Reddit, Inc. became one of the most valuable platforms for advertising because users trusted it. That trust came from strong communities with decentralized moderation that surfaced valuable content. But that trust is being eroded by bad actors attempting to manipulate public opinion for financial gain, and replace that content with AI slop.

I recently discovered a network of bot/shill accounts boosting the UI Bakery brand, and defaming competitors. I got a notification for nearly every post, because they chose to mention Appsmith in each one (a keyword I monitor for work), and then claim it didn’t work for them but UI Bakery magically fixed all their problems! All the posts are from new accounts (3-6 mo) that started out karma-farming with cat pics and memes, then suddenly become huge fans of UI Bakery. 🤔

In the same week, the top post in r/marketing is from another user exposing a similar bot network.

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐚 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐲 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞: abusing a system known for trust, in order to deceive others for financial gain, only to destroy the system and trust that made it valuable in the first place.

And once that trust is gone, no one wins: not users, not platforms, not even the companies trying to exploit it.

Lately I’ve been getting into Raspberry Pi’s and other IoT device, and mixing in some vibe-coding. I thought about starting a new section for my newsletter- specifically for IoT stuff, but knowing me, I will have a new side-project in 6 months and have to rename this section. So I’m doing it now and just calling it Side Projects 🤷

Recently I completed my first Raspberry Pi project: It's a push-to-talk AI device for your desk that works with local Ollama models. Privacy-first, and works completely offline without outside internet, as long as the Pi has wifi or LAN for the more powerful machine running the AI model locally.

For the last few weeks my feed was full of Ralph Wiggum, but it seems we’ve finally moved on to the next AI trend: ClawdBot! 🦞

ClawdBot is a new AI assistant that runs locally and works with local or online models, can send texts, browse the web, and has full file system access! Sound scary? Yes. Useful? So far the reviews are saying it lives up to the hype.

It’s received nearly 65k GitHub stars in just a few weeks! Kudos to Peter Steinberger for the amazing work, and thanks for making it open source!

One of the great things about Claude Code is its ability to run tasks in a subprocess, allowing you to continue the chat with Claude while it works in the background. Recently I discovered this can be used to SSH into another machine and remote-vibe-code to make changes on headless servers from your main desktop/laptop.

I used it to connect to a headless Raspberry Pi so that I could chat with Claude from my Macbook and push updates to the Pi. Just give Claude the IP address or host name, and the credentials needed for ssh, and it will establish a connection in a background task. From there you can chat from your main machine and vibe-code on the remote one!

Oh, and that side-project above with the Raspberry Pi? I didn’t write a single line of code. Everything was done using this method, vibe-coding from my Macbook to let Claude program the Pi. I just told it what sensors and devices I had, and it wrote the scripts and told me what pins to connect!

One of my favorite features in Appsmith is the custom widget. You can write your own UI component and then pass in data and trigger events just like a native widget. But it does require a little coding experience to set up. Or at least it did, until we added the Custom Widget Copilot!

Just tell it what kind of UI you need, and it will generate a custom widget that is interactive and connected to your data.

Knowledge graphs and graph databases are commonly used for RAG because they can be more repeatable and explainable than vector retrieval. If you’re looking to add graph RAG to your AI stack, check out this great intro tutorial from Jason Koo on setting up Neo4j in Docker.

Google Forms is a great solution when you need something quick and don’t care about the UI or branding. But what if you want to keep the data in sheets, and have a more customizable UI, and do it for free?

It’s pretty easy to set up using CloudFlare Pages/Workers, GitHub Pages, etc and then POST the data to Google Apps Script- allowing you to keep adding to the same sheet, but replace the UI with something you have full control over.

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