🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #357

Good morning! Let's conquer this Wednesday together!

#VodafoneExperiment - Vodafone made an advertisement starring an AI avatar posing as a real lady. It's so obvious it's AI, the hair is off, mannerisms are wonky, and a mole moves around, but they're just testing the waters

#iPhone17-Air - Apple’s Awe Dropping Event concluded. Among the iPhone 17 lineup announcement, a new variant - “Air” was announced. Thin and light weight. Check out the link for a summary of the event.

OpenAI Eyes India For $500 Billion Stargate Project
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is holding talks with Indian data center companies to bring its massive $500 billion global supercomputing project, Stargate, to India. This move comes after the Indian government requested OpenAI to store Indian users' data locally, citing concerns about data sovereignty and latency.

Nova Launcher Founder Leaves Project After Being Told To Stop Work
Nova Launcher is a popular Android customization app that allows users to deeply control their device's look and feel, but its founder, Kevin Barry, has left the project after being asked to stop working on it by its parent company, Branch. Barry confirmed he was the "only one working on Nova for the past year".

Xbox Cloud Gaming Expands To Vehicles
Microsoft and LG team up to bring Xbox gaming to cars with internet-connected infotainment systems, allowing passengers to stream and play games directly from the Xbox app.

Plex Warns Customers To Reset Passwords After Data Breach
Plex, a popular media streaming platform, has suffered a data breach, warning customers to reset their passwords after a hacker stole customer authentication data, including email addresses, usernames, and hashed passwords.

Npm Undergoes Supply Chain Attack, Millions Of Users' Accounts Compromised
Attackers hijacked NPM packages with over 2.6 billion weekly downloads after compromising a maintainer's account in a phishing attack. The malware operates by injecting itself into the web browser and hijacking network traffic and application APIs.

AI To Take Over 75% Of It Work By 2030, Analysts Predict
Gartner's symposium suggests AI will augment human work, but not replace it, as companies struggle to implement and manage the technology.

Bluesky - Bookmarks are now available, aka Saved Posts, that allows users to save posts for later viewing.

Google - AI Mode now available in Hindi

Signal - Secure Backups - Opt-in feature to create a daily, end-to-end encrypted archive of messages and media, with 45 days of media history included for free and optional paid subscription for longer media history and message history.

Firefox - Introduces Shake to Summarize feature to provide quick summary of long web pages with one simple gesture.

Gemini - You can now upload audio files for processing

Agents MD - An open, Markdown-based standard serving as a README for AI coding agents. It centralizes agent-specific instructions—like setup commands, build steps, testing routines, and coding standards—so AI tools (e.g., Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini) have a predictable place to look, keeping traditional README files clean and focused.

How To Deal With A Team Member Who Is Always Complaining
Complaints are not harmless and can impact individuals, relationships, teams, and tasks. Understanding why people complain and how to shift the conversation can help leaders turn complaints into opportunities for growth and improvement.

Why Retention Is So Hard For New Tech Products
Insights from a VC's 15+ years of analyzing retention curves, showing predictable patterns and pitfalls, including the futility of trying to fix bad retention and the importance of starting strong to end strong.

Optimize Your Code, Not Your Iterations
Newly-graduated programmers often focus on iteration-focused coding, but experts emphasize the power of reading code to find and prevent bugs. By building mental models and understanding control flow and state, you can discover and fix issues before they become major problems.