What is a WEBP file?

WEBP is a file image format created by Google (introduced in 2010) providing both lossy and lossless compression, usually producing much smaller file sizes than JPEG or PNG while keeping similar visual quality. 

WEBP is based on the RIFF (the famous Resource Interchange File Format) container structure.

Personal AI Assistants

Personal AI assistants are here, but security controls are askew.  

OpenClaw is an example of such an assistant.  It acts as a bridge between messaging devices (such as WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage) and AI agents.

You will find OpenClaw "advertised" on openclaw.im (the im suffix indicates the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Isle of Man. You don't need to be in the Isle of Man to have this domain, and it had become quite popular with instant messaging software with registrations from Meebo and Yahoo! amongst others (Meebo was acquired by Google in June 2012 at which point it had 100m users).

Some of its taglines include "Your Code, Your AI, Your Rules". Its GitHub location is here.

Ollama integrates with OpenClaw. In this context, Ollama acts as a local LLM provider.

Google Colab

Google Colaboratory ("Colab") is a hosted Jupyter notebook which includes free access to GPUs and TPUs. It is for machine learning, data science and education.

For cool datasets to explore ML with, check out Google Dataset Search.

There is an interesting Colab workbook by Ashwin Rao on the SVB crisis.

Colab supports a large number of constantly upgraded Python packages including kagglehub (to use Kaggle resources) and narwhals (dataframe library).

The Model Context Protocol (Merci, Anthropique)

The MCP or Model Context Protocol was introduced by Anthropic as a way of sharing data with LLMs, or put differently, connecting LLMs to wider data sources. 

Anthropic has dubbed it a "universal translator" / "USB-C port" for AI applications. Your chat application can now talk (in a standard way) to your database (as an example).

MCP is also highly relevant for those developing AI agents. A standard protocol makes integration easier. 

MCP was mentioned by Sundar Pichai in Google I/Os 2025 keynote.

Progressive Rollout (aka "Canary Deployment") in the Cloud

A canary deployment is an old concept with a new branding in the age of cloud, and terminology-wise is used by both Google, AWS and Azure. Kubernetes technology is one way to manage canary deployments.

Canary deployments are progressive rollouts where new functionality is released to a subset of specially selected users. Therefore the canary deployment runs in parallel to current production deployment used by your regular users. This gives you more time and space to test the reliably of new features "in the wild".

Dude, FP16, really? Why not FP32? Ask Voltaire.

With the rise of AI, including hardware acceleration of AI, comes a renewed interested in efficient data types.  

In this spirit, we raise a toast to FP16 or float16, also known as half-precision floating point format, which can be a more appropriate format in some circumstances and some algorithms than what is known as single precision floating point which occupies 32 bits (and hence also called FP32 or float32).

But why use a less precise data type at all, when more precision options are available?

Half precision values are useful in applications where perfect precision is not required, such applications include image processing and neural networks.

FP16 is not to be confused with bfloat16 (Brain float16) which is a different format developed for Google Brain (now Google AI) with the explicit intent of accelerating machine learning and is used a variety of AI processors (including Google Cloud TPUs).

Google Breakpad - Now on a Windows Desktop Near You

Breakpad is a library and tooling for creating crash dumps ("minidumps") and produce C/C++ stack traces from these dumps. It is used by Google Chrome, Firefox, Google Picasa, Google Earth and more.

Do Androids Dream of Dalvik VM?

I can tell you categorically that Androids DON'T dream about Dalvik VM.

Android apps, however, are built to run on a Dalvik VM (named after a fishing village in Iceland) which implements most of core Java and runs on Linux kernel version 2.6 (currently the latest version). If you are still running 2.4 you need to upgrade ASAP to 2.6 (which includes NUMA enhancements for multiprocessor, hyperthreading support for intel P4 amongst other things) to run Dalvik VM. Don't delay.

For app developers use Eclipse or IDE of choice (e.g. NetBeans or IntelliJ) on Windows as your Java/Android devstudio.

A common question - what are the differences between Dalvik and "traditional" JVMs. For one thing, java.awt with its great AlphaComposite class is notably absent, instead there is some import android.graphics.*; business going on. java.applet is also absent. Have a look at this example of android-style Java.

Java for Androids.What's next?

What's next is Scandaldroid - in other words - Scala on Android. Scala, the functional, object-oriented hybrid can use all the libraries of Java and C#.http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages/browse_thread/thread/828d946b01a4e3f2

scalac android.scala, folks.

Also worth checking out is the Google Android blog and a WordPress blog on Android.