🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #127

It's Wednesday! Time to reflect and keep moving forward!

#SwiggyStalkerAlert - A user narrates their experience (formerly) dating a supposedly Swiggy employee, that, when their relationship turned sour, started stalking their ordering habits and invading their privacy. Like everything on the internet, take this one with a pinch of salt (Hey! You are in the gossip section!)

#NewAppAlert - New social media app is gaining interest among Gen Z - Named “Daze”, it allows users to chat with each other in free form text (see their linked instagram page for a demo).

#TikTokSabotage - An intern at ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, was caught damaging some core AI models powering TikTok.

#HappyBirthdayMicrosoftExcel - Do you know that Microsoft Excel is older than Windows? And that it was originally a Mac app? Well - it just turned 40 years old!

#FreeSpeechAtMeta - A popular account that would post about celebrities and the itinerary of their private jets, which was booted from Twitter / X last year - has now been shut down across all Meta apps. Not exactly Free Speech now is it.

Zomato Makes A Bold Move To Raise $1 Billion Prior To Rival Swiggy's IPO
Zomato is raising $1 billion via a sale of shares to institutional investors. The move comes just weeks before its rival Swiggy’s public debut. Jefferies analysts called the capital raise “unexpected,” given Zomato”s existing $1.2 billion cash reserves.

Blusmart's Rise In India's Ride-hailing Industry
Electric cab companies such as BluSmart are carving out a growing share of the ride-hailing market in India. BluSmart’s fully electric fleet appeals to environmentally conscious users as well as those drawn in by convenience. Experts say there aren’t enough existing manufacturers for electric cabs to keep pace with rising demand.

India Eyes AI Chip Collaboration With Nvidia
Nvidia is in talks with India's government to co-develop AI silicon. The news comes as India launches its "AI mission" to prioritize development of AI infrastructure. The partnership aims to create chips for specific Indian use cases, such as security systems for the nation's railway networks.

Meta Brings Back Facial Recognition Tech
Facebook and Instagram will begin to deploy facial recognition tools. The tools will help fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts. The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities.

Foursquare's City Guides App To Shut Down This Year
Foursquare, a location-based social networking company, is discontinuing its City Guides app, focusing instead on its check-in app Swarm. Launched in 2014, City Guides allowed users to explore cities and leave tips and reviews. The app will officially shut down on December 15, with its web version to follow soon after.

Fab: Epic's New Unified Content Marketplace
Epic Games has merged its major content marketplaces, including Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel, ArtStation Marketplace, and Sketchfab Store, into one platform called Fab. This means that game developers and animators can now access a vast library of assets from a single site. Fab includes animations, VFX, environments, characters, plug-ins, and more, with flexible licensing options and real-time previewing.

Google - Have you come across search results on Google that had a mini search box within the result, allowing you to search directly in that website - well, that is now being removed.

X - Launches Radar, a Trend Analysis Tool for Premium+ Subscribers

Google Find My Device app - Enables biometric login authentication for secure and quicker access, with default enabled and no option to disable it.

WhatsApp - You can now add songs to your Status

WhatsApp - Another update - You can now saves contacts directly within the app, allowing for cloud storage and sync across devices.

Anthropic - Claude 3.5 Sonnet model now enables AI to navigate computer interfaces, perform tasks like filling out forms and interacting with software programs.

Swarm | Educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.

Vscode Web Visual Editor | Edit HTML files visually.

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!New! We now have a dedicated page to list all events. We will be updating this page every week. We will of course be publishing new (and coming-soon) events in this section but for a comprehensive list of events, check this page out. This page is exclusively accessible BY SUBSCRIBERS OF HEAP HEAP HURRAY ONLY 🎁 🎁 🎁

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AI Assistance Panel In Chrome Devtools
Chrome DevTools has announced a new feature called AI Assistance panel, which is designed to be an intelligent coding companion for web developers. With this feature, developers can analyze their DOM structure, interpret CSS styles, and get insights tailored to their specific situation. The panel can also prototype fixes and suggest changes to styles and DOM structure, making it a powerful tool for debugging and styling.

Confidence Boosts Impact
As a junior engineer, Ryan Peterman shares a thought experiment: would an engineer with above-average confidence and average skills or average confidence and above-average skills have more impact? He argues that confidence, albeit an overconfidence bias, can lead to influence and opportunities outside of skill level.

Big Tech Exodus
Software engineers and leaders share reasons for leaving Big Tech companies, including instability, limited growth, and politics, despite attractive brand value and compensation.