🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #260

Good vibes only this Monday - let's do this!

#AISlop - Meta's finally admitting Facebook's a mess, trying to clean up all the spammy posts, but they're still ignoring that weird AI slop trend that's been taking over, guess they're just trying to make Facebook cool for young adults again, but it's gonna take a lot more than that to get rid of all the junk.

#Perplexity - Perplexity is building its own browser to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app. This so it can sell premium ads. CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason is to compete with Google.

#DecentralizedSocialNetworks - The idea of being a decentralized service is that if one server goes down, you still have others working. Except, the decentralized social network BlueSky still went down. Apparently a DDoS attack caused it - but one can no longer argue about decentralization benefits anymore if it can be brought down.

India Selects Sarvam To Build Sovereign Large Language Model
We've been talking about India's efforts to boost its tech scene - Well, the government just chose a company called Sarvam, an AI firm, to build a large language model that's specifically designed for India - it'll be able to understand and respond in Indian languages, and will be developed and deployed locally, which is a big deal for the country's tech autonomy.

Mphasis Reports Highest Sequential Revenue Growth In 3 Years
Mphasis is an Indian IT services company that provides tech solutions to various industries. Today, they announced their highest revenue growth in 3 years, up 2.6% sequentially, driven by strong performance in BFSI, TMT, and insurance segments, with a record pipeline and $390 million in deal wins.

Intel Mandates 4-day In-office Workweek
Intel, a leading semiconductor company, has announced a shift in its work policy, requiring employees to work from the office 4 days a week, citing the need for in-person collaboration and a "vibrant hub of culture" amidst plans to lay off up to 20% of its workforce.

Alphabet Reports Strong Q1 Results Driven By Google Search, Youtube, And Cloud
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, today announced the financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025. Alphabet reported revenue of $90.2 billion, a 12% increase year over year. The revenue growth was supported by various businesses including Google Search, YouTube ads, Google subscriptions, and Google Cloud.

Gmail - Introduces Material Design 3 interface for iPhone users, adds birthday event creation and modification, and updates Gemini side panel with AI-powered image generation capabilities.

Adobe Fresco - Added "Created without generative AI" tag to certify hand-created artwork.

Netflix - Added a new subtitle option that shows only spoken dialogue, without audio cues.

YouTube - Introduces 4x playback speed for Premium subscribers, AI-based "Ask Music" radio channel, voice replies in video comments, multi-view feature for YouTube TV subscribers, and various birthday-themed updates.

Google Chrome - Reverses plans to phase out third-party cookies and will maintain current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice.

React Agent Hooks | Turn React hooks into LLM tools

Tutorial Codebase Knowledge | Turns Codebase into Easy Tutorial with AI

Tweakcn | A visual no-code theme editor for shadcn/ui components

Lessons Learned from Recreating a Styled Dialog
Learn how to create a customized dialog using the native dialog html element.

The Return Of The UX Generalist
As AI reshapes the field, specialization is giving way to a broader expertise, with a focus on systems understanding, orchestration, and strategic problem-solving, leading to the emergence of experience designers and architects who can direct AI-supported design tasks.

Vercel's Route-Aware Gateway
Vercel's platform features an application-aware gateway that integrates routing into the development process, reducing configuration overhead and latency. It uses framework code to define infrastructure, allowing for smarter request handling and optimized build output.