🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #191

It's a terrific Tuesday - let's keep pushing forward!

#ByteDance - A “dance” indeed. So, TikTok is back in the game in the US, after what looked like the beginning of the end. Apparently they're restoring their service, because why not, right? It's all drama, drama, drama with these social media giants.

#OpenAIForDDOS - OpenAI’s ChatGPT crawler can reportedly initiate DDoS attacks on random websites and they haven't even acknowledged it yet! A security researcher found out that a single HTTP request can flood a site with network requests and OpenAI's all like "crickets". The researcher reported it multiple times, but OpenAI's just not responding. This could be used to amplify a single API request into 20 to 5,000 or more requests to a site.

Co-founders Leaving Online Pharmacy Startup Pharmeasy
Indian e-pharmacy leader PharmEasy is in a bit of turmoil. According to recent reports by Moneycontrol, the co-founders Dharmil Sheth, Dhaval Shah, Harsh Parekh and Hardik Dedhia will quit the company. The online medicine delivery startup started in 2015 and had a sharp decline in valuation from $5.6 billion in 2021 to around $458 million now.

New App Alert - Meta Launches New Video Editing App "Edits"
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram & Meta's former CTO, announced a new video editing app called "Edits". The new app aims to provide a suite of creative tools for creators, including a high-quality camera, editing tools, and insights into video performance. Critics are calling it a replica of the now banned app Capcut by the makers of TikTok.

Stargazers Prepare For Rare Seven-planet Alignment
Rare alignment of the planets will take place in January and February. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will all be visible. The planets will appear in an arc across the sky due to their orbital plane.

Scholastic Breach Exposes 8 Million Customer Records
Scholastic is a major publisher of children's books, including the Harry Potter series. A hacker gained access to an employee portal, stealing login credentials from an infected employee's system, and made off with 8 million customer records, including emails, names, and addresses, but claims not to plan to make the data public, citing boredom and advocating for multifactor authentication.

Bluesky - Added custom feeds for vertical video with trending section, swipable content, and option to pin to home screen. (So did X / Twitter btw)

Dockview | Zero dependency Docking Layout Manager. Supports Vanilla TypeScript, React and Vue.

Tabby | Self-hosted AI coding assistant

Mirai | Mirai is a Server-Driven UI framework for Flutter. Mirai allows you to build beautiful cross-platform applications with JSON in real time.

Give High-quality Feedback In Less Than 1 Hour A Week
Learn how to scale your judgment across your organization by investing in fast and thoughtful feedback. Discover four techniques to make your feedback high-quality and efficient, including focusing on the 20% of work output that will make the biggest impact, prioritizing structural feedback, and using "looks good to me" wisely.

Shopify's 5-year React Native Journey
Shopify shares the success of its 5-year transition to React Native, citing increased productivity, talent portability, and faster app development. They discuss lessons learned, including the importance of hot reloading, TypeScript, and native developer expertise.

Friction In Tech: Login Codes
A UX designer critiques login code experiences, highlighting pain points such as delayed or missing codes, poor messaging, and difficult affordances. Attributes good experiences with clear messaging, easily copy-and-pastable codes, and prompting to autofill forms. Discusses trade-offs between UX and security, encouraging designers to strive for a better balance.