🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #233

Happy Thursday! One day closer to the weekend!

#BYD - Chinese automaker BYD has announced 1,000-volt supercharging technology it claims can fill a compatible vehicle’s battery in the same amount of time needed to pump fuel into a conventional car. The Super E-Platform could therefore almost triple the speeds of existing EV charging systems. 🤯

#Facebook - Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook employee, has written a book about her time at the company. The book, Careless People, details how she became disillusioned about Facebook's role in the world. Facebook's PR company, Meta, has launched legal action to stop her from promoting the book. 📚

Lok Sabha And MEITY Launch AI-powered Sansad Bhashini
Lok Sabha: India's lower house of parliament. MEITY: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. They've signed a pact to launch Sansad Bhashini, an AI-powered platform for multilingual parliamentary operations, enabling real-time translation and transcription of parliamentary proceedings in multiple languages.

Astronauts Return To Earth After 9-month Iss Stay
Boeing and SpaceX astronauts Sunita “Sunita” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore have returned to Earth after a nine-month stay on the International Space Station. The trip lasted far longer than originally planned thanks to leaks and thruster problems on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.

WhatsApp - Added ability to share songs directly from Spotify playlists to status updates with song previews and "Play on Spotify" option.

Google Gemini - Now available to use without signing in, allowing anyone to access the AI assistant without a Google account.

LinkedIn - Added "Zip", a new simplified connective puzzle game that can be learned in seconds and provides a daily challenge with increasing difficulty.

Google NotebookLM - Added a new mind map feature that generates a visual summary from any source document, allowing users to explore and understand information in a branching diagram format. Google Gemini

How To Train a Model To Generate Image Embeddings From Scratch - This video demonstrates the process of creating a neural network model to generate image embeddings. Image embeddings are vector representations that capture the semantic content of images, enabling tasks like image retrieval and clustering. The video provides a practical walkthrough of training such a model, offering valuable insights for software programmers interested in machine learning and computer vision.

K8s For Industrial Ecosystems - Gayathri Jeganmohan, a software engineer and Microsoft discusses strategies to achieve high availability in industrial systems using Kubernetes (K8s). She explores how to leverage Kubernetes' capabilities to maintain 99.99% uptime, addressing challenges unique to industrial environments. This talk is valuable for software programmers interested in enhancing system reliability and uptime through Kubernetes.

Python On The Rocks - Ria Bhatia delves into integrating RocksDB, a high-performance embedded database, with Python applications. It covers techniques for efficient data storage and retrieval, offering software programmers insights into enhancing application performance using RocksDB within Python environments.

20 New CSS Features You Need To Know In 2005 - This video introduces the latest CSS advancements as of 2025. It highlights 20 new features that enhance web development, providing practical examples and insights. This content is valuable for software programmers aiming to stay updated with modern CSS techniques.

Building Scalable Asynchronous Systems With AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a highly scalable and resilient serverless compute service. With over 1.5 million monthly active customers and tens of trillions of invocations processed, scalability and reliability are two of the most important service tenets. This post provides recommendations and insights for implementing highly distributed applications.

Syncing Data In Modern Web Apps
Nikita Tonsky, creator of DataScript, joins Instant to tackle the notoriously hard problem of syncing data in modern web apps, advocating for a database-like approach on the frontend to manage data complexity and provide a seamless user experience.

CSS Relative Colors: A New Way To Modify Colors
Learn about CSS relative colors, a new way to modify colors in CSS without using pre-processors like Sass, allowing for easier and more straightforward color manipulation, including adjusting opacity, lightness, and hue.