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Techie Tips:
Be VERY Careful With “Agent” Ai Tools Like Moltbot (Formerly Clawdbot)
Moltbot is a viral “personal AI assistant” that can run on your computer and do tasks for you through chat apps (like WhatsApp/iMessage). Because it can be given deep access to your device, the risks are higher than those of normal apps.
What to watch for:
- A fake Moltbot/Clawdbot Visual Studio Code extension (“ClawdBot Agent – AI Coding Assistant”) was found pushing malware and has since been removed from Microsoft’s marketplace. Moltbot has no official VS Code extension, so treat any “official” looking ones as suspicious.
- Security researchers also reported cases where misconfigured Moltbot setups left credentials and chat data exposed online.
Simple advice:
If you’re not highly confident with tech security, avoid installing device-controlling AI agents for now. If you already installed anything claiming to be a Moltbot/Clawdbot extension, remove it immediately and run a reputable security scan.
Sketches:
It’s a funny thing, when you think about it, that if you owned a stock in the market and the value went up 50%, and then went down 50%, that it wouldn’t end up at what it started at.
Another way to look at it is if you owned something worth 100 and it lost 50%, it’d be worth 50. To get back to 100, you’d need a 100% gain.
Article:
Nobody Likes Being Told What To Do.
After signing up for a seminar on existential philosophy, engineer Stephan Joppich learned how quickly obligation can kill enthusiasm. He was eager to study Sartre and Camus until the professor’s first email arrived, outlining two thousand pages of required reading. His curiosity collapsed under the weight of this duty.
Joppich likens that feeling to a child crying as a parent drags them from a playground for dinner — not resisting the meal itself, but the loss of choice.
Drawing on research showing that autonomy fuels motivation, Joppich argues that the moment something becomes compulsory, it starts to feel like work. But he cites British author Oliver Burkeman’s reminder that almost nothing in life is truly mandatory, only consequential. Freedom, Joppich concludes, means recognising that you’re always choosing, and that every choice carries a cost. Once he stops forcing it, he often circles back to the task by choice, not duty.
Once you accept that nothing is actually compulsory, what do you do with all that freedom?
Writer and illustrator Jason McBride explores the human instinct to fill that space with meaning. He argues that even when belief systems fall away and nihilism flourishes, the human mind still refuses to live without order.
This impulse drives apophenia, or the tendency to see patterns in randomness — to connect dots, find stories in coincidences, and shapes in the clouds. While it can lead to delusion or despair, it can also spark creativity.
McBride calls apophenia our “inner poet,” the part of us that turns confusion into coherence. Through writing, painting, or simply paying attention, he says, we can turn chaos into something bearable or even beautiful.
Meaning, he concludes, isn’t something we find but something we build through attention and imagination.
Book Recommendation:
Gilbert offers insights into the mysterious nature of inspiration. She asks us to embrace our curiosity and let go of needless suffering. She shows us how to tackle what we most love, and how to face down what we most fear. She discusses the attitudes, approaches, and habits we need in order to live our most creative lives. Balancing soulful spirituality and cheerful pragmatism, Gilbert encourages us to uncover the “strange jewels” hidden within each of us. Whether we are looking to write a book, make art, find new ways to address challenges in our work, embark on a long-deferred dream, or simply infuse our everyday lives with more mindfulness and passion, Big Magic cracks open a world of wonder and joy.