🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #218

Good morning! Thursday is a great day to keep hustling!

#Optifye - An Indian startup - Optifye, backed by Y-Combinator was in the news for the wrong reasons. Y Combinator had to delete the company’s demo video from the twitter. Here’s what happened - The company says it uses AI to monitor workers in factories and demo’ed a video of their product. The video shows a worker being called out for underperforming. In their video, they showed AI-powered security cameras to monitor factory workers. And this sparked outrage, with critics calling it "sweatshops-as-a-service". 🙎

#DictationBug - So, Apple's fixed a weird glitch where the iPhone's dictation feature types out "Trump" when you say "racist" - and it's all because of a phonetic overlap, allegedly. But some people think it might be a prank gone wrong, especially since it happened right after Apple announced a huge investment in the US to counter Trump's tariffs. 🤣

Amazon Launches Alexa Plus With Advanced AI Capabilities
Amazon just launched a new version called Alexa Plus that uses advanced AI to make it way more powerful. With Alexa Plus, you can do things like order groceries, send event invites, and even control your smart home devices more easily. It can also memorize your personal preferences and learn your habits over time. The best part? It's free for Amazon Prime members, and it's going to be available on most Alexa devices starting next month.

Qualcomm And Google Team Up For Extended Android Updates
Qualcomm, a company that makes the brains of many Android phones, has partnered with Google. They're now offering up to 8 years of software updates for phones with their latest chips, which is a big deal! This means your next phone could stay useful for much longer.

Apple Reaches Settlement With Indonesia To Lift iPhone 16 Sales Ban
Apple and the Indonesian government have reached a settlement to lift the iPhone 16 sales ban in the Southeast Asian country. Apple has agreed to invest $1 billion in the country in addition to its $10 million investment plan. The iPhone maker will also build an AirTag manufacturing plant in Indonesia's Batam island through partnering with Luxshare Precision Industry.

Steam Next Fest Returns With Thousands Of Free Demos
Steam is a popular digital distribution platform for PC games, think of it like an app store for games. Anyway, their Next Fest is back, it's like a virtual trade show where you can play demos of upcoming games for free, mostly from indie devs but also some big publishers. It's live now until March 3, and you can check it out on the Steam store.

Youtube Surpasses 1 Billion Monthly Podcast Viewers
YouTube announced that it has reached 1 billion monthly active podcast viewers, solidifying its dominance in the podcasting space and putting pressure on rivals like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Copilot - Copilot Voice and Think Deeper features are now available for free without limits, enabling voice conversations and deeper, more complex analysis.

Chrome - Passkeys can now be seamlessly synced across all platforms using Google Password Manager, allowing for hassle-free login on multiple devices and apps.

Opera - Added integration with Bluesky, Slack, and Discord to the browser's sidebar for easy access to popular messaging and communication services.

Xbox Cloud Gaming - Added ability to generate shareable links to invite friends to cloud gaming sessions.

From Flipkart to the Community: Open-Sourcing Varadhi's Managed Restbus - Flipkart has open-sourced Varadhi, its managed RESTBus, which provides a REST interface over a message broker to facilitate reliable, asynchronous, and optionally ordered service-to-service communication. Over a decade, Varadhi has scaled to handle over a billion messages daily during peak events like Flipkart's Big Billion Days. Here’s a talk about it.

Optimizing React App Performance
This guide covers the basics of React performance optimization, including the importance of performance for user experience, conversion rates, SEO, and scalability. You will learn how to measure performance using metrics such as load time and responsiveness, and how to address common problems with solutions like optimizing bundlers, dependencies, and assets, as well as techniques for optimizing images and fonts.

Software Architecture Documentation: Why It Matters
Documentation is crucial for software architecture as it provides a common understanding of the system for various stakeholders, supports team work, and guides the development team in implementing new features, going beyond just "the code documents the system" in agile teams, especially for new team members and stakeholders like Software Architects, Software Engineers, and Project Managers.

HTML5 Evolution
Ever wondered why target="_blank" opens links in new tabs? It's a legacy relic from pre-HTML5 days of framesets, where target attributes specified frame names. The underscore signifies a special value, not a frame name, to open links in new tabs.