🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #193

Hello, Thursday! Let's finish the week on a high note! Also - It’s Tech Talk Thursday! Our New Section is right below!

#DeanonymizationAttack - So, there's this 15-year-old kid Daniel who's a total tech whiz, and he's been hacking into billion-dollar companies in his free time. He just discovered a crazy vulnerability in Cloudflare that lets attackers pinpoint a person's location within a 250-mile radius. He's publishing his research as a warning to people, especially journalists and activists.

#MrBeast - The popular YouTuber… ok, an understatement - THE YouTuber - Mr. Beast seems to be in the foray to purchase TikTok.

#DeepSeek - Giving OpenAI’s LLM models a run for their money, is a model from China - that is FREE! That’s right. Some benchmarks indicate they are even better than OpenAI

Jar Reaches Key Milestone, Turns Cash Flow Positive
Jar is an Indian fintech startup offering savings/investment services. Founded 3 years ago, it's backed by Tiger Global. Today, an executive confirmed the company has turned cash flow positive while growing 10x last year, an impressive feat amidst efforts to improve financials for a potential future IPO.

KFC And Pizza Hut Struggle In India
Devyani International (KFC, Pizza Hut, Costa) and Sapphire Foods (KFC, Pizza Hut): two large quick-service restaurant operators in India. Their sales growth slowed down to single digits due to intense competition from food delivery apps, shrinking margins, and fixed costs.

Forum Software Provider NodeBB Joins The Fediverse
NodeBB is a popular open-source forum software used by millions. It's now integrating with the "fediverse", a decentralized social web, allowing its forums to interact with other services like Mastodon and PeerTube. This move will enable users to share content across platforms, promoting a more open and decentralized online community.

USA Launches $500 Billion AI Initiative, "The Stargate Project"
Masayoshi Son's SoftBank, Sam Altman's OpenAI, Larry Ellison's Oracle & Microsoft partner to build AI infrastructure in the US, starting with Texas, with a goal to invest $500 billion over 4 years, creating a new AI computing system & driving AI research & development.

Postman - Introduces AI Agent Builder, a tool that combines large language models and the Postman API platform to help users build and test AI agents using a visual editor.

EA Origin - Transition to EA app begins, with support ending on April 17, 2025.

Perplexity - Launches Sonar API for integrating generative AI search tools into applications.

WhatsApp - Allows users to link their account to the Account Center, enabling cross-posting of status updates to Facebook and Instagram as stories.

Truecaller - Added real-time caller ID support for iOS subscribers using Apple's Live Caller ID Lookup feature.

Microsoft Account - Staying signed in is now the default behavior, requiring users to actively sign out or use private browsing on shared devices.

Spotify - Introduces Courses, a new feature allowing users to stream educational content on topics such as business, tech, lifestyle, music, and more.

AI-Powered Software Development From the Trenches - What’s it like to work effectively with AI as a coding partner? Since GPT-4's release in March 2023, AI has transformed software development for productivity and innovation. While empowering, it demands unlearning old habits. This talk shares practical AI coding tips, tricks, pitfalls, and live demos.

DevTools Deep Dive - The Performance Panel in Chrome DevTools offers powerful tools for diagnosing site performance. This session explores its capabilities, highlights new features, and previews upcoming updates to streamline performance debugging and optimization workflows.

Make Your Apps Move! Awesome Animations with React Native - Let’s bring your app to life with animations! Often overlooked, animations can transform user experiences. This session covers what animations are, their value, the physics behind them, and how to build a sleek Apple Wallet-inspired component using react-native-reanimated. Get ready to make your app move!

Git Gotchas: Fixing Common Mistakes
Git can be tricky, but knowing how to fix mistakes can save time and sanity. This article shares common gotchas, such as recovering deleted files, editing commit messages, and reverting changes. Learn how to navigate Git's nuances and avoid common pitfalls.

Expo Introduces EAS Hosting For Easy Deployment
Expo's new EAS Hosting enables instant deployment and scaling of universal API routes, React websites, and more for Android, iOS, and web apps, addressing server-driven UI challenges faced by developers in full-stack app building.

Adopting GenAI Assistants: Lessons From Microsoft And Infobip
Microsoft has over 30 copilots in development, highlighting the challenges of integrating GenAI into workflows. Infobip shares their success story of adopting GenAI assistants, emphasizing top-down support, gradual introduction, and custom deployment on secure infrastructure to address data security and usability concerns.