Thursday is here - let's finish the week with purpose!
Geek Gossip
#Malware - The malware that’s been wreaking havoc across the npm ecosystem - has been open sourced by the team that is responsible for the attack - on GitHub no less! Complete with instructions on deployment and usage!
#SteamController - Valve appears to have managed to sneak in one of the weirdest Easter eggs we have seen in a while inside the new Steam Controller. Apparently, if you accidentally drop the controller from high enough, the controller lets out a dramatic scream mid-fall. The sound itself resembles the famous Wilhelm scream, which has basically become Hollywood’s favorite stock panic sound effect.
Latest Updates
Indian Professionals Favor Homegrown Companies
Blind conducted a survey of 1,205 Indian-based professionals to determine their preferences around working in homegrown companies and organizations. Flipkart emerged as the clear frontrunner with at least 20% support.
Uber India Data Centre
Uber announced plans to build their first data center in India in partnership with the Adani Group.
Anthropic Surpasses OpenAI In Business Adoption
Anthropic has more verified business customers than OpenAI, according to this month’s AI Index. 34.4% of participating businesses are paying for Anthropic services, more than any other AI lab. Only 32.3% pay for OpenAI.
Linkedin Cuts 5% Of Staff
LinkedIn plans to lay off nearly 5% of its workforce as part of a broader reorganization. The social network currently employs around 17,500 full-time employees worldwide.
Changelog
Instagram - New App (and Instagram Feature) - Instants, a new ephemeral photo-sharing feature allowing users to share authentic moments with Close Friends or mutual followers.
X - New History Tab on iOS Allows Users to Easily Track and Revisit Favorite Content
WhatsApp - Incognito Chat - Private Conversations with AI on WhatsApp
Tech Talk Thursdays
Ashok Prakash, a staff engineer at Apple, details an open-source architecture for building safe and reliable agentic systems. He emphasizes the "demo-to-production gap" and highlights critical components like agent controllers (using Temporal or Celery), serving layers (KServe, vLLM), and "contracted tools" to prevent malicious actions and cost overruns. The architecture includes a "bounded loop" for evaluation and a policy engine (Open Policy Agent) to ensure safe, traceable, and audited decisions.
Google DeepMind's Chintan Parikh and Weiyi Wang introduce Gemma 4 (2B and 4B) and Light RT, a cross-platform framework for accelerating AI on edge devices like mobiles, IoT, and desktops. Key benefits include low latency, privacy, and cost-efficiency. Gemma 4 features improved reasoning, tool calling, and structured JSON output. Light RT, built on TensorFlow Lite, supports PyTorch and JAX models and offers NPU acceleration for up to 13x performance gains.
Mayank Pant from Stripe discusses monetization strategies for AI companies, highlighting that hyper-growth firms iterate on pricing frequently to match product velocity. He recommends a five-step framework: define customer-perceived value, choose relevant charge metrics (consumption vs. outcome), adopt hybrid pricing models (base fee + scaling fee), implement guardrails to build trust, and continuously iterate based on data.
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:
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Miscellaneous
Why Senior Developers Fail To Communicate Their Expertise
Senior developers worry about stability because they take responsibility for the business to continue serving customers. Senior developers fail to communicate because they express their problems in terms of complexity management.
Software Engineering May No Longer Be A Lifetime Career
As AI adoption rises, some worry it'll make engineers less intelligent over time. However, like construction workers, we may be obliged to use AI for the sake of career advancement, even if it comes at a long-term cost.
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