Skip to main content

April Fool and Google Compilation: 2018 Version

Image result for google april fool

Every year different teams withing Google spend considerable amount of effort - both time and money to make to come up with awesome nerdy April fool joke/products. I have started following the trend since last two years and they never seem to disappoint. What I have been able to find this year are:

Where is Waldo - Google Maps Team

Waldo Maps GIFOften Google Maps team comes up with quest/games or real worl overlays that you can interact and play in Maps. In past we have seen pac man appear in map and this year it is Waldo.
Once you open your Google Map in android or iPhone Waldo will be waving his hands at you and clicking him will take you on a quest to find Waldo in different maps location. You can play and level up. I gave up after level 3 realizing my eyes aren't that great at finding Waldo. The most interesting part of the quest seems to me that you gain badges with more quest you do and the better you are able to find it. Way to go in gamifying a April fool's joke.
More information on waldo: https://www.blog.google/products/maps/wheres-waldo-find-him-google-maps/

Google Cloud Hummus API - Google Israel

Google Wants you to serve organized data to help you make better decisions. And of course when we talk about "serving" they want to use advanced machine learning model on hummus big data warehouse to give you the Hummus API. According to Google
 "We’re extremely excited to share with you our latest Google Cloud groundbreaking technology: After enabling our customers to address senses through Speech & Vision API, we are now releasing a subset of Taste APIs started with a dish we all love - Hummus!"

Way to go. Build that Taste API :D


Gboard - Google Japan

Google Japan envisions a world where you don't even want to memorize your keyboard keys. Or want to type by swiping? Gboard lets you swipe over hardware keyboards. The physical version of Gboard collects “a ton of scribble data” applies machine learning on it to match it with the correct letters. Apparently it works for all ages and, not only do you no longer have to remember where all the letters are, but manufacturers don’t even need to print the letters on the keys anymore.
Interesting...
Want to read more about it? IN japanese of course : https://japan.googleblog.com/2018/04/tegaki.html

Googz - Google Australia

Google Australia just decided "Google" is too mainstream and most peoiple in Australian accent call it something like Googz anyway. So they rebranded Google as....yes you guessed it correctly. Googz. 
And fret not, they have all the Googz merchandise you need to remind you of the re-branding ready in store.

Did I say they re-branded the building as well....


To read the announcement, head over to: https://australia.googleblog.com/2018/04/just-call-us-googz.html

Bad Joke detector - Google Files Go team

Bad Joke Detector - Files Go
Yeah, you heard that right. Remember that little nifty app that used to show you the files you can delete to free up precious space in your android phone? The one which can detect which one are meme's and which are unnecessary files? Today it gets more superpowers to detect which bad jokes were sent to you, classify that and show them to you where you can delete those files freeing up your valuable space.
Did not see that one coming. And it claims to detect the huge amount of "Good Morning" messages we get in WhatsApp. I sure will be one to try it.


Read the announcement here: https://www.blog.google/topics/next-billion-users/no-laughing-matter-files-go-introduces-bad-joke-detector/

ChromeBook Solar Charger - Google ChromeOS Team

Soil-charging.jpgIt seems Chromebooks are also gaining superpowers. And what mighty powers. It can now harness clean renewable energy to recharge itself. But the story doesn't stop there. It can recharge itself with 
        • Solar
        • Wind
        • Compost(!)
As they say " take your Chromebook charger along and watch the battery level grow like a weed."

Read about it at: https://www.blog.google/products/chromebooks/harness-your-chromebooks-supercharging-powers/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Racecraft (Project Koru) · Prologue — The Origin Story

Racecraft · Prologue , The Origin Story It Started With a Wine List and a Question About Racing How a happy-hour conversation in the Bay Area turned into a trustable AI race coach , and then into a second version that runs entirely on a phone, on the NPU. This is the prologue to a five-part series. Two years ago(1st November, 2024) I was in the Bay Area for a GDE Summit. If you've never been: it's a couple of days of talks among Google Developer Experts, the kind of people who get unreasonably excited about a new on-device runtime, and then , mercifully , a happy hour where everyone stops performing and just eats. We ended up at a restaurant(Puesto Santa Clara), a long table of GDEs, and I was doing the most important engineering of the evening: trying to decide which wine to order. Across the table was Ajeet Mirwani . I don't even remember how the wine talk turned into racing talk , these things drift , but the moment the word "racing" ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Throughput Trap: Benchmarking vLLM on OpenXLA and the Reality of Production LLM Serving

vLLM Systems · DevLab 2026, Deep Dive I was recently invited by the Google TPU team to speak at the OpenXLA Summer DevLab 2026 . This post breaks down our deep-dive evaluation of the matured vLLM + OpenXLA stack, the fundamental engineering mismatches between CUDA and XLA serving paths, and why traditional capacity metrics are lying to you. If you are operating large language models at enterprise scale right now, your platform architecture team is likely staring at a massive infrastructure crossroads: Should we migrate our core serving workloads from GPUs to TPUs? Historically, NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem was the only serious option for user-facing, low-latency LLM generation. But here in 2026, the economics and infrastructure options have transformed. Google TPUs are highly available, cheaper per chip, and the open-source serving stack built around vLLM and OpenXLA has officially achieved absolute production readiness. Yet, when our infrast...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Split‑Brain Neuro‑Symbolic Training Method for High‑Velocity Autonomous Coaching from Telemetry

 Author: Rabimba Karanjai Scope: Problem statement + data methodology + model training (no deployment discussion) Abstract Real‑time coaching in motorsport is a safety‑critical learning problem : a system must map noisy, high‑frequency telemetry to short, actionable guidance that remains physically consistent and avoids hazardous recommendations . This paper proposes a “Split‑Brain” training formulation that separates (i) a semantic coaching target (what action/critique should be expressed) from (ii) a reflexive interface (how actions are represented as compact, verifiable tokens). The approach trains a Small Language Model (SLM) in the Gemma family [1] using QLoRA fine‑tuning [2] , and introduces a telemetry tokenizer plus teacher‑student synthesis pipeline to generate instruction‑action pairs at scale. Core contribution: a reproducible method to convert “ golden lap ” differential tel...
Post a Comment
Read more