tl;dr:
"Funkhouser sat in the rear seat, and Fisher sat in the driver seat on top of a buckled seat belt. <... > Fisher engaged Autopilot while the car was in motion on the track, then set the speed dial (on the right spoke of the steering wheel) to 0, which brought the car to a complete stop. Fisher next placed a small, weighted chain on the steering wheel, to simulate the weight of a driver’s hand, and slid over into the front passenger seat. Using the same steering wheel dial, Fisher reached over and was able to accelerate the vehicle from a full stop. He stopped the vehicle by dialing the speed back down to zero."
It's not control of individuals photons (that would be boson sampling), but gaussian pulses. Still a tour-de-force of a demonstration, but actual practical implications are very limited.
Not necessarily true. Google's result used a programmable universal quantum computer for a specific task; the point of the experiment was not just to show that it can do this specific convoluted task faster than classical supercomputers, but also to show how powerful the quantum computer they've built is and how well they can control it. What they then did is go on a publish a dozen papers of running many other algorithms on it (of course, for those algorithms the quantum computer is not yet powerful enough to show advantage).
On the other hand, the device used in this experiment is a single-purpose non-universal sampler with very limited applications.