WEEKLY WHEATIES #2516

GeoGuessr, OpenAI, Meta, what3words

Apr 20, 2025

In this newsletter:

📝 Post: Beyond the Pin Drop: Uncovering the Hidden Clues in Google Street View
🗞️ In Case You Missed It: OpenAI Updates
🗞️ In Case You Missed It: Meta in Court
🗞️ In Case You Missed It: Tech Headlines
😎 Pick of the Week: what3words
📦 Featured Product: Bagsmart Tech Pouch

📝 Beyond the Pin Drop: Uncovering the Hidden Clues in Google Street View

Traveling around our home city, state, or country wouldn’t be the same without the digital maps we’ve come to know and use over the past 20-30 years. Traveling and navigating around the world to countries we have never been to or using a language we do not speak is exponentially easier today for the same reason. It started with carrying a physical map, printing directions from MapQuest, and uploading a voice to our TomToms. But now we have Apple Maps, Waze, and the behemoth that is Google Maps.

What you may not know is that in a very niche corner of the internet lives a community that revolves around Google Maps and the game GeoGuessr. Put simply, this game can be played in multiple facets, but the basics are simple - a Google Street View image is shown of a random place across the world, and the user must drop a pin on the map for their best guess on where the location is. Based on the distance from the user’s pin drop to where the real location is listed (in kilometers), the user receives a certain number of points. The lower the number of points, the better, as the lowest score wins.

The people who have played this game to what would arguably be considered the professional level are insane. They can guess locations to the city from glancing at a picture for a tenth of a second. I still don’t completely understand fully how they are so good at this, but I have researched it a bit to understand some of their ‘tricks.’ And please understand, I am not trying to take away from their genius by any means, only to help any aspiring GeoGuessr to get a head start.

There are commonalities across the world, but also very unique features that can be used to your advantage. You can watch an interview Wired did with one of the most popular in this space, Rainbolt, where he shares Every Trick a Pro GeoGuessr Player Uses to Win. Some examples he shares include: roadway material (asphalt, concrete, dirt), roadway striping, other roadway accessories (bollards, guardrails), utility poles (material and style), license plates on cars (specific to the color, length, and how they are blurred), the type of soil, vegetation, angle of the sun (including shadows), signage, and much, much more.

One of the biggest hints includes the basic information that can be gathered from the picture itself - not including any roadway or landscape features. Specifically, the type of vehicle used to take the pictures, the type of camera used (potentially specific to a type of car), and when the pictures were actually taken, based on the timestamp.

For clarification, certain types of vehicles (think brand, model, color) may have only been available in a given country. An example may include where some highways out in the middle of nowhere Kenya were the only place in Google’s map database recorded from a 4-door truck with a snorkel installed.

Other countries may have only approved Google to take pictures during a given time of year, or simply based on Google’s schedule and availability. Alternatively, Google’s resources may not allow them to go back to a certain country for a while, so the current pictures’ dates are ‘set in stone’ for the foreseeable future. Combine those aspects with the type of picture taken, or even the type of camera Google used (I can only find that a total of 4 different types of cameras were used), one who has researched this information can start to narrow down where the image may be.

Armed with all of this information that one has studied and researched in depth, it’s no secret how a professional GeoGuessr can start to pinpoint locations to a specific country or even a city. However, there is this x-factor that allows these players an ability to just ‘know it when they see it,’ too. As a professional in your area of expertise, you probably have it - or at least know someone who does, right?

I wanted to share this because I think it’s very interesting and cool! However, please let this also stand to remind you that pictures you post online (depending on the site) may contain personal identifiers. The next two paragraphs were copied from Weekly Wheaties #2434 where I wrote about Staying Safe Online Through Hacks, Phishing, and Scams.

A default rule of thumb is to not post anything you wouldn’t want your [grandparents, grandchildren, children’s teachers, boss, etc.] seeing. Regardless of marking something private and/or deleting it, there are still ways of finding posts from years ago. Pictures also include metadata that has personal identifiers: GPS location, time, date, device used, etc.

If you really want to be careful, strip all pictures of their metadata using the Metadata Finder tool. Alternatively, taking a screenshot of a picture will give it different metadata should you not want to share the original metadata.

Think you’re ready to try out GeoGuessr?

🗞️ ICYMI: OpenAI Updates

OpenAI is considering its own social network to compete with Elon Musk’s X. There’s talk that this is just to help train their models so they don’t have to scrape the internet as much as they do in order to stay up to date. By having users post information on servers they own, they won’t have to pay otherwise (by access or compute power). New models were also introduced: GPT-4.1 in the API and OpenAI o3 and o4-mini. Other announcements included ChatGPT's memory can now reference all past conversations, not just what you tell it to while they are also considering acquiring Jony Ive’s AI startup to produce a screenless phone

🗞️ ICYMI: Meta in Court

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is back in court Fighting to Keep Instagram and WhatsApp through an Antitrust trial. But one may argue how can it be a monopoly if it’s free? Let this stand as a reminder that a lot of those on Capitol Hill don’t know how social media works, while also noting that if something is free, you are the product.

In this case so far, “it was suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to "neutralize a potential competitor”” in a 2012 email dubbed “smoking gun.” Later on in 2018, they considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook.

🗞️ ICYMI: Tech Headlines

😎 POTW: what3words

Mentioned in this week’s post were Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze - arguably the top three navigation apps used. Except these only do great for getting close to a location, or to a physical building with an address. What they don’t allow for is pinpoint accuracy to locate something or someone. Yes, dropping a pin may be beneficial, but that isn’t always accurate either.

Enter what3words. This website or app allows any location in the world (in 10 square feet increments) to be precisely described in 3 words. These words are random and do not always make sense, as you’ll see, but they are unique to that location. This can be extremely beneficial for parking; meeting up in a stadium, fair, or large outdoor event; finding a trailhead; meeting your baseball or soccer team at the right field; and many more unique and possible one-off instances.

📦 Featured Product

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the Bagsmart Electronic Tech Pouch to carry many of my tech accessories that travel with me daily in my backpack. I chose this item since it was priced inexpensively compared to the other options available, and I wanted to see if I’d like using one before splurging for the tomtoc, Peak Design, or Alpaka options. What I like about all of these is their ability to stand up on a table when opened and not fall over and spill out. Having a small tech pouch like this also makes it easy to stay organized and know where everything is, along with quickly locating it or moving from one bag to another.