🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #342

Happy Wednesday! You're halfway to the weekend!

#HikeMessenger - After India’s Prime Minister spoke of a local push for social media, India’s competitor to WhatsApp - Hike Messenger (now shut down though) - came into news once again. It’s founder reflects upon its fond days and what led do its downfall.

#KiroPricing - AWS’s vibe coding tool got real popular, until it didn’t - thanks to its pricing. AWS has introduced new pricing for Kiro, its AI-driven coding tool. The latest plans are "a wallet-wrecking tragedy," according to many of its users. Kiro's competitors are cheaper by a wide margin.

#GrokAI - We may now understand why Twitter’s AI is the way it is - it’s system prompts were exposed revealing instructions for its different personas including a “crazy conspiracist” that seems designed to handhold a user into beliefs that “a secret global cabal” controls the world.

Oracle Sacks 10% Of Indian Workforce
Oracle, a major software company, has laid off nearly 10% of its Indian workforce, a move seen as a strategic shift in focus towards the US market, amid high-level talks with US President Donald Trump and a major deal with OpenAI.

Apple Expands India Presence
Apple Inc, the multinational technology company behind the iPhone, is leasing 2.7 lakh sq ft of office space in Bengaluru for 10 years at a cost of Rs 1,010 crore, signaling its plan to boost engineering teams and operations in India. Further, there’s rumour that its entire iPhone 17 lineup could be manufactured in India!

Intel Insider Leaks
Varun Gupta, a former product marketing engineer at Intel, was sentenced to two years of probation and fined over $34,000. Gupta transferred thousands of confidential files from his Intel-issued computer to a personal hard drive before quitting the company in 2020. He accessed those files later on to use them while representing Microsoft in negotiations with Intel.

Google's Nuclear Ambition
Google-backed Kairos Power and Tennessee Valley Authority aim to bring 50 megawatts of nuclear power to Tennessee in 2030. The twin reactor facility is set to supply power to Google's datacenters in Tennessee and Alabama.

Spotify - Introduces seamless playlist transitions with custom mix options, including auto and manual controls for volume, EQ, and effects.

Grammarly - Adds 8 new AI agents, including Reader Reactions, AI Grader, Proofreader, Citation Finder, Expert Review, Paraphraser, AI Detector, and Plagiarism Checker to Grammarly Docs.

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW - Adds RTX 5080 GPUs for 5K streaming at up to 120fps, introduces Cinematic Quality Streaming (CQS) with YUV 4

Design Arena AI - The world’s first crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design. Users face off in “this-or-that” design battles, voting on outputs from top AI models across UI, image, audio, video and more. With live leaderboards, real-world voting, and rankings powered by Elo systems, it’s part fun, part data gold for smarter design evolution. Ready to crown the next design champ?

Email WTF - “Email is Easy.” Challenge yourself with a playful 15-question quiz that tests whether email addresses are valid per RFC rules. It’s interactive, lightweight, and perfect to wow subscribers with a quick brain teaser.

10 Simpler Internal Tools Any Engineering Manager Can Build Under 2 Hours
Some good ideas for an Engineering Manager to work on - equally good for regular developers too.