🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #72

Good Wednesday morning! Let's conquer the midweek together.

#CorporatePressure - It seems like Microsoft is really freaking out about security after being threatened by cyber attacks. Every Microsoft employee is now being judged on their security work. Some things are just priorities, you know?

#WhatsThatPromptAppleAI - A Reddit user discovered the prompts that Apple’s engineers provide to their AI to get their assistants to respond to the user’s instructions. A good insight into writing excellent instructions to your LLM to get meaningful output.

#DellDrama - Dell is apparently laying off close to 12500 employees. HR exit meetings kicked off on Tuesday morning, spurring a wave of LinkedIn status changes. Loyal Dell graybeards have grumbled about losing long-term incentives.

#BrowserGoals - Apple is adding a new feature to Safari called “Distraction Control’ The feature lets you remove distracting things like cookie preference pop-ups while you’re browsing.

#WatermarkWars - Did you hear about OpenAI's new AI-detecting tool? It's reportedly 99.9% effective at spotting those fake articles online! But why haven't they released it yet? Could it be because they're worried about angering their biggest fans? What's going on, OpenAI?!

Amazon's India Boss Quits
Manish Tiwary, the head of Amazon’s India operations, is leaving the firm as the U.S. e-commerce giant grapples with mounting pressure from competitors. Amazon has poured more than $7 billion into India, but has faced hurdles in penetrating smaller cities and towns.

Windows 11 Hits 30% Market Share
Today, Windows 11 made a significant milestone, reaching 30.83% market share for the first time since its launch in 2021. Windows 10 is now below 65%, or 64.99%, or -1.06 points in a month. The operating system will reach its end of life in about a year.

Goodbye Chromecast. Hello Google TV Streamer 4K
Google TV Streamer 4K is the successor to Chromecast. It comes with an improved processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage for great performance. It supports 4K HDR with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos for a great audio and video experience.

Dice | A drop-in replacement of Redis with SQL-based realtime reactivity.

Fasthtml | The fastest way to create an HTML app

Developing Soft Skills Or Why You Are Still Not Being Promoted
As software professionals, it's essential to develop soft skills to climb the corporate ladder. In this series, we'll explore the essential skills required to becoming a Staff Engineer. In this first piece, we'll focus on communication, which includes writing, speaking, and nonverbal communication. We'll discuss the importance of reading and re-reading, being succinct, and writing regularly to improve our communication skills. The article provides personal tips, examples, and what to do and what not to do in each mode of communication.

How To Write Good Error Messages
Learn how to craft informative and actionable error messages by providing context about the code's intended behavior, file paths, and specific file types.

LLMs Replace Lorem Ipsum
Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing user interface design by providing realistic content, eliminating the need for placeholder text like Lorem Ipsum.