🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #60

Rise and shine! It's a brand new week with brand new opportunities.

#ByeByegooGl - Google will shut down the Google URL Shortener service in 2025. From August 23, 2024, goo[dot]gl links will show an interstitial page for a percentage of users. As the shutdown date nears, that percentage will increase.

#STEMgradsGoneMild - India has millions of STEM grads. Like, they're literally overflowing! But where do they go? Turns out, the pick of the bunch fly to the US, while the rest are stuck with crappy salaries and "skills" that don't cut it in the Indian IT scene. Despite producing around 5-10 million STEM graduates annually, India is running out of skilled software engineers.

#AIImmortality - They're gonna bring back your dead loved ones with AI! No more grief, no more mourning, just a fake, robotic version of them. I mean, denial is one thing, but this is just crazy!

#VRLifeCrunch - Report claims Meta told its VR/AR teams to cut spending by a fifth. The company still expects developers to pump out a new Meta Quest 4 headset, a Quest Pro sequel, and new AR glasses that nix the Ray Bans branding in the next three years.

PayTM Struggles To Recover
PayTM, once the poster child of India's startup ecosystem, reported a 36% decline in revenue and a more than doubled loss in the first quarter due to a regulatory clampdown on its payments bank subsidiary.

Google Toughens Up Quality Control for Android Apps
Google is updating its minimum quality requirements for Android apps to ensure a better user experience on the Play Store. Starting August 31st, apps that aren't functional or only do little won't be allowed. This is part of Google's efforts to police the Play Store and keep users safe from bad apps.

Netflix Surpasses Expected Subscriber Growth
Netflix added 8.05 million subscribers during the second quarter of 2024. That's well above expectations from financial advisers, and it is also well above the 5.89 million subscribers that were added during the first quarter of 2023. Netflix now has 277.65 million subscribers globally.

Instagram Unveils New Features and Reveals Plans to Study App's Impact on Teen Mental Health
Known for its photo and video-sharing capabilities, Instagram is expanding its features to include temporary notes on Reels and the ability to add multiple songs to a single Reel. Additionally, the platform has partnered with the Centre for Open Science to provide data for studying the app's impact on the mental health of teenagers.

Zoom Expands Beyond Video Conferencing Channel
Zoom is transitioning from being just a meeting application to a comprehensive collaboration platform called Zoom Workplace. The company’s AI strategy extends beyond just using natural language processing during meetings for real-time translation and transcription. The platform also offers translation services for multilingual meetings and AI-powered insights for customer service agents.

GPT-4o mini Launched by OpenAI
OpenAI has released GPT-4o mini, a lightweight and affordable AI model that scores 82% on the MMLU benchmark, making it a significant improvement over its predecessor. It's even cheaper than some competing models, and already live on ChatGPT for free and paid users, as well as available through the API for developers.

Llm2sh | As programmers, we often need to type out commands to carry out tasks. What if you could instead type out what you want to do - and the terminal figures out the command for you and runs it?

Eldoraui | Eldora UI is a collection of re-usable components that you can copy and paste into your web apps. It primarily features components, blocks, and templates geared towards creating landing pages and user-facing marketing materials.

Fights between Managers and Reports: Avoiding Dreadful Situations
Great managers don't get into sustained conflicts with their direct reports. Remember, if you're in a sustained conflict with your boss, they're not great. You're probably not great at your job either, statistically speaking. There are only three options: try to get them fired, adapt, or try to get them to change. Try not to get your hopes up, and consider the practicalities of the situation.

Dry Promotions Are Here
Innovative companies are increasingly offering "dry promotions" to employees, which involve a change in job title without a corresponding pay hike. While it may seem like a demotivator, experts suggest it can be a learning opportunity, allowing employees to develop new skills and take on more responsibility. However, it may not be suitable for everyone, especially those with familial responsibilities.

Microsoft India Team Exposes LLM Flaws
Microsoft Research study finds that traditional accuracy metrics are insufficient for evaluating the quality of compressed LLMs. Researchers propose using distance metrics like KL-Divergence and the percentage of flips to better assess the impact of compression.

Agile: Story Points Are Pointless
Story points are unreliable and confusing, but alternative techniques suffer from similar pitfalls. The article explores the flaws in story points, including their inability to represent time and the problems with combining them with velocity. It also introduces Measured Queues as a better estimation method, which can address short-term and long-term estimation issues and provide a more valuable exercise for larger teams.