🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #207

Wednesday is the perfect day to reflect and refocus!

#Aadhaar - So, apparently, Sabeer Bhatia, founder of hotmail[dot]com (now renamed to outlook[dot]com) thinks the Indian government wasted a ton of money on Aadhaar technology, like, $1.3 billion! He says it could've been done way cheaper with video and voice printing tech, like, for just $20 million. How credible is their opinion? Well, they have not been able to replicate their hotmail success again since 1997 so… 😜

#MildlyInfuriating - Infuriating or just plain hilarious - you decide. A pregnant woman, in the middle of her contractions, was using an app to track them better. It was going well, until she was prompted to rate the app! Enough said - check the discussion out! 😂 

#YouTube - It’s official. YouTube is now being consumed more on television sets than your mobile devices. 😲 

Elon Musk Leads $97.4 Billion Bid To Acquire OpenAI
Elon Musk is leading a group of investors in a $97.4 billion bid to acquire the company OpenAI. Musk's attorney, Marc Toberoff, submitted the acquisition proposal to OpenAI's board of directors today. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman countered by offering to buy Musk's X (formerly known as Twitter) for approximately $9.74 billion.

CFPB Fines Wise $2M For Deceptive Remittance Practices
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has hit U.K.-based remittance company Wise with about a $2 million fine. The agency claims that the fintech company misled customers fees and failed to properly disclose other fees. They allegedly didn't refund fees on time and harmed hundreds of thousands of dollars to consumers.

Bitcoin Investor Offers To Buy Landfill Site
James Howells, a computer engineer, is offering to buy a landfill site in Newport where he believes a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, worth £620m, was buried in 2013. He previously tried to sue the city council for access to the site, but his case was dismissed.

Instagram - Introduces Teen Accounts with enhanced safety features and parental controls in India.

AI Agents Course - Brought to you by the Github equivalent for AI models, Hugging Face's AI Agents Course is a free, interactive program designed to guide learners from beginner to expert in building and deploying AI agents. The course covers theoretical foundations, practical applications using libraries like smolagents, LangChain, and LlamaIndex, and offers hands-on projects, community challenges, and a certificate upon completion.

Creation - A developer built an open-source laptop from scratch with a 4K AMOLED display, mechanical keyboard, RK3588 SoC, and custom powertrain. The project balances performance, efficiency, and build quality while overcoming hardware, software, and mechanical challenges.

FAIR AI Demos - This website from Meta showcases experimental AI research, allowing users to explore future AI capabilities.

Bulls**t Machines - University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom developed a free online course on LLMs for college freshmen, focusing on AI’s impact on learning and society. It’s a humanities course designed for broad accessibility.

Learning Assembly: A Game-changer For Software Engineers
Assembly code expert shares how learning assembly programming changed his view on memory management, understanding of pointers, and the difference between stack and heap.

The Rise Of The Hero Section
WordPress theme creator Marcel Moerkens shares the story of how he coined the term "Hero Section" in 2013, revolutionizing web design with a bold, attention-grabbing intro section that's now a standard pattern in web design.

Netlify Sees 1,000 AI-generated Sites Daily
Netlify's integration with ChatGPT has led to 1,000 new sites being created daily, indicating a trend of AI automation in software development projects, with many using AI-assisted coding tools to start new projects, and the emergence of "agentic IDEs" catering to this shift.