🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #165

Here's to a productive Monday full of accomplishments!

#PartyPolice - So, Airbnb is being a total buzzkill this New Year's Eve, deploying anti-party tech to block wild bookings and disrupting all the fun. It's using machine learning to weed out party animals.

#LocationHistory - Google is no longer storing Timeline data in the cloud by default. The company changed the default retention period – for Timeline/Location History and Web & App Activity – to three months, down from 18 months.

#ForProfitFeud - OpenAI published receipts, in the form of a long timeline of emails, texts and legal filings, illustrating that Elon Musk’s injunction to prevent OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company runs counter to what he wanted in 2017. Essentially, OpenAI is providing even more evidence to the fact that its former co-founder wanted the AI startup to become a for-profit company and make him CEO.

Uber Launches 'Moto Women' In India
Uber launched ‘Moto Women’ on Thursday in Bengaluru, offering women-only bike rides, a first in India. This service connects women riders with women drivers and includes features like real-time trip sharing, phone number anonymization, and a 24x7 safety helpline for secure rides, planning a pan-India expansion.

Blinkit Rolls Out 'Bistro' To Heat Up Quick Food Delivery Race
Blinkit has launched 'Bistro', a food delivery app that promises to deliver snacks and other food items in just 10 minutes. This move from Blinkit is to compete with Zepto in the quick food delivery space.

Swiggy Takes On Zomato With 'Scenes' Feature For Live Events Ticketing
Swiggy's 'Scenes' feature offers booking and ticketing for live events, concerts, culinary events, and workshops. The feature is live in Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. It competes with Zomato's District, which offers discounts and table booking across Swiggy partner restaurants.

Whistleblower Death Rocks OpenAI
Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco. The San Francisco medical examiner's office determined his death to be suicide. Mr Balaji had publicly spoken out against artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

Harvard's Big Gift To AI Research
Harvard University announced today that it will release a massive dataset of 1 million public-domain books to aid AI research, with backing from Microsoft and OpenAI, aiming to "level the playing field" for smaller players in the tech industry.

Visual Studio Code - Introduces Copilot Edits with improved progress and editor controls, allowing for multiple file edits at once using natural language.

Tumblr - Launches Communities, a feature offering semi-private spaces for users to network around topics of interest.

Google Drive - Adds "Summarize this folder" feature, allowing users to generate summaries of all files within a selected folder using the Gemini AI assistant.

Threads - Introduces collection of recommended profiles, similar to Bluesky's Starter Packs, in topic following and For You feed suggestions.

ChatGPT - Added video, screen share, and image uploads to Advanced Voice in mobile apps, enabling real-time voice and video chat, and screen sharing capabilities for eligible users.

WhatsApp - Introduces video call effects and backgrounds, pre-call participant selection, and high-res video call support on desktop app.

NotebookLM - Introduced interactive mode for Audio Overviews, allowing users to ask questions and engage in conversations with AI virtual hosts.

Mailroom | Framework for creating, routing, and delivering user notifications based on events from external systems

Todoctor | CLI tool to analyze and report TODO comments in JavaScript and TypeScript Git repositories

Top Web Dev Trends For 2025
The year of the developer is here, and we look at five trends shaping the future of web development.

From Student Blogger To Pro
Insights on career growth via relationships and taking chances, from an art school student who landed a job through a cold email, and how chance encounters and being open to opportunities shaped their career path in design and writing, RISD graduate shares their story.

Redis Creator Antirez Returns
Salvatore Sanfilippo, aka antirez, returns to Redis after 4.5 years, citing a desire to re-engage with the tech world and help reshape the company's community attitude. He'll work part-time, focusing on demos, documentation, and design. Redis Licensing concerns are addressed, with antirez stating he's not opposed to the license switch and believes it's not the core issue, but rather the community fracture that needs attention.