Is Anything “New” with the Galaxy S25?

33:10It is so minimal, but it kind of has iPad-y vibes to it, which I like this new one better. All right. Super, super minimal. I would like to say it in person. I would like to respond to Marques Brownlee, who said maybe change for change's sake is a bad thing, and I disagree with you because in the golden age of Android phones, especially with Nexus devices, who the hell know what it was going to look like the next year you know we got lg we got huawei we got uh samsung we got all these manufacturers making random stuff it was great it was amazing i loved it and i don't think anyone is excited about these phones this is you know i understand why samsung is doing it but if you live in the united states it is so dominated by apple and samsung and they have all both of them have released the same phone for four years now and we just really, really need some mix-up in here.

34:11This is a perfect example of when you kind of become the default phone, especially to the people outside of all of you listening to this podcast, you can be safe. And I'll be honest, even someone, I listen to this podcast, I live this podcast, I bought the S24 because it was kind of the boring, safe phone and I just knew it was gonna do what I wanted it to and I decided not to take a risk and the price was good for it. And also Samsung's trading deals are always like some of the best trading deals. Always look for those. So it's not the worst thing, but it is the safe thing and it's far less fun to talk about.

34:47Right. Yeah, it's difficult. So like Marques kind of already went over the high level details of the entire event and all of the phones, but we can talk about them briefly. It's just so hard to talk about because the S25 and S25 Plus are basically the same phone as the S24, S24 Plus. you're not really getting a lot new. You're just getting that new chipset and some of these new AI features. Something to note that The Verge put out an article about is that the Ultra, the S Pen no longer can be used to take photos. And they also got rid of the little magic wand feature and they cited that nobody was using them.

35:24Correct. I could hear that. I think that taking photos with it was still very useful, although I think a lot of people probably just use the gestures because they have a lot of ways to take selfies. I feel like every year they need to come up with a new way to take a selfie. You can do it with a Samsung Galaxy Watch as well. Yeah, or you can put your palm out and it starts the countdown. I get it, but it is a little bit sad to see. Yeah, it does seem like the main... So that's one thing that's changed. The changes are mostly in S25 Ultra. And what that is is very slight visual change. Because of that visual change and smaller bezels, We do go from 6.8 to 6.9, quad HD, AMOLED, 120 hertz.

36:07Cool. The ultrawide camera goes from 12 megapixels to 50 megapixels. And they talked a lot about that and how it's better macro photos, better ultrawide photos and video. That's all fun. I believe there's the new glass on the front, ceramic, glass, ceramic, Corning, Gorilla, Armor 2, whatever. I don't think I said that. I'm not sure. At that point in it, they had said, like, this next-gen glass is the most durable ever. And I realized that every tech company out there needs some new vocabulary because we can't just say most advanced ever every single year for every single update. Sure as hell can.

36:52Well, a lot of the time there's an inverse relationship between shatter-resistant and scratch-resistant. And a lot of the times on a tick tock cycle, they'll just make the next version more chatter resistant, but not talk about how it's less scratch resistant and vice versa. And they just go back and forth forever. So, you know, I don't know. I think a big part of the reason that it's probably more durable as well is because of the shape and because there's less of the screen bleeding over the edge. when apple switched the phone to be square with the iphone they also said like oh ceramic shield and sure you might have some of those ceramic elements inside of it whatever most of that durability came from the fact that now it was squared off so you know uh okay we can talk about some other stuff pricing we've got 799 yeah that was something we didn't have i don't i don't believe even in the briefing for marquez's video yeah has pricing in it i don't think so nope so the base model of the standard s25 starts at$799 the plus starts at$999 and the ultra starts at$1299 i can talk about one thing that i know you'll be interested in and i only know this because of fellow um chi 2 ally ben shun on 9 to 5 google right before this came out confirms that s25 is ready for chi 2 but not chi 2 inside of the phone um he had a great article called galaxy s25 is ready for chi too but there's a problem with mag safe accessories and just uh about a bunch of different accessories it looks like they have the very typical like stands that can hold your phone your watch and charge your earbuds or your ring actually wow this can do all four it looks like um but yeah so chi too ready no which means in case you haven't listened to us complain about this for the last month it means there will be accessories that are chi too slash mag safe whatever magnetically compatible, but it does not mean that the magnets are inside of the phone.

38:46So they'll have Chi-Chi ready cases. Well, I lost that bet. Well, it's funny though, because these ones that they have are clear and there's also like dbrand, which is a channel sponsor, by the way, has a clear case with a magnet on the back. Marques and I made the joke that pretty much the only way you can tell people you have the S25 lineup is by buying a clear case because the colors are the only new thing that really looks any different from the series before. That is true. So go on and grab one of those. I just mini rant about Chi-Ti Ready. We've already done this, but I just want to say, now it's just a way for them to make more money on the cases.

39:29Yeah. Well, and so Chi - And accessories. Does Chi have to license this to cases? Chi-Ti Ready, right? Yeah. Seems like a good way for Chi to make even more licensing money to all case manufacturers. Yeah. And et cetera. so many bait and switches i'm sad cool so can i just say that the s25 ultra looks so good i think it looks good man i think it looks way better than the titanium railing the two-tone love that the two-tone is nice um i do like i said i like the curved corners more and the flat edges i think it looks really nice um but it seems like most of the stuff we're getting is ai based yeah which they spent there was a the samsung unpacked went out of order of how we are talking about it was like straight into galaxy ai talking about now brief and the now bar and a lot of different ai tech summarization and then right into gemini there was a point later where they started talking a little more about like pricing and stuff and adam goes hold on we can't record the podcast they haven't talked about the phones yet and like three of us turned around to him and said no they did he did it's like no they didn't talk about like the cameras or anything i'm like no we talked about the cameras adam it's it was i completely missed it it was like in the middle i just wish they would start off with it but let's get into some of the ai stuff i think okay would you agree that the tldr of the ai features on this phone are a lot of the stuff we've seen in google and apple phones at least what they've announced but now in a galaxy phone and some of them having slightly updated features.

41:07But some of the slightly updated features were also Google announcing features that this just happens to be the first phone that it releases on, which we have seen from Samsung and Google every year for the past like three years. Yeah, it works good for Google. It lets them announce early without having to have their hardware out early, but also lets Galaxy have a selling point of like a couple extra features that you didn't have before. I think one of them specifically is Gemini Live being multimodal so it can talk about things on your phone screen. Right. That wasn't available before. Now we have it.

41:38And I think that's kind of neat. Gemini Live is also pretty good. Yeah. I always go, this sounds pretty cool. And then I hear Gemini Live talk and I go, I want nothing to do with that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, since it's AI, you still have to verify literally everything it tells you. But it's kind of cool that it sounds like a natural conversation, at least. They had a new feature that they also announced where it can now take action across multiple apps. so you could say like add this to my calendar and send a text to this person that we're on for the day in the galaxy ai portion before gemini we had things called the now brief which is essentially personalization of different information that you might find useful throughout your day based on what it's seeing on your phone also something called the now bar which is a lock screen widget that shows the most relevant piece of information available to you and looks It's a lot like live activities on the iPhone.

42:31Can show you scores, can show maybe how far your Uber is away from you, if a flight's getting delayed, stuff like that. I wonder if that's going to need APIs because the live activities API is a thing that developers have to implement. Wouldn't be surprised if it does. That would make sense. Also, like natural language actions, one of them, I think this is going to be one of those things that's good for accessibility for people who aren't tech-focused like us. An example they used is telling your phone my eyes are getting tired and it adding the like night blue light dimming onto it. I hated that though.

43:03You hated - If your eyes are getting tired - Stop looking at your phone. Just stop looking at your phone. But if you can say stuff like that, that's a little more natural to your phone to be able to change some settings around or things in the phone, that's gonna, all of us family IT people out there, it's gonna save us a few phone calls. That's true. As long as people actually use the AI features. That's true. It all depends on, I guess, how easy it is to get to those. Right. Well, now you can just hold down the side button. Right. So that's another interesting thing. Like Marques mentioned, now if you hold down the power button, it doesn't open necessarily Gemini nor Bixby, but it's like a combination of the two?

43:41It seems like kind of like a combination of like using Gemini, but then also using, he said Bixby. I don't remember them saying Bixby in the show at all, but what he's talking about is from the briefing and I don't know exactly what they said in there, but it seems like holding down that button gives you Gemini until Gemini needs to physically interact with your phone somehow. Then it goes into Galaxy's AI, whatever they're calling it. Do you guys remember how we had most of this with Google Assistant? I'm so scared of just Google Assistant just going away soon. I mean, they barely ever talk about it.

44:16They had the similar situation to this Bixby thing in the Pixel event. When they barely really talked about Google Assistant at all, they just gemini gemini gemini and then at one point they said and gemini can use google assistant to do that like turn on and off your lights in your home and it was like where what is this branding i'm not really sure i don't know it feels like google assistant and bixby are kind of like in the retirement home together and gemini and galaxy ai are their newborns so um yeah yeah a couple other quick things there's being able to ask your phone to find specific photos so it's Basically, like, gallery search, but with voice.

44:58They use an example of a dog in a bathrobe. But the more you ask it, the more it can use context to think, like, that was in October because you're asking about a Halloween picture. We're already able to do that in Google Photos. Now with voice. Cool. Awesome. Okay. Circle to Search, which was a great example of you mentioning, like, here's something Google AI is doing, but it's launching first because I believe the S24 launched Circle to Search. Now the new features are if it sees in that circle a URL, an address, a phone number, it'll be able to let you click on those and go straight into whatever you need for them instead of just a web search for them.

45:40Awesome. They just get to announce new AI features every six months instead of every year like Apple has to. Google gets to have a second event that they have to do zero work for. Although ironically at the Pixel event, And because they didn't announce the pixels for like the first hour, they used a Galaxy S24 Ultra to show off all the new Gemini features. I'm sure that was part of the deal. Yeah, probably part of the deal. So with AI stuff, the thing that kind of made me the most upset was saying that by purchasing these phones, they all come with six months of Gemini Advance and two terabytes of cloud storage for free.

46:15Yeah. Which means... Why does that make you upset? Because then eventually we will have to... What is the difference between Gemini and Gemini Advance? Are we losing Gemini? Gemini Advance is like the paid open AI thing. Okay, so we'll still get all of these features without paying for it. That's what makes me upset. Great point. What in here will I potentially lose if I don't have Gemini Advance, which is a monthly subscription, correct? That is a good question. It's a good question. $20 a month. Yeah, what if you stop paying for it after six months and most of these features stop working? That's terrible.

46:50I don't think that's true. I don't think that's how it's going to be. Are you willing to put your name behind that statement, David? I will bet on it. I could be super wrong and I could have missed something. So please tell me how wrong I am. Gemini Advance is just a more advanced model. And you'll probably still have access to the regular Gemini control stuff and searching stuff. So if you don't pay, your phone gets dumber. That would be horrible. That would be terrible. Man, are we really moving towards a world where your phone is a subscription plan? outside of the already subscription plan that you already paid for it?

47:21To use it? Outside of the carrier plan that you also pay for? Yes. Outside of your texting plan that you... The fact that it took this long is actually surprising. There's like four layers of subscriptions, though. Yeah. Wow. It's a good question. We'll have to figure that out. I think the last thing I kind of had here is a couple AI photo video tools. Okay. I guess not all of them are AI because they did introduce log video. Even if they're not AI, they'll call it AI. Okay, AI log video. They did introduce the face swap, which we've talked about on Google Photos before. There's an audio eraser that we've seen a couple different times that allows you in post to erase wind noise, background noise, increase regular talking noise to make it more clear.

48:06Which was the one time Ellis went to use the bathroom during the audio feature. I know, he was really sad to miss it. this event in general yes was really boring it was horrible um they've been horrible for a while so most tech events not just samsung yeah most tech events yeah but i feel like the the the fact that they like refuse to change how the phones even look kind of like is uh mirrored in the boring level of the event it's fair they also showed a render of the um ar glasses again so So not only did they show the render of the glasses, it started as... Goggles, I guess. Yeah. It started as like this weird timeline.

48:48They showed this like hypothetical timeline of what could be going forward with how all of this AI works in it. And it showed a phone, a folding phone, a multi... They called it multi-folding. Yeah. Then goggles or VR headset. Yeah. Then glasses. Yeah, which implies that a tri-fold is going to come out before the VR headset. That's a really good point that I didn't think of because all the rumors right now are - It was a timeline. It was a timeline. I guess, I don't know if it's timeline of release date or timeline of technology maybe. I don't know. But then they did show - It's a timeline of lies.

49:24A timeline. But then right after that, they showed a render of the front of a Google - Google XR. I'm calling it Google headset because we're talking - We've been - They called it Google XR in the - Android XR. Android XR? I think it's Android XR. yeah I think it's Android XR but there was a name it was Project XR but it is Project Something and then later again though in an AI infographic about AI they showed something that said said headset and said glasses so not only are we talking about they mentioned glasses twice they definitely mentioned glasses or they like alluded to it they actually talked about the headset a little they alluded to glasses when Google releases their Gemini glasses it will probably be at a Samsung event so you know yeah okay something that was at the very end that makes no sense we have briefly mentioned the existence of a potential iphone 17 slim and then we mentioned the existence of a potential galaxy s25 slim uh obviously to beat apple to the punch they did the credits which was two screens very quickly so that they could one more thing us um they are calling it the galaxy s25 Edge, which if you don't know, is a callback to the S6 Edge, the Galaxy Note Edge, the Galaxy S7 Edge, which is when they were first starting to figure out how to bend displays.

50:48So they sort of had this like, it would bend over the side of the right side and they would display information on it. They are just reusing that brand name to make a slimmer phone is what it seems to be. they showed a very quick splash video and a very quick render and at the event they have a few units but you have to stand like 10 feet back from it so you can't really see exactly what it looks like marquez took a little video for us oh did he post it you did it's a random channel we're we're seeing this it's in waveform yeah we're seeing it right now it is extremely hard to tell what's different about it really because they sort of have this like exploded it's not even an exploded view it's just hanging hanging they're hanging it i don't know it just looks thinner i don't know yeah so it was it was like uh they tried to pull the like marvel end of credits but they knew the minute credits rolled people would peace so the credits were boom six seconds long and then then they said um now you think you've seen it all and then like s25 edge which i will give them credit all of us looked at each other and said this didn't leak are we actually getting surprised?

51:55It may have been a little boring, but I am hyped anytime there's something that genuinely surprises me in one of these events. At least the name. So kudos to Samsung. What if it's an S25 without the AI features? Like if you're like - Slim, we slimmed out the AI features. Yeah, you're like, I don't want any of this. One thing I can see from this and you could see from the render is it's definitely not just like the S25 because it only has two cameras. It's an oval camera bump on the back, which looks very similar to like a regular iPhone, but slimmer. I hate to compare everything to iPhone in this, but like, it's just kind of where we're at.

52:32Yeah. Yeah, you can see in this one clip, very much so, just two cameras and like a flash or a microphone underneath it. Right. And it's like hanging on this bar and there's just an absolute sea of people reaching over trying to see it and people sticking their cameras over and security guards like shushing them back. Do we think this is potentially like the new version of the S series FE? So like, could you see this coming out approximately the size of the S25 plus? Very similar features, maybe slight spec bump down and in that like$700 range. I think it's going to be$1 ,000. I think that would be a terrible move because the FE has such great brand recognition.

53:17It's probably going to be more. I wonder if it's going to be$1 ,100. I feel like they're going to pull some sort of like it took a lot of intense special engineering to get it to be this slim and still like deliver this level of performance. So you're paying for the extra, you know, because I think you're getting one less camera, too. I know. But I think that the iPhone 17 slim that is rumored is also rumored to be way more expensive. Yeah. So we know nothing else about it. the Verge asked for comment and a Samsung representative said they had nothing further to share other than the tease that unpacked, which was clearly planned.

53:55Cool! Thanks, guys. Obviously, the hands-on video that Marques did is out now on the YouTube channel, so go watch that if you want to know more information about these phones. Otherwise, that was basically the event. That was. I'm sorry that sounded pretty down, but the event was pretty boring i think everyone can admit that that doesn't mean these phones are going to be terrible they're probably going to be some of the best phones of the year like they always are samsung is this wild phenomenon where like they release six months before everyone else yeah it's generally a pretty boring event and then you get to the end of the year and you go nope that was probably one of the best phones of the year so i don't know how they do it but did we mention that the tv thing the tv watch thing oh can you mention that i thought this was the coolest thing they announced and I was packing my car.

54:44I don't even know how to feel about it. It's like if your watch knows you're asleep and you also have a Samsung TV and they're both set up on smart things, your TV will turn off because it'll be like, oh, this dude's asleep. You might have to do that. There's a pizza party happening on the floor of us, folks. This is not a drill. Yeah, your TV will turn off and on the one hand, saving electricity, pretty cool. I think it'll be good, you know, save electricity. It'll be interesting. There's an entire generation of children who remember waking up at 4 a.m. to the George Lopez show playing and just being confused.

55:23It'll also be interesting because I do feel like there's a decent amount of YouTube AdSense revenue generated by autoplay while people are asleep. Absolutely true. I was just going to say, like, the way, I'm assuming TVs still have this, but TVs have had this for a long time, but it's called Sleep Timer, which is you knew you were going to fall asleep to this turn this off in one hour do they really yeah the problem with that is is i feel like every time i was like there's nothing like just closing your eyes and going to sleep when you are the most tired if that happens to be out like it's the worst when you're on the couch and you're like i need to make it to my bed but i'm not going to be as sleepy as i am right now but if you're watching in bed or if you just want to fall asleep if i were cognizant enough to set my sleep timer i would always make it to the sleep timer and then it would turn off and i would turn it back on and then fall asleep with the tv on being able to just watch and be like you're asleep i can turn i can safely turn this on yeah well i think it's the most niche thing ever but i think it's good because i often will fall asleep to like youtube or something and then i wake up at four in the morning to youtube playing and it's i get a worse night's sleep because i woke up in the middle of the night with it on yeah because I was coming out of some sleep cycle or something.

56:37And we had this whole event and this was, that was the cool part. That was mean. I take it back. It was a beautiful event. It was, production was great. It sounded fantastic. They always do the sweet screens on the stage. Like Samsung's so good at that. A plus for effort. Are we allowed to say that Marquez is seeing something secret while he's out in California? I can say that I will not be on the rest of this episode because I have to leave right now to go meet Marquez to shoot something top secret. Looks like you guys are stuck here with me. So that's our little teaser. That's also why there won't be trivia this week and why I said it was a chaotic episode because we didn't fit everything in on time and I need to run but there's still a little more of the show left.

57:20Will TikTok be gone? Who knows? Also Andrew, not to make this episode even more chaotic but earlier this episode we reported on Project Stargate the$500 billion dollar effort to open AI. Larry Ellison launched some AI stuff. Since we said that like three hours ago, we saw headlines that Elon Musk was saying, nah, it's not real. They're not going to do that. He's not involved in this, but he says they have not raised the money and it's not going to happen. And him and Sam Altman are duking it out on Twitter. It's funny because he said they don't actually have the money. And then Sam Altman says, I generally respect your accomplishments.

57:58and I think you're the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And that was it. And then he went on to say, wrong, as you surely know. Want to come visit the first site already underway? This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn't always optimal for your companies. But in your new role, I surely hope you'll put America first. And then in a separate thing, I saw Satya on the news. And Satya got asked. He was like, so Elon just said that this ain't real. oh my goodness uh what's up with that and satya in as in the most like goonish way possible was like i'm good for my 80 billion and i was just like i i just want to say by the time you dear listener are listening to this a lot of this a lot has changed but this is as a recording on wednesday that's been the case for the past week so we'll see what happens anyway if you've made it this far on the podcast i salute you uh we're gonna take it to a quick break andrew needs to get to the airport for a very secret project he's flying out for and we'll see you after the break and then you'll be stuck with me and um i will hopefully give you a really great 20 or so minutes you will i can't wait to listen to it later okay see you in a sec bye

59:40See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

59:56When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets Mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. I'm Scott Hansen, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's knows Sundays hit different when you earn them. We've got you covered with outdoor power equipment from Cobalt and everything you need to weatherproof your deck with Trex Decking.

1:00:37Plus, with lawn care from Scott's and, of course, Pit Boss grills and accessories, you can get a home field advantage all season long. So get to Lowe's, get it done, and earn your Sunday. Lowe's, official partner of the NFL. Welcome back. Andrew, like we said, had to go do some top secret stuff via airplane. But I'm here. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Have you ever seen me on this side and Alice on this side? Actually, I think this might be a first. One of the permutations. Audio listeners, they have switched chairs. Okay. So what were you about to say? I was about to say we are coming back in this very good third segment of the show, and we are going to talk about some of our favorite apps.

1:01:22But before I get into the app that I really wanted to talk about, I just wanted to say honorary mention app goes to Blue Sky. Thank you. No particular reason. How many people said? I think everyone should be on that platform. How many people said Blue Sky is never going to happen? I might have said that. I think you said it. I don't know if it's happening yet. It's happening. They have 28 million users. I just put a sick meme on there. That's right. So you know there's funny stuff waiting for you on that platform. Yeah. No reason. Just, I just think, I think now's the time. I don't know. Anyway, David, Would you like me to share my favorite app that I'm using on my phone or would you like to go first?

1:02:09Go for it. I just want to say before I do this, I have gotten now five or six DMs that I'll read the same way. They go, Ellis. I know where this is going. I was so sure I saw you on the subway in New York City. Or I wasn't sure. It might have been you. It might have not been you. And then you pulled out your purple 12 mini. And I was like, that could only be Ellis. And I just want to say, every time I get one of those DMs, warms my heart to know that my, and I'm going to say it here first, I'm admitting it guys, this phone barely works. Over the holiday break, I was getting lunch with Adam and he saw me pull out my phone and attempt to type a text message.

1:02:47And I probably pressed my phone seven times before one of the key presses registered. And that's how every day is for me actually. Um, and, uh, And Adam was like, oh, my God, I did not know it was this bad. I assume that it like Apple is usually very good at keeping their older devices alive. And I didn't know that that was that old. I assumed it was still functioning. It is still functioning. All the components work. My theory, my working theory is that it I have the base storage model. I have 64 gigs. I don't know how much RAM is in this thing, but I'm sure it's not much. And and again, I'm basing this on assumptions.

1:03:23If you're an iOS engineer, please tell me how wrong I am on Blue Sky. Um, but I have a feeling a lot of memory swapping happens in this thing, like from the storage to the memory to the storage of memory. And I think over the years, the RAM is getting worse. I'm almost out of storage all the time because iOS is just a bloat machine. And I think what happens is the RAM just fills up. And that is what you're seeing. Because if I'm having digitizer issues like that, and I lock the phone, unlock the phone, don't switch apps, like stay in that app. The RAM refreshes and it's back to like working perfectly.

1:04:01Yes, super annoying to have to lock and unlock my phone almost every time I want to use it. I'm glad you admitted that. But I am so dedicated to this thing not ending up in a landfill. I don't need a new phone. There's not a single feature on any new iPhone that I absolutely need. It's not about the features. It's about having a working phone. I respect Alice's choices. Thank you. Anyway, so my favorite app that I'm using on my phone right now is the nts app nts is an online radio station um they have two stations nts1 and nts2 very fun um wait does nts stand for something ntsc nts stands for nuts to soup which was the name of a previous blog run by uh one of the guys who founded nts anyway nts is really cool they have two stations, one of which is usually more hype music.

1:04:57The other one is typically more chill music. It's a lot of dance music. It's a lot of international music. It's live DJs. You get cool personalities. They also have these really great playlists on their website. And typically they're called Infinite Mixtapes. And they have things like Memory Lane, Poolside, Slow Focus, The Tube, Labyrinth. I just think NTS is a super duper cool way to listen to music. Oh, and then And another thing I do that I think is just like so awesome is they'll do these curated playlists, which I get every streaming service does curated playlists. But theirs are just so awesome.

1:05:35Like it'll be like a spotlight of Cuban artists you've never heard of. Or it'll be like a deep dive into music of Detroit in 1997. Or like just like they're just so good about caring about music and caring about culture. and so yeah, go nts.live is the website the app is pretty good if it works on my terrible phone, it'll probably work on your phone that's right yeah, if you like music I gotta go with that ooh, and right now one of my favorite DJs, Ann's has a playlist up on NTS as we speak I'm probably gonna go bump that after this I wanted to shout out the Pixel Fed app once again We talked about it very lightly last week.

1:06:23If you don't know what it is, it is an alternative to Instagram that is federated over ActivityPub. If you don't know what that is, what are you doing? I feel like I've mentioned this 50 times, so you should go watch our ActivityPub and AT Protocol episode. We'll link it in the show description. However, the reason I want to shout out PixelFed right now is because, one, Instagram changed the aspect ratio of all of the posts, which I don't think that we've mentioned yet. Something very, very frustrating happened. I'm opening Instagram right now. Over last weekend, where your profile grid on your homepage - Oh, wait, no, mine's still square.

1:06:57Sometimes some people's are still square, but they're moving it. Everyone's been being moved to like, it's not 4x5, it's something similar. They introduced some sort of way to sort of crop in your images, but it just makes it look worse. Anyway, it's just, it's frustrating, and it feels like Meta is just going to continue to do whatever the heck they want to try to make Instagram just a video app. Like they really just don't seem to care about photography anymore. So I understand that it is frustrating to constantly move apps every single time the app starts getting just destroyed because they're trying to make more money off of you.

1:07:34Pixel Fed, federated over ActivityPub. The whole point is that it's decentralized. Something I wanted to call out about it is that the developer, which, yes, the developer, the one guy that is developing it. Are you serious? Yes, single guy that's developing it yesterday upgraded the infrastructure, and it was down for a little bit while he was doing this because he said they were getting an influx of users. So now it is way faster. Like when I first started using the actual app last week, it was extremely slow. It was lagging like crazy. It was glitching. Now everything is going really well. Again, it's super basic, but, you know, the federated social web is really important right now.

1:08:16and I think everybody should be moving towards these platforms that give you more control of your content. So if you want something like Instagram, but it's much simpler and will not change into a video platform in the future, get on PixelFed. My account is at davidml at pixelfed.social. Wait, I have a question for you. Follow me there. Because you've recently moved your entire website to Ghost. I did. The open protocol, open source protocol posting thing. Open source. And now this PixelFed. PixelFed. If you were to publish a post on one, would it show up on the other? So PixelFed is only images.

1:08:52Okay. So if you were to post like an image on Ghost on your website. Yes. That would ideally pop up on PixelFed or vice versa. I believe I would be able to follow my Ghost account. Yeah. Something that's cool is the BridgyFed people, which we also talked about in our federated content episode. you can basically create a bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol on BlueSky so that it creates sort of like this ghost account that mirrors what you what you post on other platforms so on PixelFed you can follow the BridgyFed account and it will create a BlueSky account for your PixelFed account that you don't have to do anything on you can just post on PixelFed and those posts will show up on Blue Sky.

1:09:40And the benefit of that is if you're on Blue Sky and you just want to follow my photography, you can follow my Pixel Fed account through Blue Sky, which is very cool. Interesting. Anyway, I just, I think we're moving towards this world where we really need to start thinking about decentralized social media. So try out Pixel Fed. It's really great right now. A lot of people are joining it. It's having a good time. Yeah, that's what I wanted to shout out. Nice, good one. Mine this week is an app called Rooms. It is an iOS only, I believe. And I remember when they launched it, I was on the S24 Ultra.

1:10:16And I was very upset that I couldn't use it. And now I'm on iPhone and remembered that, oh, wait, this app exists like a couple, maybe two weeks ago. So I downloaded it. And it is basically TikTok, right, for pixelized rooms. So you can make like a pixel room. Oh, wow. and this is sweet it's really dope it's really creative people have been getting very artistic on here there's different like tags you can do so there's like featured trending you can do an art one that just shows like dope things people make you can do games education experiments fantasy it's it's insane uh i tried my hand at making one of them and as basic as it is i'm very proud of it and i made it like the wallpaper on my phone just because it's like wow this is really really clever um definitely check it out i'm gonna check this out this might i mean obviously i haven't tried it but i think i'm gonna go ahead and get and and you know previously my favorite for you page style feed belongs to bird buddy oh yes terrific yeah terrific algorithmic feed but i can see this taking the cake dude i'm telling you if ever you get the urge to just like swipe and not do anything with your time this thing at least will inspire you and make you want to build things versus just like consuming for the sake of consuming.

1:11:34That's it's really cool. That's pretty cool, man. And people in here are so talented. It is crazy. The things that they are building look actually beautiful, like their works of art. Oh, and there's a web client. Yeah. And you can do it on a website, too. I just want to I want to say, are you did I cut you off? No. OK, so this is exactly what being friends with Adam is like, as he goes, he goes, guys, I just got a new phone for the seventh time this year. I've switched once again." And then you're hanging out with him, and then three weeks later he's like, "'Dude, I just discovered this really sick thing, "'but it's only on the phone I'm not using.'" And then he'll be bummed about it for like three days and go like, "'You know what?

1:12:15Nah, I'm doing it.'" And he'll do some... This is the other thing about Adam that's so crazy, is this man is the master of the trade-in. This guy will be like, Like, we'll be like, dude, you already have an S25 Ultra. Where did you get this? And he'd be like, oh yeah, I just like went under my bed and I found three chocolate chip cookies and a Nexus 8. I gave it to Samsung and they gave me$17 ,000 and I went and I bought a new phone. And it's just like - The Nexus 8 is psychotic. But it's just like, this is - That's true. Bro, I've known you now for like three or four years and like, I feel like I'm always watching you do this crazy acrobatic trade-in stuff.

1:12:53Yeah, it's a lot. I think I don't know. We'll see. I think I've settled down now because now I have like a shortcuts routine and so many little things that are just like such a core part of my life. Adam, why are you lying to us live on the podcast? You know, you can say whatever you want. I'm in denial. I do think you could totally start an entire blog based on blog, like TikTok account, YouTube channel, whatever. Yeah. Just like like Adam's trade in corner. I think it would go off David's Fetiverse corner and Adam's Yeah This is what happens when Marquez and Andrew leave Yeah we gotta say We all have a corner now When the cats are away The dogs come out No that's not That's what it is now baby The dogs are out Alright well it's been a week Lots of stuff happening on the internet You already know There's things ongoing right now Many things are ongoing.

1:13:53It's hard for us to be a definitive podcast, especially when it takes us two days to edit this thing. If you're in the Northeast United States, stay warm. It's 8 degrees Fahrenheit. It's cold. That's been it. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you catch us next week, or we hope to catch you next week, on the Waveform Podcast. We've been your hosts. I'm Ellis. I'm David. And there will be trivia next week. Next week. When everyone's back. catch you guys in the next one peace wait for my producer to add molina and elizroben we are part of the vax media podcast network and our interaction music is produced by vain bingo

1:14:51This is so crazy. David, what are we going to talk about? Oh, I know what to talk about. What? I don't... There's nothing in the script. Lemo, Lemo! And Doug. Here we have the Lemo, Lemo in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemo? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.

1:15:29Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just$5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Prices and participation may vary.