Google’s TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday)

Google’s TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) meetings were a long-standing tradition within the company, serving as weekly all-hands meetings where employees, including senior leadership, gathered to discuss company updates, projects, and issues, and to ask questions. These meetings were originally held on Fridays, hence the name, though they were later moved to Thursdays.

Key Features and History of Google’s TGIF Meetings:

1. Open Communication:

   • TGIF meetings were a central part of Google’s open culture, reflecting the company's commitment to transparency. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced TGIF as a way to keep employees informed about significant developments, new product launches, and strategic decisions.
   • Employees were encouraged to ask questions directly to top executives, fostering a sense of inclusion and openness.

2. Q&A Sessions:

   • One of the most prominent aspects of TGIF was the question-and-answer session, where employees from across the company could submit and vote on questions via Google’s internal systems.
   • The questions were often candid and could cover controversial topics, such as company policies, business strategy, diversity, and other issues.

3. Global Participation:

   • As Google expanded globally, TGIF meetings were live-streamed to offices worldwide, allowing Googlers (Google employees) in various time zones to participate.
   • Recordings of the meetings were also made available to employees who couldn't attend live.

4. Cultural Significance:

   • TGIF became a symbol of Google’s unique culture, reflecting its emphasis on transparency, innovation, and employee engagement. The meetings were informal yet impactful, often featuring updates from senior executives like Page, Brin, Sundar Pichai, and other top leaders.
   • The relaxed atmosphere sometimes included snacks, drinks, and socializing, contributing to Google's fun and collaborative environment.

5. Shift in Format and Frequency:

   • Over time, as Google grew larger and more complex, the TGIF meetings began to evolve. The increasing scrutiny from external sources, including leaks to the press, led the company to change the format.
   • In 2019, Google reduced the frequency of TGIF meetings, moving them from weekly to monthly and then replacing them with more focused town hall meetings.
   • Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, indicated that this change was necessary because the company had become more diverse in terms of products and services, and TGIF was no longer as effective for keeping everyone aligned.

6. Decline in Participation:

   • As the company scaled, fewer employees participated in the TGIF meetings. Some employees felt the meetings were no longer addressing their concerns or that leadership was avoiding difficult topics.
   • Reports of tension between leadership and employees also emerged, particularly surrounding issues like handling political content, workplace activism, and privacy concerns, which became frequent topics in the TGIF sessions.

7. Replacement by Other Forums:

   • By 2020, the traditional TGIF meetings were largely replaced by other communication forums and events. These include town halls and smaller, more focused meetings, such as AMAs (Ask Me Anything) with executives that allow more specific discussions on particular areas of the business.

In Short:

Google’s TGIF meetings were once a hallmark of the company’s open and transparent culture, providing a space for employees and executives to engage in candid discussions. However, as the company grew larger and faced more public scrutiny, TGIF meetings evolved and were ultimately replaced by more focused communication methods. The transition reflected the growing complexities of managing a global tech giant with a diverse workforce and sensitive challenges.

AI-powered programming languages

 AI-powered programming languages are a type of programming language that uses artificial intelligence to help programmers write code more efficiently and effectively. These languages can automate tasks, suggest code completion, and even debug code.

There are a number of different AI-powered programming languages available, but some of the most popular include:

• Google AI's TensorFlow is an open-source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, and the edges of the graph represent the flow of data between nodes. TensorFlow is a powerful tool for machine learning and deep learning applications.
  
• Microsoft's Cognitive Services is a set of cloud-based AI services that can be used to add intelligence to applications. Cognitive Services includes a number of different APIs for tasks such as natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition.
  
  
  
• Amazon's SageMaker is a cloud-based machine learning platform that makes it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. SageMaker includes a number of different features for machine learning, including pre-built models, data pipelines, and training tools.

  

  
  
• IBM's Watson is a cognitive computing platform that can be used to build AI applications. Watson includes a number of different APIs for tasks such as natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.

  
• AI-powered programming languages are still in their early stages of development, but they have the potential to revolutionize the way we write code. By automating tasks and providing intelligent suggestions, these languages can help programmers to write code more quickly and efficiently. They can also help to improve the quality of code by identifying bugs and suggesting improvements.

• Here are some of the benefits of using AI-powered programming languages:

  • Increased productivity: AI-powered programming languages can automate tasks and provide intelligent suggestions, which can help programmers to write code more quickly and efficiently.
  • Improved code quality: AI-powered programming languages can identify bugs and suggest improvements, which can help to improve the quality of code.
  • Reduced development costs: AI-powered programming languages can help to reduce development costs by automating tasks and improving the quality of code.
  • Increased innovation: AI-powered programming languages can help to increase innovation by providing programmers with new tools and capabilities.

  As AI-powered programming languages continue to develop, we can expect to see even more benefits in the future. These languages have the potential to make programming more accessible to everyone, and they can help us to develop new and innovative applications that were not possible before.

DEEP Cognition source of ref

Twitter is using machine learning to crop photos

The machine knows what you want to look at

Speedy Neural Networks for Smart Auto-Cropping of Images

Once they’d trained a neural network to identify these areas, they needed to optimize it to work in real time on the site. Luckily for them, the cropping needed for a photo preview is pretty broad — you’re only narrowing down an image to maybe its most interesting third. You don’t need to target in on specifics. That means Twitter could pare down and simplify the criteria the neural network was judging using a technique called “knowledge distillation.”

The end result was a neural network ten times faster than its original design. “This lets us perform saliency detection on all images as soon as they are uploaded and crop them in real-time,” write Theis and Wang.

This new feature is currently being rolled out on desktop, iOS, and Android apps to all users says the company. So next time you see a photo preview on Twitter that invites you to click remember to thank a neural network.

Cropping using saliency

A better way to crop is to focus on “salient” image regions. A region having high saliency means that a person is likely to look at it when freely viewing the image. Academics have studied and measured saliency by using eye trackers, which record the pixels people fixated with their eyes. In general, people tend to pay more attention to faces, text, animals, but also other objects and regions of high contrast. This data can be used to train neural networks and other algorithms to predict what people might want to look at.
The basic idea is to use these predictions to center a crop around the most interesting region.

Read more

Thank you Twitter official blog @ 2018

Socket Programming in Python

Socket programming is a way of connecting two nodes on a network to communicate with each other. One socket(node) listens on a particular port at an IP, while other socket reaches out to the other to form a connection. Server forms the listener socket while client reaches out to the server.They are the real backbones behind web browsing. In simpler terms there is a server and a client.

import socket
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

Here we made a socket instance and passed it two parameters. The first parameter is AF_INET and the second one is SOCK_STREAM. AF_INET refers to the address family ipv4. The SOCK_STREAM means connection oriented TCP protocol.

Now we can connect to a server using this socket.

Connecting to a server:
Note that if any error occurs during the creation of a socket then a socket.error is thrown and we can only connect to a server by knowing it’s ip. You can find the ip of the server by using this :

$ ping www.google.com
import socket 

ip = socket.gethostbyname('www.google.com')
print ip

#Example of a SCRIPT

# An example script to connect to Google using socket

# programming in Python

import socket # for socket

import sys 

 

try:

    s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

    print "Socket successfully created"

except socket.error as err:

    print "socket creation failed with error %s" %(err)

 

# default port for socket

port = 80

 

try:

    host_ip = socket.gethostbyname('www.google.com')

except socket.gaierror:

 

    # this means could not resolve the host

    print "there was an error resolving the host"

    sys.exit()

 

# connecting to the server

s.connect((host_ip, port))

 

print "the socket has successfully connected to google \

on port == %s" %(host_ip)







Output :
Socket successfully created
the socket has successfully connected to google 
on port == 173.194.40.19


First of all we made a socket.
Then we resolved google’s ip and lastly we connected to google.
Now we need to know how can we send some data through a socket.
For sending data the socket library has a sendall function. This function allows you to send data to a server to which the socket is connected and server can also send data to the client using this function.


A simple server-client program :

Server :
A server has a bind() method which binds it to a specific ip and port so that it can listen to incoming requests on that ip and port.A server has a listen() method which puts the server into listen mode. This allows the server to listen to incoming connections. And last a server has an accept() and close() method. The accept method initiates a connection with the client and the close method closes the connection with the client.





# first of all import the socket library

import socket               

 

# next create a socket object

s = socket.socket()         

print "Socket successfully created"

 

# reserve a port on your computer in our

# case it is 12345 but it can be anything

port = 12345               

 

# Next bind to the port

# we have not typed any ip in the ip field

# instead we have inputted an empty string

# this makes the server listen to requests 

# coming from other computers on the network

s.bind(('', port))        

print "socket binded to %s" %(port)

 

# put the socket into listening mode

s.listen(5)     

print "socket is listening"           

 

# a forever loop until we interrupt it or 

# an error occurs

while True:

 

   # Establish connection with client.

   c, addr = s.accept()     

   print 'Got connection from', addr

 

   # send a thank you message to the client. 

   c.send('Thank you for connecting')

 

   # Close the connection with the client

   c.close()





Reference : Python Socket Programming

If you like Abin's blog and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using abinabraham.online or mail your article to ambattuabin@gmail.com. 

Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above.