🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #254

Happy Friday! Let's finish the week with energy!

#MarkZuckerberg - So, Mark Zuckerberg thinks he could've made Snapchat a bigger deal if he'd bought it back in 2013...he's still salty about it, apparently.

#Zoom - Zoom apparently had a big outage. The worst part is that most of their account support team could not be reached because zoom uses internal VoIP to communicate with customers… but their web domain itself (zoom[dot]us) could not be reached… And why did that happen? Apparently GoDaddy is to be blamed…

#AppleIntelligence - Meta is basically blocking Apple's AI features on its apps, like Facebook and WhatsApp, and making iPhone users use Meta's own AI instead. It's like, Meta doesn't want Apple to get all the attention, you know?

Zepto Rebrands Parent Entity Ahead Of Public Listing
Zepto has changed the name of its parent entity from Kiranakart Technologies Private Limited to Zepto Private Limited. The change is seen as an effort to boost brand recall.

Google Found Guilty Of Antitrust Violations In Ad Tech Market - Could Get Broken Up
A federal judge has found that Google violated antitrust laws by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in the advertising technology market. The court will set a briefing schedule and hearing date to determine appropriate remedies for the antitrust violations. The remedies could include forcing Google to break up its advertising business, like selling its Google Ad Manager.

CVE Program Secures Funding After Contract Extension
The Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) program, a 25-year-old database of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, was at risk of closure after its contract was set to expire. The nonprofit MITRE runs CVE, which is crucial for global cybersecurity. The US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has extended the contract for 11 months, ensuring the continuation of CVE services.

Google Gemini - Generate AI-powered videos using text-based prompts with Veo 2, producing 8-second clips in 720p.

JetBrains - Introduces AI-powered coding tools, including Junie and AI Assistant, across all IDEs with a new free tier and subscription plans.

Grok - Added a "memory" feature that enables the chatbot to remember details from past conversations with a user, allowing for more personalized responses.

OpenAI - Introduces o3 and o4-mini, new reasoning models with state-of-the-art results and external tool access, including web browsing and Python interpreter.

Discord - Introduces experimental age verification process using face scanning or ID submission for access to sensitive content.

Instagram - Introduces Blend, a custom Reels feed shared between users and members of a DM group.

Prompt Kit | Core building blocks for AI apps. High-quality, accessible, and customizable components for AI interfaces.

Smartfunc | Turn docstrings into LLM-functions

Pledge | A thoughtfully designed reactive programming framework in Swift

Linux Hacking Tools For The Win
Warp Terminal is a terminal tool that can be used to make you look like a hacker. It can be installed from the official repository of most Linux distributions. It will burst a huge text and animation effects on your terminal, where regular keyboard entries do nothing.

Hard Times For Junior Programmers
A Reddit user discussed the challenges junior programmers face in the industry, citing an oversupply of junior developers and the increasing use of AI-powered senior programmers.

Google Layoffs
A Google engineer's emotional goodbye after being let go, despite being told it wasn't based on merit, and having multiple projects and responsibilities suddenly taken away, highlighting the harsh realities of corporate layoffs in the tech industry.