AI Weekly Malaysia

Peter Vijeh fine-tuned a small GLiNER named-entity model to extract brands, models and steels from knife comments across six subreddits (r/knives, r/knifeclub, r/chefknives, r/japaneseknives, r/FixedBladeEdc, r/KnifeSteels), then asked who does the recommending in 'what should I buy' threads. The headline finding: one chef's-knife brand gets 31% of its buying-thread mentions from 5% of the accounts, four times what chance would predict. He says the buying-thread numbers can be recomputed from the published data with one script, but the account-history comparison cannot, because it rests on usernames he will not publish; the post drew 276 points and 359 comments on Hacker News.

Why: If you use the 'append reddit to a Google search' trick for product or tooling research — or if your growth plan is seeding Reddit comments — this gives you a concrete number to reason about: one brand taking 31% of recommendation mentions from 5% of accounts. Note what you can and cannot verify: the 4x concentration is recomputable from the published data, the account-history evidence is not, so treat the second claim as unverified and the first as a measurable pattern you could run on your own category. Vijeh also states the post was drafted with AI from his outline and run logs before editing, which is worth knowing when you weigh the prose against the code.

Reddit announced it is winding down RSS feeds, with support ending November 13, 2026, and will shut down public API access in March 2027. Reddit says RSS had become a "common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse," and points moderators toward the Discord Relay Devvit app as a migration path, while stating there is no direct replacement for RSS consumption. The move lands as Reddit's non-advertising "other revenue" grew 24% year-over-year to $43 million in Q2, largely on AI data licensing deals.

Why: If you ingest Reddit via RSS or the public API — for moderation alerts, sentiment pipelines, dataset collection, or agent tooling — you have a hard deadline of November 13, 2026 for RSS and March 2027 for the API, and no free equivalent is being offered. Reddit's $43M/24%-growth non-ad revenue line shows the intended replacement is a paid licensing deal, so any product that depends on Reddit content needs either a Devvit-based re-architecture, a budget line for licensed data, or a different data source. Treat this as a pricing signal, not just an access change: free community data is being converted into a commercial licensing product.

Ars Technica reports that Reddit is adding limits to Old.Reddit.com, with the headline stating that users who haven't used Old Reddit in 6 months will be blocked from it. The supplied article text contains only Ars Technica/Conde Nast cookie-consent boilerplate, so no implementation details, dates, rollout scope, or Reddit statement are available.

Why: If your workflow depends on old.reddit.com — lightweight browsing, mod tooling, or scrapers that hit the legacy frontend — this is a signal that access may become conditional on recent activity, but the text gives no enforcement mechanism, API impact, or timeline, so don't rewrite anything based on this item alone. Wait for Reddit's own announcement or a follow-up with concrete details before changing scraping or moderation tooling.