Chapter 1: What does it take to be prepared for disaster?
What does it take to be prepared for disaster? You have to be confident. You have to be calm. Will you be perfect? No. But the idea is that you'll have your bearings and this won't be something new to you. This week on Explain It To Me, how to stay ready so you don't have to get ready. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
I read a stat last week that there's like a quarter of the amount of people there's rats in New York City. Like there's a quarter. Yeah. Wait, what? Wait, hold on. I don't understand. You're saying there's four times as many rats in New York City? There's one quarter as many rats. There's one quarter of a rat for every person. There's one rat for every four people.
There's one rat for every four people. Yeah, one rat. Isn't that? That's a lot of rats. It's a pretty big number. One rat per four people? So there's a 25% chance you have a rat following you?
There's a 25% chance you are a rat.
Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.
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Chapter 2: What smartphone photography trends are discussed?
I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And this week there's music playing for some reason.
I don't know why.
What do you mean for some reason? But it feels appropriate. We're all back. We're all back. Oh, that's why. We're here. It's the normal crew. Spoiler, we didn't even say our names yet. We did. Audio didn't. Did we? Yeah, we did.
We actually just did. I'm rusty.
He said I'm Andrew. We went around and said our names, and you were like, so we haven't said our names. So we're all back. We're all also rusty, but hey, it's another tech week. It's Tarch. Tay. Mech. It's Mech. Google I.O. happened. We got a whole bunch of Gemini stuff. Sony tweeted. They have these new headphones, but they also tweeted this April Fool's Day joke like two months late.
It was about AI photo correction. We'll talk about that. A new camera might be a Fuji X100V competitor, maybe. And a story about the coolest things we've ever done as a company because it's new and we've been keeping it a secret, but it's time you guys finally know about this thing that we've been doing. And I'm very excited to share it with you. At the end, can't skip ahead. Full retention.
Yeah. Wait, I don't know what this is. So I'm going to be excited. I'm also. I was like, yeah, totally. It's incredible. Totally. Yeah. But first, did they even test this? Yes. I think David has some that are for next week. Yeah. That are going to be really fun. I'm going to give you guys a choice. I was writing some things down on my paternity, so I have a few.
But I have either a, did they even test this? Or one that I was impressed by, so I wrote it as a, hell yeah, they actually did test this. So people have been saying maybe some of these things are a little too down. I'll open the floor that if you're ever really, really impressed by something, we'll put that in there. I like that. Because they did test it.
I do like when things surprisingly work and you didn't expect them to. Yes. This is one of those. It sounds like we want to go with the hell yeah, they tested this. I think that would be fun. Cool. This is something that's positive. It worked really well. It's something that maybe surprised me because this feature hasn't worked for a long time. But I had a really good Magic Q experience.
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Chapter 3: What announcements were made at Google I/O?
Yes. So I had somebody, a mutual friend of Marquez and I say, hey, do you have any photos of that camera crane arm you used to have on Marquez's Tesla? And I was like, wow, that was a long time ago. We don't have that anymore. I'm not even sure. I'm sure they're in here somewhere. And I got a little button that said Google Photos. I was like, oh, cool. I can one click.
I'm still gonna have to search for it. Launch Google Photos. Launch Google Photos. Right there, suggestions based on the text message. And there's two pictures of Marques' car with the camera crane. Wow. And I just clicked both of them and said, thank goodness for Magic Q because these are actually them. And Mistos had no idea what I was talking about. But who cares? He got the pictures he needed.
That is what it's supposed to be amazing for. Supposed to do. It is now one for 3,000. Yeah, I found that I can search brand names in Google Photos and it can tell me like Tesla versus regular car. Or you can search Mercedes and it will find Mercedes. Well, here's something that's funny. It said on a Tesla, like in the suggestion said on a Tesla, but...
It was one of like eight photos that it tested. The one before it was the trailer hitch camera mount with a giant Ford logo on it. It'll always have false positives. Very clearly is not. I don't know how, but it always has false positives for some reason. But yes, it did find the Tesla's, which is cool. Cool. I think it found the crane arm. I think that was the... The discerning factor.
That was a little easier to pick up on and unique. It's been getting the faces wrong for me recently. Has it? Yeah. I'll be like this person in Canada and it'll be like 80% of them is that person. But then 20% of them will be a different person. Positive. Yeah. It just seems to cast the net wider than it's supposed to, which is probably a good miss. Yeah.
And then, yeah, I'll just have some random stuff. That's not what you asked for, but it will always have somewhere in there. One of the things you asked for. Right. Right. Okay. I tweeted that I'm going to have a generational crash out, so I think that's about to happen. And what will you be talking out about today, David?
If you're unaware, this week, two companies decided to do the worst thing possible to piss me off. That's right. Google and Sony decided to implement new AI image editing features that just proves that engineers have no idea what the f*** a photo is supposed to look like. I think they tagged you specifically. Yeah. I felt personally very attacked by this. I want to...
Before you get into it, the blame, I'm not sure where to put it on just the grouping of engineers, because we've had photo engineers come to us and say, like, we watched your video on this and we've been trying to tell people on our team. I'm blaming the social media team. So there is someone to blame, and I agree, and it doesn't take anything away from this.
Some of the engineers know what they're talking about. Yeah. Okay, well, to be fair, okay, I'm just going to talk about exactly what happened. Do you want me to talk about Sony first or Google first? Let's do the Sony one. The Sony one? Okay. So Sony tweeted this photo from a new phone that, of course, they just basically didn't announce like usual, called the Xperia, what is it?
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Chapter 4: How do AI features impact smartphone photography?
And like, it's almost like I need to make this as... cool and like impressive as possible. Cause I took this amazing picture of a moose, but it's just like, and they sell them for like $5,000.
It'll be like a sunset where the sky is like so orange. It's like, it's like you melted 10,000 basketballs into it. Yeah. And like, and like the, like a wolf that's like silhouetted, but because it's bracketed, there's still tons of, sorry, this is like my pet peeve.
For sure. Was that near Estes park? There's probably 40 galleries in Estes park that have like these exact pictures I'm talking about. I specifically remember one next to a coffee shop. Yeah. I think there is something to what you said where people think that it's good if it looks difficult.
And back in the day when photos were 8 megapixels, if you get a really sharp photo, that would look like a really good camera. So if you could sharpen, dehaze, and create a really structured, sharp photo, it looked, quote, better even though it didn't really look that good. Just because you didn't know how to do it. Yeah, so that sort of stuff started leaking into like this generic photography.
Yeah, bracketing is the same thing. It's like, okay, if I wanna take a picture with like the blue sky in instead of blown out, it would be really difficult unless I had a photo or camera with great dynamic range or I could learn bracketing and get like two or three photos and combine them. Yeah. So now every time I take a photo, I'm like, I should do bracketing just to make sure it looks better.
It's not necessarily better, but then that starts gripping into regular photos too. Totally. And this has even happened in film photography. Film photography is kind of trendy right now, you know, whatever. There's this like saying that people will be like, oh, just always overexposed by a stop so that you always have information in the shadows. And it's like, no, no.
Because then you're just going to get an image that has too much information in the shadows. And, like, yeah, I guess you can scale it back because the highlights are more protected, but it's better to actually expose for the photo you want, not just show all the information all of the time. Yeah. You know? To get back to the Sony thing. Yeah.
Sorry.
Well, two things on the Sony thing. One, that tweet with all the horrible edits from the AI thing blew up. It has 13.5 million views on Twitter. Their marketing department is like, I'm so confused because the best time to delete this was yesterday. But also, this is the most traction we've ever gotten. It's a lot of views.
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Chapter 5: How does Google Wallet enhance shopping experiences?
You can click on a thing and say you're interested in it. But when it drops below a certain price, you're kind of interested in it and it connects to your Google wallet.
So now as well, if it knows that you have a certain credit card and that certain credit card gets certain cash back at certain stores, it will be like, oh, when you go to pay for this, you should use your Target card because it's at Target and you get 5% off at Target or something like that. You get cash back, whatever.
I really really think Google is just trying to find more revenue sources because by making Gemini and making all this automation stuff They are taking away from search ads So they just they're slowly trying it They're like we're gonna get ahead in the AI thing even though it's taking away for our main business But we need to figure out ways to make money from it if we're gonna own it.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of Google's AI-driven suggestions?
Yeah. Yeah so It's kind of interesting, but I remember seeing the study where there was a bunch of – they tested a bunch of these different models at how good is it at actually suggesting me like the right flights, the right hotel reservations, whatever, if you were just to say like –
make me this trip classic and like 90% of the time it gave the users like one of the more expensive options for the hotel for the flight all these things so classic and so Google can now go to you know retailers and advertisers and they can say hey look we can slowly sort of like suggest these products towards these users and
And kind of the overall, the overarching theme for IO this year is just like, trust us more and more and more, bro. Which makes me trust you less and less and less. Yeah. Yeah. Because all I see with all of this is, I think you guys mentioned it on an episode I wasn't here, is like the new version of SEO.
Because all of this is just going to lead into a different way that big companies can pay to be better results inside of AI.
Chapter 7: How will AI change consumer purchasing behavior?
Exactly. That is 1000% where it's going, no matter what you say. Yeah. That's how it's going to work. Yeah. That's how people are going to make money on it. Google is just like, oh, just don't make your own decisions. Let AI make all the decisions for you, and then they're going to advertisers and they're saying, now that everyone just trusts us, we can just suggest your products. Yeah.
It points pretty directly to the direct trade-off between privacy and convenience. And this is also a shout out to Joanna's book, which you'll hear about that probably on an upcoming bonus episode. But if you just give your life to the AI, you just go, all right, you know everything about me, Google. It's kind of a privacy nightmare, but you have everything about me now.
That is the best case scenario for actually getting the results that are most applicable to you. And so when you ask for it, yes, it will be skewed, but it will be skewed based on what it knows about you. And theoretically, it will give you better products to buy or more useful suggestions based on it knows about your car, your house, whatever already.
And so if you do decide to just give it all to the AI, that will be your win. But not everybody wants to do that. And obviously that's the tradeoff that they're trying to convince you to make. It's why a lot of people like keep the Instagram ad tracking on because they'll say like, oh, I actually like it because it gives me relevant products.
And I'd rather have relevant products than, you know, turn it off the lingerie that I guess. There's literally no reason to have that on. Wrong. I've gotten so many good products. People want to get ads for stuff they want to buy. I told you there's a divide. Some people actually do want to buy stuff from Instagram. It's not that I want to buy stuff from Instagram.
It's that it shows me brands from smaller brands that aren't just like Amazon or Shein. I find actual stores from Brooklyn or something because they're using targeted ads. It's good for small businesses. It's bad for me, but it's good for small businesses. That's Facebook's point.
Bad argument. Bad take. Bad argument. Do not turn on app tracking for the sake of helping small businesses. That is ridiculous.
Helping small businesses by letting one of the largest companies in the world sell your data? Are you serious, bro? How else are you going to find them? The small business has been spending money desperately trying to find good customers, and this is the way they actually get to that customer. I'm not accepting any of these. I only make everything that I use. This next jersey, I sewed it.
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Chapter 8: What new features are introduced with Google's smart glasses?
I know a few people who like use meta advertising and they're literally like you put in $10 and $30 pops out. So clearly there it works. There's a lot of shit wrong with meta, but that product is a money fountain. There's a reason meta is a giant, giant, giant corporation in that small, like everyone uses it. I don't think that, you know, only small business, whatever.
But if you are a small business and you put $10 in and $30 pops out, I mean. Yeah. Unrelated and related. They're doing a ton of layoffs today. So clearly this is not great timing for any of this meta stuff. Who is? They laid off like 10,000 people this week. Again? Yeah.
oh my god okay well that's great AI baby okay the other thing in retail is there is now this thing called AP2 which is agent payments protocol and basically Google is scared that the agents are going to hallucinate with your credit card information that's what they are terrified about because they you know they want you to be able to tell your agent like oh if this brand like if this shirt from this brand goes on sale can you just buy it for me which is kind of crazy to think about like
something could just agentically like shop for you without you having like discreet input it's kind of close to what someone so like an ultra rich person who has like a personal assistant yeah they'd be like I mean you'd be too rich to do this but you'd be like when it hits a certain price Just buy it for me. But we don't have personal assistants.
But it's like, oh yeah, now my phone is a personal assistant. I'll just have it wait on something for me and it has infinite capability of waiting and finding the right thing and then it just does it. It's the weird thing of AI where it's like, that is a totally reasonable thing to ask, but at the same time,
weird robot internet has my credit card number like i like both of these things are true and i'm terrified well it's kind of the next step do you remember amazon dash buttons yes yeah yeah so for the young the youngins out there amazon used to like give you for five dollars you could buy this amazon dash button then they give you a five dollar credit and it was a button that you could assign to any product on amazon so when you hit it it ordered it for you it was like it
If you put it by where you keep your paper towels, like something that you restock a lot on. So like every time my paper towels are almost up, I just press it. They're going to come to my door. Tide pods. Yes. Tide pods. So like what Samsung and all these companies have wanted to do forever is put cameras in your fridge. So it automatically does this for you. Right.
That's like because these companies, they're like, oh, if people bought things as soon as they ran out of them every single time and they bought the same thing over and over and over again, we could make more money because that's more purchases per hour. Mm hmm. Right. So that's what Google's trying to do here.
They're trying to make it like, oh, you're because all these ad companies, the main problem that they have with like the Facebook pixel, all this stuff, they they see that you're interested in something because you interacted with it, but actually getting you to make that. and actually go through with the purchase is the hardest part of the whole thing.
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