🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #162

Hump day vibes - let's power through Wednesday!

#HumanAds - Twiterrati are calling out the desperation of startups trying to get funding, using humans with ads on their bodies as billboards!

#BlueskySubscription - Bluesky is slowly rolling out new features, and the latest one is a subscription-based model for a “pro” plan.

#AISlop - This tech dev is speaking out about how AI-generated bug reports are making his job a nightmare - all these fake reports are wasting time and resources, and he's like, "can't we just get real humans to do this?"

#Alibaba - He's a real character, this Fan Luyuan guy. Thinks he can just insult his staff and colleagues, and then apologize and buy his way out of it with three months' salary. Newsflash: being "straightforward" and "carefree" doesn't excuse being cruel and unprofessional.

Amazon Expands Into India's Quick-commerce Market
Amazon is the sixth major entrant in India's quick-commerce market, which is currently clocking more than $6 billion in annual sales. The U.S. tech giant is piloting the service in Bengaluru.

“Squid Game” Teams Up With Duolingo To Teach Viewers Korean Ahead Of Season 2
Netflix is partnering with language learning app Duolingo to help viewers learn Korean ahead of Season 2 of "Squid Game". Duolingo will offer 40 keywords & phrases from the show.

Google's Year In Search 2024: Trends, Insights, And Surprises
Google releases its annual list of top trending searches for 2024. The list is based on text-based searches on google[dot]com. It doesn’t include searches on other Google properties like YouTube. The top search term in 2024 was a soccer (football) tournament.

OpenAI's AI-powered Video Creation Tool, Sora, Now Available To The Public
Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative videos from text prompts. The tool is now available worldwide except in Europe, the UK and China.

SAP: GenAI To The Rescue
SAP says it will use machine learning to speed up migration of legacy ERP systems. Support for legacy ECC systems expires on December 31, 2027.

Top VC Firms Predict Crypto And AI Takeover
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Y Combinator have made bold predictions about technology startups in 2025. Both firms see vast potential in crypto, stablecoins, and artificial intelligence (AI) a16z envisions a future where AI manages our crypto wallets and decentralized chatbots become autonomous entities. YCombinator predicts a significant surge in stablecoin usage, surpassing traditional payment methods in volume.

Google Unveils Willow, Its Latest Quantum Chip
Google announced Willow, its latest quantum chip, which boasts a significant reduction in errors by adding more qubits to the system, a major issue in building quantum computers. Unlike its 2019 quantum chip, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy this time, instead focusing on reducing errors in its system.

Microsoft Teams - Take control of screen sharing now available in Teams for web, allowing users to request control during presentations and modify shared screens with approval from the presenter.

Instagram - Introduced "Trial Reels" feature, allowing creators to test their content with non-followers before sharing with followers, providing engagement data and insights to inform content decisions.

Legend State | Legend-State is a super fast and powerful state library that enables fine-grained reactivity and easy automatic persistence

Studio | A lightweight Database GUI in your browser. It supports connecting to Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite.

Preserving The Web's Dynamic Past
This article explores the challenges of preserving online user interfaces, highlighting the distinction between saving content and the "look and feel" of websites. It discusses the importance of saving snapshots of user interfaces, like screenshots or screen recordings, and presents a personal project using Playwright and GitHub Actions to automate taking screenshots of a website on a regular schedule.

Unexpected Global Tech Winners Of 2024
India’s homegrown EV industry, a Chinese video game that became a soft power success, and a U.S.-based walkie-talkie app that proved unexpectedly popular in Kenya are some of Rest of World's most surprising winners in global tech.

Why Leetcode Remains A Tech Industry Staple
FAANG hiring processes rely on Leetcode for filtering candidates due to high volumes of applicants, despite criticism of its relevance to real-world coding tasks. Its scalability and ability to assess coding skills in 45 minutes outweigh drawbacks, as alternative methods have their own limitations. Smaller companies are exploring practical coding questions as an alternative.