AHSYNC BYTES - Weekly Digest (17th Nov, 2025)
Explore key advancements in AI, Angular, and web development. Baidu challenges leading models with a lightweight multimodal system, Google expands privacy in cloud AI, and new tools like Colab for VS Code and Angular Signals refine modern development workflows.
Discover what’s next in AI, Angular, and Web Development. Our weekly digest brings you the most relevant updates, expert strategies, and breakthrough innovations, so you stay informed and ahead of the curve.
🤖 AI & Machine Learning
Baidu ERNIE multimodal AI beats GPT and Gemini in benchmarks
Baidu’s latest ERNIE model, a super-efficient multimodal AI, is beating GPT and Gemini on key benchmarks and targets enterprise data often ignored by text-focused models.
For many businesses, valuable insights are locked in engineering schematics, factory-floor video feeds, medical scans, and logistics dashboards. Baidu’s new model, ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, is designed to fill this gap.
What’s interesting to enterprise architects is not just its multimodal capability, but its architecture. It’s described as a “lightweight” model, activating only three billion parameters during operation. This approach targets the high inference costs that often stall AI-scaling projects. Baidu is betting on efficiency as a path to adoption, training the system as a foundation for “multimodal agents” that can reason and act, not just perceive.
Ryan Daws
Google reveals its own version of Apple’s AI cloud
Google has rolled out Private AI Compute, a new cloud-based processing system designed to bring the privacy of on-device AI to the cloud. The platform aims to give users faster, more capable AI experiences without compromising data security. It combines Google’s most advanced Gemini models with strict privacy safeguards, reflecting the company’s ongoing effort to make AI both powerful and responsible.
The feature closely resembles Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, signalling how major tech firms are rethinking privacy in the age of large-scale AI. Both companies are trying to balance two competing needs — the huge computing power required to run advanced AI models and users’ expectations for data privacy.
Muhammad Zulhusni
What's new in TensorFlow 2.19
Highlights of this release include changes to the C++ API in LiteRT, bfloat16 support for tflite casting, discontinue of releasing libtensorflow packages. Learn more by reading the full release notes.
Datasets for Training a Language Model
A language model is a mathematical model that describes a human language as a probability distribution over its vocabulary. To train a deep learning network to model a language, you need to identify the vocabulary and learn its probability distribution. You can’t create the model from nothing. You need a dataset for your model to learn from.
In this article, you’ll learn about datasets used to train language models and how to source common datasets from public repositories.
Adrian Tam
🚀 Angular
Handling Time and Mock Clocks in Tests
In the realm of software testing, the concept of time can be a tricky one to manage, especially when dealing with asynchronous operations and timeouts. We are continually refining our approach to handling time in unit tests, particularly concerning the use of mock clocks. We’ve found that mock clocks, while useful, often lead to headaches in test code and unrealistic timing scenarios.
To address these challenges, we are exploring the exciting concept of “auto-advancing” mock clocks, which aim to streamline testing and enhance the accuracy of time-based simulations. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the intricacies of mock clocks, their limitations, and the potential benefits of auto-advancing functionality.
Andrew Scott
Onboarding AI Agents into Your Angular Team
The world of software development is changing faster than ever. Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a trend. It’s already part of the way we build software. In this guide, the author will share his own experience working with AI agents and give you practical advice on using them in Angular projects.
You’ll learn the difference between Vibe Coding and AI-Assisted Coding, and how to guide an AI agent to act like an additional team member, writing code that follows your rules, stays predictable, and is easy to review.
Przemysław Łęczycki
Master Angular Signals
If you're tired of wrestling with ExpressionChangedAfterItHasBeenCheckedError, complex RxJS chains, or slow, unpredictable apps, you've found the solution.
This book is for you if you:
✅ Are struggling to understand when and how to use Angular Signals effectively.
✅ Want to build modern, zoneless applications but don't know where to start.
✅ Need a clear, practical plan to migrate your existing RxJS or NgRx (RxJS based) codebase.
✅ Are ready to write simpler, cleaner, and dramatically more performant code.
Authored by Muhammad Ahsan Ayaz—a Google Developer Expert, multiple-award-winning author, awarded by Google (via the GDE program) for his Angular course on YouTube called "MASTER Angular in 90 Minutes with This Crash Course" with over 370,000 views, and author of ngx-device-detector (an Angular library with over 12 million installs and over 5,500 GitHub projects using it today—this guide cuts through the theory and gives you battle-tested, practical strategies.
Upcoming Events
- NG Poland 2025: November 18 2025, 10th Edition
- The Principal Dev – Masterclass for Tech Leads: November 27-28 2025
- Angular Day: will be held in 2026, Get notified yourself!
NG Poland
Lars O. Tech Lead
🌐 Web & Frontend
Google Colab is Coming to VS Code
We've seen the passion from the community to bridge the gap between powerful VS Code development and web-based Colab notebooks through blog posts, forum threads, and popular GitHub repositories detailing workarounds. All of this made it clear that Colab users want the power and simplicity of Colab inside the VS Code editor they are already using.
Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code. This work is the culmination of two key trends that have become apparent in the last few years. Read the full blog here.
Spencer Shumway
Introducing Code Wiki: Accelerating your code understanding
Reading existing code is the one of the biggest, most expensive bottlenecks in software development.
To address this issue and improve your productivity, we're introducing Code Wiki, a platform that maintains a continuously updated, structured wiki for code repositories.
Fergus Hurley
Making the terminal beautiful one pixel at a time
We're excited to announce a significant upgrade to the Gemini CLI user experience, making your terminal interactions more robust, intuitive, and visually stable. We have overhauled the foundation of how Gemini CLI is rendered to eliminate the visual noise often associated with terminal applications, bringing a level of polish you typically only expect from graphical interfaces directly into your terminal.
You no longer have to deal with flickering screens, bouncing input prompts, or losing your place in long output streams. It’s the same powerful Gemini CLI, just dramatically smoother.
Jacob Richman
Upcoming Events
- Web Directions Developer Summit: November 19-20, 2025 - Sydney, AU
- AWS re:Invent 2025: December 1 – 5, 2025 - Global cloud computing conference
- Frontend Nation: Comming in 2026! Free Online Live Event
💡 Bottom Line Up Front
The latest industry developments center on making AI more capable, efficient, and privacy-conscious. Baidu’s new multimodal model challenges established benchmarks, Google introduces a cloud privacy system reminiscent of Apple’s approach, and TensorFlow continues refining its tooling. The focus on datasets reflects ongoing efforts to improve the foundations of language model training.
In the frontend world, Angular teams are adopting better strategies for managing time in tests, integrating AI support, and transitioning to Signals for cleaner architecture. Web development is strengthened by new tools such as Colab for VS Code, smarter code documentation systems, and a more stable Gemini CLI experience.
I hope you find these helpful. If you do, please share our blog with others so they can join our amazing community on Discord (link below)
Don't miss out – join our awesome community to grow as a tech enthusiast, and to help others grow.
As always, Happy coding ❤️
