Last year I mentioned the story of how my colleague Sasha Blair-Goldensohn has used his experience of using a wheelchair to make Maps help make the world easier to navigate. Now Sasha is sharing some good news:

People can now turn on an “Accessible Places” feature to have wheelchair accessibility information more prominently displayed in Google Maps. When Accessible Places is switched on, a wheelchair icon will indicate an accessible entrance and you’ll be able to see if a place has accessible seating, restrooms or parking. If it’s confirmed that a place does not have an accessible entrance, we’ll show that information on Maps as well.

It’s cool to see what a community-powered effort this is:

Today, Google Maps has wheelchair accessibility information for more than 15 million places around the world. That number has more than doubled since 2017 thanks to the dedication of more than 120 million Local Guides and others who’ve responded to our call to share accessibility information. In total, this community has contributed more than 500 million wheelchair accessibility updates to Google Maps. Store owners have also helped, using Google My Business to add accessibility information for their business profiles to help users needing stair-free access find them on Google Maps and Search.

You know what’s wrong with this? Nothin.’ 🙂

Both Adobe and Nvidia are promising big improvements to encode times with this new support. Nvidia claims a basic 4K transcode should drop to 4 minutes and 45 seconds using an RTX 2060, compared to 11 minutes and 43 seconds using software encoding on an Intel Core i9-9750H CPU.

[Via John Lin]

“FM technology,” man—F’ing Magic. Check this out:

Now, when you select text with Lens, you can tap “copy to computer” to quickly paste it on another signed-in device with Chrome. This is great for quickly copying handwritten notes (if you write neatly!) and pasting it on your laptop without having to retype them all. Copying text to your computer requires the latest version of Chrome, and for both devices to be signed into the same Google account.

My wife has been using quarantine to teach herself to play the ukulele (and me teaching myself to spell it correctly for once!), so I was especially charmed this year to learn that 1) Google has a ukulele group, and 2) they recently performed together for Hawaii’s celebratory Lei Day (May 1). Group member Eva Depta was kind enough to share the positive vibes publicly:

All this is due to run live—here on a PlayStation 5. Redonkey Kong. (And you know Imma keep sprinkling “Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry” into conversation all the time—maybe even someday learning what it means!)

“This should give you a dim view of human potential,” even as its dark absurdity makes my day. 😝

[Via Sahil Vora]

“Dynamite saxophone solos in rock n’ roll songs” kinda died, per 30 Rock, back in the 80’s, but thanks to my colleagues in machine learning (who are truly doing God’s work 🙃), perhaps they’ll soon be back:

I’m told that the model requires ~10-15 minutes of audio training data, and once it’s ready you can apply a transfer in around 2-3 seconds.

Perhaps now we’ll all be Jack Blacks (Jacks Black?) 🎷

[Via Sehmon Burnam]

To celebrate Teacher Appreciation week, Google put together this playlist of 13 great talks given on campus over the years. I’m hoping to dig into a bunch of these soon, either here or via the corresponding podcast version.

Apropos of 💯 nothing, I am trying, at all times but now especially, to channel Jack Black’s ethos here:

Oh man—having spent the tail end of the Nineties jammed into a 120-sq.-ft. Manhattan apartment (where my jacked-up cat could run around the walls a la Trinity in The Matrix), I got a big kick out of this MTV Cribs-style video my teammate David recorded to entertain our team (“Daydream”) & to “Keep Daydream NYC Weird.”

The ironic small-space tour reminded me of a classic SNL. To this day I can’t hear the word “solarium” without immediately replaying it in Liam Neeson’s brogue. ☘️