🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #217

Rise and shine, it's a winning Wednesday!

#AISummaries - Chegg, and edtech platform is suing Google parent Alphabet over claims the search engine’s artificial intelligence summary tool has hit its revenues. The US-listed educational technology group is weighing up a sale and it's all because Google's not sending them traffic. 🥺

#ElonMusk - Elon Musk, the man who changed Twitter's name to X, still occasionally refers to the social media platform he runs as Twitter. 🤭

India's Hyperloop Dream Gets $1 Million Boost
Indian Railways will grant an additional $1 million to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras to further develop India's first hyperloop test track. The track, named 'Avishkar', enables a high-speed train to travel in a near-vacuum tube at speeds exceeding 1,000 km/hour.

VS Code - Introduced Copilot agent mode, an autonomous peer programmer that performs multi-step coding tasks at your command.

Google Drive - Added searchable video transcripts that can be viewed in a sidebar next to the video player, allowing users to easily find specific moments in a video by searching the transcript.

YouTube - Introduces smarter mid-roll ad placement with automatic ad slots at natural break points, allowing creators to opt for automatic, manual, or mixed placement options.

Google - Introduces Gemini Code Assist, a free AI-powered coding assistant for individuals with AI-driven code completion, generation, and chat capabilities.

Opera One - Adds Discord, Slack, and Bluesky to sidebar, introduces two new themes with customizable sounds and music.

xAI Grok - Added voice mode for top-paying X Premium customers, allowing users to ask questions aloud and receive AI-generated voice responses.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet - Introduces hybrid reasoning, precise control over thinking process, and exceptional performance in coding and front-end web development tasks.

Amazon Kindle - Removing "Download & transfer via USB" option for downloading e-book files directly to computer.

Visprex - Visprex is an open-source, in-browser data visualization tool that enables users to quickly visualize CSV files without uploading data to external servers. It offers features like histograms, scatter plots, line plots, and correlation matrices to facilitate efficient data analysis. Visprex is suitable for students and data scientists.

GIF Buttons - Our subscribers are mostly young so for the unaware, if you browsed the internet around the 2000s, seeing gifs as buttons was quite common. Here’s a trip down nostalgia lane - a collection of gif buttons from the 90s and 00s internet era.

Beatcode - You have heard of LeetCode. Well, here’s BeatCode. Think LeetCode, but you get to compete with other developers like you! It is an interactive platform that transforms coding practice into a competitive experience. Users can engage in head-to-head battles, solving LeetCode-style problems while employing special abilities to challenge opponents.

UIFonts App - An online tool that enables designers to test and preview fonts in real-time, facilitating the selection of suitable typefaces for various design projects.

The Rise Of Spec-driven AI Development
As AI transforms the software development lifecycle, a new approach emerges: spec-driven AI development. This method builds guardrails into specifications to ensure safer, higher-quality AI-generated code. By using plain language to describe functions, developing code based on specs, and testing for consistency, developers can create more reliable AI applications. This approach prioritizes specs over code, allowing for improved governance, validation, and collaboration.

QR Code Quirk
A surprising discovery about QR codes: using all capital letters can result in a smaller physical size due to the difference in encoding modes. Alphanumeric mode (used for upper-case letters) is more efficient than Byte mode (used for lower-case letters), even for URLs with only letters and numbers.

Tailwind CSS: Weighing The Pros And Cons
Tailwind is a CSS framework that uses a utility-first approach. Elements are styled directly, without needing to leave your HTML. It undoubtedly has benefits, but they come with trade-offs. Here we explore some counterpoints to those benefits.