🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #270

Embrace Monday like it's the beginning of something great!

#Aadhaar - The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has “sucessfully conducted’ face authentication test during the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET UG) 2025 in Delhi. The initiative, in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and the National Testing Agency (NTA), aims to enhance “exam security and candidate verification processes using advanced biometric technology”. However, its raising major red flags about privacy.

#Netflix - For the unaware, Netflix has an interactive special named “Bandersnatch”. Here, you can chose the fate of the main character while you are watching the show! It blew many peoples minds when it released and people were quick to try different combinations. Well - Netflix is now pulling it off its listings. Today is the last day you can view it - so watch it before it disappears.

#Windows11 - Microsoft's giving the Start menu a major facelift, and it's all about making it more personalized and user-friendly. They also shared the decision making process and iterations it went through.

ISRO Launches RISAT-1B Satellite For Enhanced Border Surveillance
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) is India's national space agency, responsible for the country's space program. Today, they launched RISAT-1B, a radar imaging satellite that will provide all-weather border surveillance and national security, equipped with advanced C-band synthetic aperture radar technology, to be used in response to cross-border threats, especially after recent terrorist attacks.

Visual Studio Code - Added custom instructions and reusable prompts in the Chat feature, along with smarter results and improved performance, and introduced a new base model, GPT-4.1, for enhanced coding capabilities.

ChatGPT - Added GitHub integration for Deep Research, enabling users to link repositories and retrieve relevant information to compile reports.

Shazam - Introduced the Shazam Viral Charts, a daily updated ranking of the fastest-growing songs globally, based on unique Shazam signals and weekly growth in Shazam volume.

Google Chrome - Enhanced Protection mode now utilizes Gemini Nano on-device large language model (LLM) on desktop for instant insight on risky websites and additional protection against unseen scams.

Google Gemini API - Introduces "implicit caching" to deliver up to 75% savings on repetitive context passed to models.

Hyperswitch | An open source payments switch written in Rust to make payments fast, reliable and affordable

Pipask | Safer python package installs with audit and consent 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 install

Seyfert | the black magic Discord framework

Real-world Adoption Of AI Coding Tools: Lessons Learned
A SaaS company with a mature Ruby on Rails codebase shares their experience with AI coding tools, Claude Code and Cursor, finding 20% increased productivity and improved code ambition, but also highlighting challenges in workflow integration and remembering to use the tools.

Weird: A Decentralized Web Identity Platform
Erlend Sh, GitHub developer, proposes Weird, an open-source alternative to Linktree, aiming to make personal websites easy to build, with a focus on self-hosting and sovereignty, using technologies like Svelte and Rauthy.