🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #184

It's Friday! Let's end the week with success!

#IndianIT - Indian companies are scrambling to upskill their workforce in Generative AI, but the quality of training is questionable, with some employees just clicking "next" through presentations to become "GenAI certified", all to appeal to clients and stay competitive in the rapidly changing tech industry.

#Meta - Meta is experimenting with showing off its AI with images of actual users. The images are then displayed to users in-stream. The company is testing this out to show off its generative AI.

#DailyListen - Google's got a new toy, and it's all about making your life easier! They're rolling out "Daily Listen", an AI-generated podcast that summarizes your news feed and interests into a 5-minute audio digest. It's like having your own personal news butler!

Eli Lilly Expands Presence In India With New Capability Centre
Eli Lilly, a US-based pharma company, announced plans to open a new global capability centre in Hyderabad, India, employing 1,000+ professionals to focus on automation, AI, software engineering, and cloud computing, enhancing innovation and efficiency in developing next-gen medicines.

Flipkart Taps Dunzo Co-founder To Lead Quick-commerce Push
Flipkart just hired Dunzo's co-founder Kabeer Biswas to lead their quick-commerce effort, called Flipkart Minutes, where they aim to deliver stuff within 10-15 minutes. It's a big deal because this model has been successful in India, and Flipkart is trying to use quick commerce as an avenue to tap consumers in urban Indian cities.

Salesforce Freezes Software Engineer Hiring Amid Ai Productivity Boost
Salesforce is a huge cloud computing company. Their CEO Marc Benioff just announced they won't be hiring any more software engineers in 2025 because their AI tech, Agentforce, has increased productivity by over 30%! They're focusing on AI and sales, and might even add 1,000-2,000 salespeople. This is big news, and I'm excited to see how it plays out!

Meta Tests Ebay Listings On Facebook Marketplace
Meta said on Wednesday it would launch a test in Germany, France and the United States. The test will enable buyers to browse listings from eBay on Facebook Marketplace.

Nasa's JPL In Danger From California Wildfires
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a key facility developing Mars & outer space tech, is under threat from raging wildfires in Los Angeles. 70,000+ evacuated, 2 dead, & 1,000+ structures destroyed, with JPL on emergency lockdown & staff losing homes.

Hugging Face - Microsoft's 14 billion-parameter language model Phi-4 now available for download, fine-tuning, and deployment.

Grok - Released as a standalone app, allowing users to access its generative AI capabilities independently of the X app.

Instagram - Political content will now be allowed (and ranked positively) on Instagram.

Perplexity - Integration with Tripadvisor adds detailed hotel information, including summaries, ratings, images, and perks, to search results.

VLC - Added automatic subtitles generation and translation using local and open-source AI models, supporting multiple languages and offline functionality.

Mercure | An open, easy, fast, reliable and battery-efficient solution for real-time communications

Tailwindcss Motion | A Tailwind CSS Plugin. It’s a simple, yet powerful, animation library with a simple syntax.

Midscene | Automate browser actions, extract data, and perform assertions using AI. It offers JavaScript SDK, Chrome extension, and support for scripting in YAML.

React 19: A New Era In Web Development
This article covers the major updates in React 19, including the Actions API, new hooks, Server Components, and enhancements to hydration and the Context API, and provides examples and tips for a smooth transition to the latest version of React.

AI Code Analysis Breakthrough
Researchers rewired an AI analyzer to mimic senior developer thought processes, resulting in significant improvements in code review and analysis. By grouping files by functionality and providing context, the AI system can now catch complex issues and suggest improvements, revolutionizing the field of AI-powered code analysis, as seen in AI-powered IDEs like GitHub Copilot.

CSS-Tricks Recap
Chris Coyier reflects on 2024, a year of revival for the popular front-end development blog, which saw 26M unique pageviews after a year-long pause; published 153 articles, including 3 guides and 34 new Almanac entries; and revamped its table of contents and note-taking features.