Thursday is your day to make big moves - let's do it!
Geek Gossip
#Google-AI-Overviews - Report shows how hard publishers of all sizes were hit by the ongoing AI revolution in Google search. Small publishers (sites with 1,000-10,000 daily page views) saw the steepest drop because users no longer had a need to visit websites and they could simply get their answers from AI Overviews that show up at the top of the search results.
Latest Updates
No major news for the day. Some minor updates that you can see in the changelog section below.
Changelog
Facebook - Introduces Creator Fast Track program with guaranteed pay and increased content reach for creators.
OpenAI - GPT-5.4 mini and nano models launched - Fast and Efficient Small Models for High-Volume Workloads
Firefox - Firefox 149 launched with built in VPN
Perplexity Comet - Available for iOS devices, allowing users to access the AI-powered browser assistant on Apple devices.
Tech Talk Thursdays
The Model Context Protocol is a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol. This workshop from Anthropic - the creators of MCP - talks about the philosophy behind MCP, its impact on the broader ecosystem since launch, and how developers can use it to build context-rich AI apps and agentic experiences.
In this MongoDB workshop, Apoorva Joshi explains how to build multimodal AI agents using Python. She defines agents as systems that use LLMs to reason, plan, and execute tasks via tools. The session highlights a modern Vision Language Model approach, where document pages are screenshotted to preserve the context between text and images, effectively solving the "modality gap" in data retrieval.
Aparna Dhinkaran identifies three core components for AI agents: routers, skills, and memory. Effective evaluation requires tracing if the router picks the right skill, the skill executes accurately, and the agent converges on an answer efficiently. For voice agents, this extends to speech-to-text accuracy and tone, ensuring reliability across complex, multi-step multimodal interactions.
In Case You Missed It
🎁 We now have a dedicated page to list all events. We will be updating this page EVERY WEEK. We will of course be publishing new (and coming-soon) events in this section but for a comprehensive list of events, check the link(s) below:
This link is EXCLUSIVELY accessible by subscribers of Heap Heap Hurray!
Miscellaneous
Your New Job Is to Onboard AI Agents: How AI Native Companies Actually Operate
Three AI-native companies (Linear, Ramp, Factory) show how to seamlessly integrate AI agents into day-to-day work, making them first-class employees.
Good Software Knows When To Stop
Good software knows the purpose it serves, it does not try to do everything, it knows when to stop and what to improve.
The Unwritten Laws Of Software Engineering
Software engineers learn unwritten rules by breaking things and swearing they'll never do it again. Here are 7 laws every engineer has broken at least once, learned the hard way.
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