🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #329

Good morning! Let's conquer Friday and enjoy the weekend!

#Indian-Inspiration - OpenAI released their “study mode” that offers step by step guidance instead of quick answers. Guess what? They were inspired by Indian students, tutors and the education system in India. Listen to this video at around the 7:30 mark where the VP of Education at OpenAI describes it.

 #Raanjhanaa - What’s a kollywood (Tamil Film Industry) movie doing in this newsletter? Well, a movie released in 2013 is being re-released - with a different ending. A happy ending. And - the ending apparently was edited using AI. Did that get your attention now?

#Lo-Fi-Girl - The popular audio stream on YouTube with a background of a girl with headphones studying has had an update, with the girl, named the Lo-Fi girl graduating. Her headphones were replaced with the graduation cap with a message thanking its audience.

#Azure - 15 years after it launched, we finally know how much Azure earns for Microsoft. They would always club its earnings with other services - so until now, nobody knew if it was profitable and by how much. In its latest earnings release, we now know that Azure earned $75 billion last year - and is growing 34% YoY.

#SubstackScandal - Sub stack is a newsletter as a service tool, that came in the news for all the wrong reasons. It sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness. The push alert was sent to an undisclosed number of users’ phones.

Samsung Partners With Startup India To Empower Young Innovators Across India
Samsung, India's largest consumer electronics brand, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Startup India to strengthen the country's startup ecosystem and empower young innovators from remote areas through Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow initiative, providing access to infrastructure, expert guidance, market linkages, and funding opportunities. This partnership aims to nurture the next generation of problem solvers and aligns with India's growth initiatives.

TCS Faces Union Backlash
The Karnataka Labour Department has called for a conciliation meeting with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on August 6 to discuss recent layoffs. This follows an industrial dispute filed by the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union. TCS, quoting the company CEO K Krithivasan, said it planned to reduce its workforce by 2% by 2026.

Google Plays Ball With Real-money Gaming Apps In India
Google has proposed sweeping changes to its Play Store and advertising policies in India. The company is aiming to allow more real-money gaming apps onto its platforms. The move is a bid to settle an ongoing antitrust case with a local online gaming platform WinZO.

Google Invests $6 Billion In India Data Centre
Google will invest $6 billion to develop a 1-gigawatt data centre and its power infrastructure in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The data centre investment includes $2 billion in renewable energy capacity that will be used to power the facility. It will be the search giant's first such investment in India.

YouTube To Be Included In Australia's Social Media Ban For Children Under 16
YouTube will be included in Australia's world-first social media ban for children under 16. The video sharing site was set to be excluded from the ban. The ban will limit TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and Snapchat and is due to start in December.

Proton - Released a new authenticator app providing dynamic two-factor authentication codes for secure login to services across multiple platforms.

Dropbox Passwords - This product has been sunset. Data export option added for easy transition to alternative password managers.

Microsoft Teams - A summary of all the updates landed in Teams for the month of July 2025

Instagram - Live streaming is now allowed only for accounts with more than one thousand followers

Wtffmpeg | A command-line tool that uses a local Large Language Model (LLM) to translate plain English descriptions of video and audio tasks into executable ffmpeg commands.

Yt Transcriber | TUI app- Give it a YouTube URL and you get a transcription with possible speaker identification and optional summary or translation, all thanks to open-source AI tooling.

Vet | A command-line tool that acts as a safety net for the risky curl | bash pattern. It lets you inspect, diff against previous versions, and lint remote scripts before asking for your explicit approval to execute. Promoting a safer, more transparent way to handle remote code execution.

The Many Javascript Runtimes Of The Last Decade
JavaScript's diversification continues with new runtimes and engines emerging, including Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, and Wasmer, each optimizing for specific tasks and use cases, from edge computing to microcontrollers.

AI Coding Assistants: A Double-edged Sword
Dan McKinley’s classic blog post Choose Boring Technology is still relevant today. McKinley: Boring technologies have known failure modes, well-understood capabilities, and proven operational reliability. When you combine unfamiliar technologies with AI-generated code, you’re not just adding unknowns - you're multiplying them.

Fluid Compute Revolution
A blog post by the team at Vercel, describing how they were able to optimize the use of Lambda functions and reduce their costs.

We believe in sharing great resources, and these newsletters are some good ones. They offer sharp, focused insights - especially around tech topics we might only touch on briefly.

If you're into cryptocurrency and blockchain, we recommend Cryptogram - it dives deep into the space, which we don’t often cover in detail.

For startup enthusiasts, Rustic Flute is a must-read, especially since we’ve noticed many of you love staying on top of the latest in the startup world.