🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #403

Happy Thursday! Let's give it our all today!

#AIBubble - A J P Morgan report highlights that the AI industry would need to make $650 Billion in annual revenue - just to deliver a 10% return on investments - indicating how much AI companies have hyped their product but under-delivered on its features.

#Android - You shall finally be able to determine which app is a memory / battery hog. Google Play has introduced a new metric to help you identify and address sources of battery drain. Excessive partial wake locks join the technical quality bars which can cause those pesky battery drain issues.

#YannLeCun - Touted as the “Godfather of AI” - Yann LeCun, a chief AI scientist at Meta, is planning to leave the company to build his own startup. He is already in talks to raise capital for a startup that would focus on continuing his work on world models. A world model is an AI system that develops an internal understanding of its environment so it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios. This could be a setback for Meta - that’s desperately trying to up their AI game in the recent past.

Figma Expands In India With New Office And Hiring Spree
Figma, a popular design and development platform, is expanding its presence in India with a new office in Bengaluru and plans to hire local talent to tap into the country's massive developer community.

Xbox Cloud Gaming Now In India
Microsoft has quietly revealed that the Xbox Cloud Gaming platform is now rolling out in India. The company hasn't made any widespread announcements about this region expansion just yet. Users are already claiming vastly improved latency to servers thanks to the upgrade too. In simple terms, you no longer need that fancy specification for your computer - just a keyboard and a mouse with a display - and an extremely fast internet connection are all you need to play the most high end games!

Adani Group Launches 1,126 Mw Battery Energy Storage Project In India
The Adani Group has started India’s largest battery energy storage project in Khavda, Gujarat, with a capacity of 1,126 MW. It will help store power from solar and wind plants, making electricity supply more steady and reliable. Adani plans to reach 50 GWh of energy storage in the next five years.

AgriTech Startup Bharatagri Shuts Down Amidst Funding Woes And Rising Losses
BharatAgri was an AI-led farm advisory startup founded in 2017 that aimed to provide technology-led advisory and agri-input platform for small and mid-sized farmers. Despite raising $12.5 million in funding, the company struggled to achieve profitable growth and ultimately shut down due to rising losses and a tough fundraising environment.

Cadabams Group Invests $7.3 Million In AI Powered Mental Health Platform MindTalk
The Cadabams Group has invested $7.3 million in its newly launched digital mental health platform, MindTalk. The initiative marks one of the largest technology-led expansions in India’s mental health sector.

Google Unveils Private AI Compute
Google has developed a new AI processing platform called Private AI Compute, which aims to provide secure and private AI experiences in the cloud, combining its capable Gemini models with robust security and privacy assurances, ensuring user data remains secure and inaccessible to anyone, including Google.

Google Messages - Introduces Remix feature for editing and reimagining photos in conversations.

Google Drive - New Data Migration Service for seamless transition from Dropbox to Google Drive.

Visual Studio - Now Generally Available with Blazing-Fast Performance, AI-Driven Development, and a Redesigned User Experience.

Nithya Ruff (Head of Amazon Open Source) traces the history of open source, from its "Tale of Two Cities" origin in the 80s/90s with Richard Stallman (GPL) and Linus Torvalds (Linux), to its widespread adoption in the 2000s by webscale companies, enterprises, and governments. She argues the "third decade" faces major challenges: supply chain security, financial sustainability, and ensuring open-source AI to avoid a model monopoly.

Akshita Gupta (Member of Technical Staff @ Salesforce) discusses efficient caching in Python, exploring its role across the full stack, from hardware-level CPU caches to browser, CDN, and DNS caching. She explains Python's built-in tools like lru_cache and cache for local, in-memory optimization and contrasts them with external, distributed solutions like Redis, covering key concepts like cache invalidation, eviction policies, and hybrid approaches.

Pratyush Tewari presents "Chakra UX," a framework for applying the seven chakras to product design. He maps each chakra's core human need (e.g., security, creativity, connection) to a UX principle (e.g., reliability, aesthetics, community), arguing that this holistic approach creates more meaningful, human-centered products that go beyond simple metrics.

A History Of How Apple’s Calculator App on MacOS Got Its Design
Chris Espinosa, one of Apple's earliest employees, dropped out of college to work on the Macintosh team, creating the iconic calculator UI under Steve Jobs' guidance.

A Friendly Guide To Frontend Date Pickers
There can be easier ways to pick a date than a calendar widget. This guide provides alternate ideas and aims to send developers on a path towards user-friendly interfaces.

Material Design 3.0 Evolves
Google introduces Material 3 Expressive, a design system that aims to create a more emotional and intuitive user experience, building on the success of its predecessor, Material Design.