🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #317

Wednesday calls for determination and progress!

#Tesla - It’s here! Their first showroom. In Mumbai. It opened yesterday and they launched their Mode Y electric SUV for a whopping 60+ lakh - 30+ lakh more than what it sells for in USA, thanks to Indian taxes.

#Cybersecurity - Google last year had launched an AI agent to combat cyber security issues. Codenamed “Big Sleep”, it found a real world security vulnerability recently!

#CodeReview - Microsoft meanwhile has their own AI tool to do Pull Request reviews. It’s reviewed over 6 lakh PRs!

#Nodejs-Release-Cycle - There’s currently a discussion going on to shorten the LTS duration of Nodejs and shift to annual major releases. Check it out.

It’s a slow news day in this edition.

Apple Invests In US Rare Earth Magnet Production
Apple announced a new commitment of $500 million with MP Materials. Apple is committed to buying American-made rare earth magnets. The commitment is part of Apple’s pledge to spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

Mistral - Released Voxtral, its first open audio model for businesses, offering affordable and multilingual speech intelligence with transcription, understanding, and real-time actions capabilities.

Kiro - Here’s Amazon’s IDE for vibe coding. It is an AI-powered IDE built by a small AWS team that transforms “vibe coding” into production‑ready software. It converts single prompts into structured specs (requirements, design, tasks), generates and tracks code with agents and hooks, integrates with VS Code, supports multimodal inputs, and helps maintain docs, tests, and security through its lifecycle.

jsDate wtf - This is a playful quiz site that tests developers’ knowledge of JavaScript’s quirky Date API. It offers trick questions, highlighting inconsistent parsing edge cases across runtimes like Node/V8.

Typescript Effect - It is an interactive playground showcasing the Effect library in React. It lets developers visualize and experiment with composable, type-safe algebraic effects, error tracking, and recovery. Users can tweak code live and immediately see how Effects behave under the hood, making complex control flow easier to grasp

Core Engineering Revival
Indian IIT-Madras director V. Kamakoti warns that the focus on AI and computer science is hindering infrastructure and industrial development, urging students to reconsider core engineering disciplines like civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.

Designing AI Experiences That Stick
Designing a new AI feature? This article provides a systematic approach to building AI experiences that stick, covering flows, interactions, and user intent. Learn how to complement chat interfaces with task-oriented UIs and amplify user value with AI.

Bypassing Restrictions On Google Chrome’s Extension Manifest v3
Chrome's MV3 update breaks adblockers, but a bug in the Chrome source code allows them to work around it by creating a custom event using JavaScript bindings, exploiting a vulnerability in the WebRequestEventImpl class.