Ars Technica: Google open-sourced a hat shaped like a giant keycap—and it actually types. “… the Gboard CAPS project is another of Google Japan’s joke keyboard ideas, like the 5.25-foot-long, single-row Gboard Stick Version keyboard shown off last year, used to promote Google’s Gboard app. However, Google Japan seemingly prototyped the keyboard in real life.”
Deccan Herald: ‘Ejipura Stonehenge’: Unfinished Bengaluru flyover named must-visit monument on Google Maps. “The unfinished flyover was marked as Ejipura Monument and Ejipura Stonehenge on Google Maps, where citizens even started giving out reviews by tagging the flyover as a ‘must visit’. A user’s review read, ‘These monuments are an epitome of tourism in the most happening part of Bangalore. Must visit! Please be prepared for the huge loving crowd of people who have all come here to witness the greatness of the beautiful structures.’ Google Maps later removed the flyover’s listing.” I think in America we would call the flyover an overpass. Same idea anyway.
The Daily Beast: How Barstool Built an Empire by Swiping Sports Highlights. “Four years ago, Barstool Sports was raked over the coals for taking a comedian’s video. The sprawling and bro-tastic media company already had a reputation for stealing jokes, but that act of theft inadvertently revealed another way the site was profiting from content it didn’t own: an anonymous, seemingly random Twitter account which was in fact run by Barstool.”
Cornell University: That’s funny – but AI models don’t get the joke. “Large neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence, can generate thousands of jokes along the lines of ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ But do they understand why they’re funny?”
Ars Technica: Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over. “On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT’s knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes, leading them to conclude that the responses were likely learned and memorized during the AI model’s training rather than being newly generated.”
New York Times: A ‘Crown Jewel of Comedy’: The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home. “…Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.”
IFL Science: This Is The World’s Oldest Bar Joke, But Literally Nobody Knows Why It’s Funny. “Say, have you heard the one about the Abderite who saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked whether she was his wife? Upon hearing that eunuchs couldn’t take wives, the Abderite replied: ‘so, is she your daughter?’ Didn’t tickle your funny bone? It probably sounded better in the original Latin – along with context clues like who, exactly, the Abderite people were and why they seem to have been the ancient Roman equivalent of the ‘dumb blonde’ archetype.”
Liliputing: Google Japan designed a gigantic, single-row Gboard keyboard as a joke (but you can build one if you want) . “Google may have stopped putting out dozens of April Fools’ videos every year, but Googlers in Japan still love a good joke – and the latest is ridiculous keyboard that they’re called Gboard Bar Version. It’s a single-row keyboard with every key laid out end-to-end in a highly impractical way.”
Mashable: The secret Wikipedia prank behind the Pringles mascot’s first name. “The name ‘Julius Pringles’ — which Kellogg’s claims as officially trademarked, though a search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office site for ‘Julius Pringles’ returned no immediate results — looks not to have come from a marketing team, or some long-forgotten Pringles founder. Rather, the name stems from two Wikipedia savvy, hoax-loving college students snacking away on Sour Cream & Onion Pringles in their dorm room back in 2006.”
Newswise: Joking about COVID-19 Won’t Create Marital Bliss. “Making jokes about COVID-19 to alleviate stress is not necessarily a good way to communicate with your spouse or keep your relationship intact, according to a study by Rutgers and other researchers. Instead, keeping up communication, networking with others, and maintaining a sense of self, is more apt to keep you together, researchers report in findings published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.”
Lad Bible: ‘Heist’ Caught On Google Maps Turns Out To Be Pranksters Holding A Glue Gun. “Darren Honeyman and his colleague of 15 years Dave Hutchinson were at work in Darlington, County Durham, earlier this year when they saw the the Google van coming. So, not wanting to miss the opportunity of a lifetime, the pair decided to create a scene especially for the camera. And they didn’t disappoint.”
Now available: data dump of puns. From the page: “Open source Puns! We’ve got a data dump of all of our puns on our site. You can check out the Github repository here.”
CNET: April Fools’ Day 2021: Cauliflower Peeps, Duolingo toilet paper and more pranks. “April 1 is typically a day for silly jokes, and companies have put a lot of effort into trying to make people laugh. Last year was an exception, but some brands are venturing back into the realm of April Fools’ Day for 2021. We’re keeping an eye on the shenanigans all day and will update with the latest knee-slappers as they appear.”
9to5 Google: Google canceling April Fools’ Day jokes for the second year in a row (Good.) “An internal memo sent by Google’s VP of global marketing, Marvin Chow, explains that the company will continue its ‘pause’ of April Fools’ Day pranks in 2021 as ‘much of the world’ is still dealing with ‘serious challenges’ during the pandemic.”
For a given value of useful, but it’s Saturday, so.. Make Tech Easier: Here’s a Bunch of Funny Things to Ask Siri. “Siri is an extremely useful AI assistant, helping you in day-to-day tasks like making a calendar appointment or finding your iPhone. But there are plenty of other more whimsical uses for Siri too. This is especially true when it comes to kids, though adults will also enjoy the pile of nonsense questions you can throw at Siri. So we’ve gathered together a whole bunch of funny things to ask Siri when you’re bored and looking for a quick fix of fun. Some are kid-friendly, others aren’t. We’ll let you be the judge!”
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