🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #372

Hump day vibes - let's power through Wednesday!

#Amazon - Amazon just finished up its fall event, where it shared big updates across its entire hardware lineup. In addition to revealing new Echo hardware and Kindle Scribe upgrades, Amazon also took the wraps off refreshed Fire TV devices and a whole bunch more.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Steps Down
Music streaming giant Spotify's founder Daniel Ek is stepping down as CEO and will become executive chairman by the end of the year, making way for two new co-CEOs, Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström.

Electronic Arts To Be Taken Private In $36 Billion Deal
The company behind the popular FIFA computer games is in advanced talks to be taken private by three investment firms. The megadeal marks a continued push by Saudi Arabia’s PIF into the videogame industry.

Taiwan Pressured To Move 50% of Chip Production To USA Or Lose Protection
Taiwan's TSMC is the world's leading chip manufacturer, producing 95% of the world's most advanced chips. US Commerce Chief Lutnick wants Taiwan to shift 50% of its production to the US, citing national security and economic benefits.

Opera - Introduces AI-powered browser Neon with task-based agents and customizable AI assistants.

Adobe Premiere - New Mobile Video Editing App From Adobe - Fast, Free, and Focused Mobile Video Editing App with AI-Powered Features and Generative Assets.

Google Search - AI Search Mode now updated with Visual Exploration and Multimodal Search

Facebook - Introducing Fan Challenges to allow creators to engage their community by setting prompts for fans to create and share content. For creators with over one million followers, Custom Top Fan Badges can be created to recognize their most engaged supporters. Additionally, the Professional dashboard has been updated with new metrics to track top fans over time.

WhatsApp - Live and Motion photos can now be shared, and Meta AI-powered creative tools allow for custom chat themes and backgrounds. New sticker packs are available, and a group search function has been added. Additionally, the document scanning feature has been extended to Android devices.

ChatGPT - OpenAI has introduced parental controls that let parents link with teen accounts, set usage limits, and adjust features like content filtering, voice mode, image use, and quiet hours. Parents don’t see their teen’s conversations, except in rare safety-critical cases, and teens can unlink at any time.

Anthropic Claude - Anthropic introduced Claude Sonnet 4.5, a frontier AI model fine-tuned for coding, reasoning, and long-context tasks. It brings major upgrades like checkpoints, context editing, file creation, and a Claude Agent SDK for building custom agents. It maintains the same pricing as Sonnet 4 and carries improved safety, alignment, and computational performance.

Zomato - Zomato has launched "Healthy Mode" to address the company's previous shortcoming in helping users eat genuinely nourishing food, despite making ordering easy. This new feature provides a "Healthy Score" for dishes based on key nutritional factors like protein, complex carbohydrates, fiber, and micronutrients, rather than just calories.

Paperless NGX - A self hosted alternative to scanning and hosting your own documents instead of using Box or Google Drive.

Web AI Demos - With the large amount of AI integration that Google has come out with, here’s a showcase website demonstrating all of the “AI” capabilities that Google’s APIs have to offer. If you frequently participate in hackathons, this one will be come in handy very much.

AI Date Generator - Metabase’s AI Data Generator lets teams create believable, business-ready datasets in minutes for demos, dashboards, and testing—no real user data needed. You pick the industry and parameters, preview schema and sample rows, then export full datasets as CSV/SQL or load them into a Metabase instance. The tool is fully open source, uses LLMs + Faker, and can run locally. Excellent for use in prototypes.

How To Influence Others Without Manipulating
Influence is not the exclusive property of those in authority, but rather a currency of all relationships. By understanding the 5 doors of influence - Rationalising, Asserting, Negotiating, Inspiring, and Bridging - we can grow our awareness and range, and choose consciously how we invite others to join us.

Test Driven Development - A Bad Example
A discussion on Kent Beck's 2003 book "Test Driven Development: By Example" that introduced the Red-Green-Refactor loop, a step-by-step guide to applying TDD, which has since evolved into various interpretations, making industry discussions inconsistent.

The AI Coding Trap
AI Coding Agents struggle to provide working software in complex systems, requiring human review, testing, and integration, limiting productivity gains to around 10% despite marketing claims of 10X faster development.