🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #225

Cheers to Monday! New week, new adventures!

#Siri - It appears that Apple may have jumped the gun on how much AI ready they were. They are now delaying some of the Apple Intelligence features that were meant to go into Siri. The demo shown previously seems to have just been a marketing stunt and they appear to be nowhere close to achieving the promised features. 😯

#BillGates - Here’s a glimpse into the emails exchanged between Bill Gates and their team way back in 2003. They were discussing about the superior music experience that Apple offered then (through their iPod devices - remember iPhone was not a thing then). A nice insight into how the people at the top brainstorm things. 👌

#SmartHome - Ok. We admit - this tech seems really cool. LG’s new air conditioner can apparently analyze the room’s layout - and get this - direct / divert the cool air to where the occupant really is instead of just blasting it out in one direction alone. Now that’s a “smart” device. 🥶

Indian Government Launches AI Kosha, A Platform For Non-personal Datasets
The Union government has launched AI Kosha, a dedicated platform aimed at housing non-personal datasets to support the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and tools. This initiative is a part of the broader IndiaAI Mission, designed to facilitate structured and accessible datasets.

Jiostar Begins Layoffs Affecting 1,100 Employees
JioStar, a joint venture formed from the merger of Reliance Industries Ltd’s media business, Viacom18, and The Walt Disney Company, has begun layoffs. Departments such as finance, commercial, and legal are reportedly the most affected.

Razorpay Expands To Singapore, Its Second Destination In Southeast Asia
Razorpay is a Bengaluru-based fintech company that provides AI-driven payment solutions. They've just announced their expansion to Singapore, offering seamless, secure, and scalable payment solutions to support the country's digital economy, aiming to reduce cross-border transaction fees by 30-40%.

BlinkIt Changes Commission Mode
Blinkit is a quick commerce platform owned by Zomato, a popular Indian food delivery company. In a bid to improve profitability, Blinkit has changed its commission mode from a fixed rate to a variable one, charging a commission based on the selling price of items, which could help increase its take rates.

Reddit - Introduces new posting features, including pre-post rule checks, reposting options, community suggestions, and enhanced post insights.

Android 16 - Introduces lock screen widgets, allowing users to access information and interact with apps directly from the lock screen.

Google Maps - Added Live Updates feature, showing estimated time to arrival and time until next turn on the status bar.

GitHub Copilot - Added secret scanning feature using AI to detect generic secrets in code and generate regular expressions for custom patterns.

Telegram - Adds Chromecast video casting, Star Messages for monetization and filtering, detailed info pages for unknown senders, and the ability to withdraw and convert earned Stars into rewards.

Google Meet - Enhanced custom and AI-generated backgrounds with improved image quality and additional preset styles, including professional office, bookshelf, and more.

Mistral - Introduces Mistral OCR, a multimodal API for converting complex PDF documents into formatted Markdown text, enabling easier ingestion by large language models.

Chicory | Native JVM WebAssembly runtime

Firew0rks | Fireworks in your terminal

Yaak | The most intuitive desktop API client. Organize and execute REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, Server Sent Events, and gRPC

Functions In CSS
Learn how to create responsive containers using CSS functions, specifically the intrinsic-container function, which calculates the maximum width of a container based on its margin and max-width values. Understand how to apply this function to different container sizes using CSS classes.

Styling Accordion Elements With Marker
Learn how to style in built browser accordion element

Stateful Vs Stateless Architecture
Stateful architecture remembers client sessions, while stateless architecture processes requests without prior knowledge. Stateful (e.g., e-commerce shopping carts) offers rich user experience, but scaling and failure recovery can be complex. Stateless (e.g., RESTful APIs) allows for horizontal scaling and resilience, but may require heavier requests and client complexity.