🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #368

Happy Thursday! Let's power through the day!

#3-Billion - That’s the number of monthly active users on Instagram! It just hit a new milestone - 4 years after hitting 2 billion monthly active users.

#iOS26 - For the first time, you will be able to receive notifications originating in your iPhone onto your non-Apple smart watches! Until now, only if you had an iWatch, you would receive these - but iOS 26.1 beta code seems to have an unreleased feature called Notification Forwarding that enables this.

#LinkedIn - LinkedIn is getting roasted for sharing Premium users' private messages to train their AI models, and now they're updating their terms of service to be more transparent about using customer data! Apparently, they'll be using it to train AI models to make your LinkedIn experience more relevant, but you can opt out if you want!

Swiggy Sells Off Its Stake In Rapido
Due to a conflict of interest, Swiggy has finalised the offloading of its entire 12 percent holding in ride-hailing firm Rapido, worth Rs 2,399 crore. The shares are now being acquired by Rapido's existing investors, Prosus and Westbridge Capital.

Rocket Raises $15m To Take On Vibe-coding Rivals
Rocket[dot]new, an Indian startup building an AI-powered app development platform, has raised $15 million in a seed round led by Salesforce Ventures. The 16-week-old startup aims to become a comprehensive agentic system, which will utilize AI not only to build apps and websites but also to conduct competitive research and product development. Rocket[dot]new has crossed 400,000 users in 180 countries and reached $4.5 million in annual recurring revenue.

Wipro's Bengaluru Campus To Ease Traffic Congestion
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has sought the support of Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji to ease traffic congestion on Bengaluru’s Outer Ring Road (ORR) corridor. Mobility experts believe this could cut congestion along the stretch by nearly 30% during peak hours.

Nasa Artemis II Mission On Track For 2026 Launch
NASA is planning to send 4 astronauts around the Moon and back in the first human mission beyond low-Earth orbit in over 50 years, with preparations underway for a Feb 2026 launch. The mission includes a new rocket and spacecraft, and will test the systems and crew for a future lunar landing.

Google - Introduces Mixboard, AI-powered mood board creation software that uses text prompts and Google's Nano Banana image editing model to generate and edit visual ideas.

Windows - Windows ML is now generally available for production use, allowing developers to deploy AI experiences directly on Windows devices with streamlined model dependency management and optimized performance across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs.

LinkedIn - Introduces Career Hub with Trending Skills insights, Internal Mobility, and Role Guides to help professionals upskill and advance in their careers.

YouTube - Added a "Hide" button for end screens on videos and removed the desktop hover-to-subscribe button from branded watermarks to simplify the viewing experience.

WhatsApp - WhatsApp now supports message translation on both iOS and Android, with Android users able to translate between six languages and iPhone users having access to all languages supported by Apple's Translate app.

Cloudflare - Introduced VibeSDK, an open-source AI "vibe coding" platform that enables users to deploy their own custom platforms with one-click setup, integrating LLM models for code generation, application building, debugging, and real-time iteration.

Manohar Sai Jasti (from Workday) explains how LLMs convert natural language questions into SQL queries. He highlights the need for a "semantic layer" (using dbt) to provide LLMs with crucial data context, preventing hallucinations and enabling fast, accurate self-service analytics via RAG pipelines.

Dilpreet Singh (at PyCon AU 2025) argues that effective evaluations ("evals") are crucial for Generative AI, moving "beyond vibes" to a grounded approach. He covers building "golden sets," sanity checks, human preference capture, LLM-as-a-judge, and systematic error analysis for robust AI models.

Moving Off TypeScript
Motion, a rapidly growing startup, scaled to 2.5M lines of TypeScript code, but experienced issues with code sharing, performance, and compile times, leading to a search for alternative ecosystems with runtime types and faster compile times.

Dear Github - No YAML Anchors
GitHub introduces YAML anchors to GitHub Actions, but they're redundant with existing functionality and introduce non-locality, making it harder for humans and machines to analyze and reason about workflows.