🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #488

It's Thursday! Time to wrap up the week strong!

#WhatsApp - While governments across the world are thinking of banning social media for children, WhatsApp has come out with allowing minors to own WhatsApp accounts, through supervision of their parents.

#Firefox - Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for Firefox, internally named "Nova" It features strong curves that aggressively round off the tabs and the address bar, pastel colors, a refreshed new tab page, floating "island" UI elements.

#AIEnergy - MIT Technology Review dropped a bombshell report that states the energy required for a 5 second AI generated video is equal to running your microwave for 1 hour!

#Grammarly - A service that allows you write professional, without spelling or grammar mistakes launched an AI feature that allowed you to edit your work through famous professional, human editors (like the likes of actual humans that edit newspapers or editorials). Except - they didn’t take permissions from these actual humans. Facing backlash, Grammarly has finally paused this feature.

India's Neobank Fi Discontinues Banking Services
Founded in 2019 by former Google Pay India executives, Fi is a Bengaluru-based startup that offers digital savings accounts and money management tools, serving over 3.5 million customers and completing over a billion transactions. The company is winding down its banking interface, directing customers to access their accounts through Federal Bank's mobile app.

Atlassian To Lay Off 10% Of Workforce
Atlassian, a global software company known for its collaboration and productivity tools, has made the difficult decision to reduce its workforce by 10%, affecting approximately 1,600 employees.

Founder of QuickSort Algorithm Passes Away
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more.

Vercel - You can now send messages in WhatsApp through the Chat SDK

Google Chrome - Rolls out Gemini integrated features in India

Meta - Improves spam and scam detection features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp

Google Play - More paid games added to the catalog. You can now also play games in Trial mode - a risk free way to try out full versions of games without cost.

Aakansha Priya and Adriana Villela provide a deep dive into Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) for managing OpenTelemetry collectors at scale. They explain key components like the OpAMP server, client, and extensions, highlighting how the OpAMP supervisor acts as a sidecar to enable remote configuration updates and collector restarts. The session includes live demonstrations of various deployment scenarios, including containerized setups and the Kubernetes-native OpAMP bridge.

Sohan Maheshwar discusses securing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using relationship-based access control (ReBAC) inspired by Google's Zanzibar paper. He introduces SpiceDB, an open-source authorization database, and demonstrates two techniques: pre-filter authorization (checking permissions before querying the vector database) and post-filter authorization (filtering retrieved results before they reach the LLM). These methods prevent unauthorized data access in AI applications, ensuring that LLMs only process context the user is permitted to see.

How Vercel Runs A CDN In Front Of Discourse
In this article, you will learn how to use Vercel as a content delivery network (CDN) to front any application, not just those deployed natively on the platform, and how to use Vercel's microfrontends to run multiple apps on a single domain. You will understand how to set up a CDN proxy, configure Vercel microfrontends, and run multiple apps on a single domain with a vertical microfrontend approach.

How We Rebuilt Next.js With AI In One Week
Cloudflare engineers rebuilt Next.js from scratch on Vite, creating a drop-in replacement called vinext, offering 4x faster builds and 57% smaller client bundles.