🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #573

Happy Thursday! You've got this - let's make today count!

ICYMI - a surprise for our readers - check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

#SarvamAI - India’s own Sarvam AI is hiring over 100 forward-deployed engineers to scale its sovereign AI platform and build India's full-stack AI infrastructure, following a $234 million Series B raise at a $1.5 billion valuation.

#GoogleVsDuckDuckGo - DuckDuckGo's free new web browser now blocks most video ads on YouTube, providing users with an ad-free experience. The feature is turned on by default for most iPhone, Windows, and Mac users and will be enabled automatically for Android users soon.

#OpenAI - After the US Government blocked its release and then gave their approval, OpenAI is set to release GPT-5.6 Sol, a new AI model, on July 9, alongside Sol Terra and Luna, with CEO Sam Altman hinting at new building capabilities.

#Meta - Meta's superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang claims the company's AI model Watermelon has caught up with OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on benchmarks, but lacks evidence to back the claim, raising questions about its validity.

Google For Startups Accelerator: India 2026 Class
The Google for Startups Accelerator: India has selected 20 AI-first startups from over 2,500 applicants for its 2026 class, marking the 10th anniversary of the program. These Indian founders are pioneering cutting-edge technologies in climate, healthcare, and finance, with a focus on agentic, multimodal systems.

Claude - The promotional period for using Claude Fable 5 has been extended to July 12, 2026, allowing eligible users to access the model at no extra cost for up to 50% of their weekly subscription limits.

Spotify - You can now pin up to 20 favorites at the top of Your Library.

Bing - Users can now log in with Google and Apple accounts without requiring a Microsoft account, gaining access to personalized features and Microsoft Rewards.

TypeScript - A 10x faster native port of TypeScript has been released, offering native code speed, shared memory multithreading, and new optimizations that typically yield speedups between 8x and 12x on full builds.

Grok - New model 4.5 released

Google Photos - Users can now create stylized and imaginative video clips with cinematic relighting, background swapping, and artistic effects in seconds using the new Video Remix feature.

Meta's AI Glasses - The camera will now automatically be disabled if it detects that the capture LED has been blocked, physically tampered with, or destroyed, and the device won't be able to take more photos and videos until its system detects that the capture LED has been uncovered.

Divya Mohan from SUSE presents on Longhorn, a cloud-native persistent block storage solution for Kubernetes. She explains its architecture, featuring control and data planes, and announces the general availability of the V2 Data Engine. Mohan also outlines upcoming releases, including live upgrades and sharding, while encouraging community engagement and sharing user stories.

Deepika Upadhyay (Clyso) with IBM co-speakers Madhu Rajanna, Rewant Soni, Malay Parida, and Pratik Surve present on Rook, the storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. They discuss its Ceph integration, the Ceph-CSI driver, erasure coding advancements in Ceph v20, and disaster recovery strategies to optimize storage efficiency, scalability, and data protection in containerized environments.

Tittu Varghese from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) shares how they built India's massive payments infrastructure, UPI, using 100% open source. He details scaling to 24 billion monthly transactions, employing AI for real-time fraud detection under 20ms, and NPCI's commitment to giving back to the community by open-sourcing key tools like Drunix, FIMI, and Falcon.

ICYMI - a surprise for our readers - check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

Writing Loops, Not Prompts, Explained
Industry experts now emphasize designing loops, not manual prompts, to efficiently utilize coding agents. Loops automate repetitive tasks, freeing attention for judgment and high-level decisions.

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Tony Krueger passed away. They were a Microsoft developer and revolutionized word processing with their unobtrusive spell checker that introduced red squiggles under misspelled words, now a ubiquitous feature in word processors.