todoist whenever they can be reliably automated instead.

🎥 Upcoming Videos

Wittgenstein in the Age of AI

The next larger video is about Ludwig Wittgenstein.

More specifically:

What happens when Wittgenstein's ideas about language collide with artificial intelligence?

⚙️ Tool Of The Month

Cron

Yes. Cron.

The ancient Unix tool that quietly executes commands at specified times while asking for absolutely no attention.

It is deeply unsexy.

It also runs half my life now.

The modern tech industry could learn something from software that doesn't require an account, subscription, blockchain, AI assistant and Series C funding round before it can execute a shell script every Sunday.

📬 Get in touch

Write me a DM on social media or send me an email to:

[email protected]

Stay weird.

Daniel