🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #103

Sending you Thursday morning cheer! Have a splendid day ahead.

#RahulDravid - What the heck is The Wall doing in a Tech Gossip column?! Rahul Dravid, the all-round Indian cricketer, has joined. Salesforce as the first ever-brand ambassador to help Indian businesses grow using Salesforce CRM platform.

#WhatsApp - First, ethical hackers found a way to access the View-Once only posts in WhatsApp, who then “fixed it”. A week later, they were again able to access these posts just fine! Can they really resolve it?

Ed Tech Giant Byju's Faces Unpaid Dues Crisis, Services Suspended By AWS And Vodafone Idea
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vodafone Idea have suspended their services to BYJU'S due to unpaid dues, citing the edtech firm's mounting financial troubles and severe liquidity crisis. BYJU'S owes AWS and Vodafone Idea millions of dollars in unpaid bills, leading to a suspension of services, including cloud computing and telecommunications. The company's mobile app has been crashing, and teachers are no longer conducting classes voluntarily due to unpaid salaries.

BHASKAR: India's New Startup Ecosystem Platform
Union Minister Piyush Goyal recently announced the launch of BHASKAR, a digital platform to unify India's startup ecosystem, providing a one-stop solution for collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing.

Galaxy Tab S10 Series Now Up For Pre-reserve In India
Samsung India fans can now pre-reserve the upcoming Galaxy Tab S10 series. The banner reads "New Galaxy Tab," with the tagline "Galaxy AI is here". Users will get a 45W fast charger for free worth INR 3,499.

Meta Blocks Russian State Media Outlets
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has banned Russian state media outlets RT (formerly Russia Today) and Rossiya Segodyna from its platforms globally, citing their involvement in foreign interference activities. This move comes after the US government imposed sanctions on the outlets, alleging they worked with the Kremlin to influence Moldovan elections and foment unrest.

Salesforce Launches Ai-driven Agentforce Platform, Killing Traditional Chatbots
Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, has unveiled its fully autonomous AI agent for customer service, rendering traditional chatbots obsolete. The new platform enhances AI-driven Agentforce capabilities, making complex tasks more efficient. Major Fintech giant Klarna has cut ties with Salesforce due to its AI overhaul.

• Snapchat New AI Lenses and Memories Features, including AI-Generated Portraits, Personalized Captions, and Collaborative Storytelling

• GitHub Copilot Copilot Extensions now available in public beta, enabling developers to integrate their favorite tools and create custom extensions.

• Microsoft Excel Python integration generally available for Windows users of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise, enabling seamless analytics within Excel workbooks.

• Azure AI Service Adds 11 new English (India) and Hindi AI voices, upgrades existing voices with "Styles" feature, and expands Indian language support to include Assamese, Punjabi, and Oriya locales.

• Substack Live Video Now Available on this newsletter platform

• YouTube Multiple Updates

  • Introduces Communities feature, as a rival to Discord, for a channel’s subscribers to stay engaged within the channel itself instead of using a third party tool

  • Introduces “Hype” - a feature available only to channels with less than 500,000 subscribers. Allows users to “hype” smaller channels, to help gain them more popularity

  • Introduces many AI features, such as help with generating titles, thumbnails and entire videos!

Fast Grid | World's most performant DOM-based web table.

Caniuse Cli | Command line tool for “Can I Use …” and MDN Browser Compat Data

Clipboard Apis: Unveiling The Mystery Of The Clipboard
Discover how the web clipboard works, its APIs, and limitations. Learn how it stores and organizes data of different types, including text, HTML, images, and more. This post explores the web's clipboard APIs, their history, and proposals to resolve limitations, as well as how to read and write to the clipboard using JavaScript.

Chatbot Manipulation Exposed
Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist, discovered his online reputation was being manipulated by chatbots. He contacted Profound, a firm specializing in AI sentiment manipulation, to change his negative online persona. The company uses large-scale sentiment analysis to map chatbots' black boxes and can influence their responses. However, this technique only works for big brands and not individuals or small outfits. Researchers have found a way to boost product visibility by adding strategic text sequences to product information pages, making LLMs more susceptible to manipulation.

Devops Best Practices
In this article, the author shares their personal habits that have helped them maintain quality and speed in their product development. Highlights include: keeping commits small, refactoring frequently, deploying often, and acknowledging the importance of testing and technical debt management.