Apple’s Smart Glasses Chips & Clippy's AI Comeback | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, a human masquerading as an alien. Wait.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast where Chris and I get into four interesting articles that we found in the tech news sphere? Projection? Dimension? I don't know.

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Ned: Chris, what are you-

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Chris: Shadows on a cave wall? No. Philosophical. Anyway, Wikipedia is suing the British, and it's going to be interesting. At the end of 2023, the British passed the online safety bill. This, in their minds, would be done to make everyone online safer. According to the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, it will lead to a, much more censored, locked-down internet for British users, to which the UK government ostensibly replied, Yeah, The bill itself is a monster. 250 pages of repression and nanny stating that has been in vogue on that side of the pond for a while now. And of course, before you start snorting all American superior-like, There are plenty of people who want to see the same thing happen in the United States as well. So watch it. Among other dystopian things, the online safety bill takes aim at undermining end-to-end encryption, requiring monitoring age verification for naughty sites, and user verification for sites over a certain size. This is where Wikipedia comes in. The bill would classify Wikipedia as a Category 1 site, subjecting it to the worst and the strictest parts of the bill. This includes collecting data and verifying identities for volunteer editors of Wikipedia articles.

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Chris: Wikipedia's argument is that this is a clear and present danger to those editors as, for example, people Writing about controversial topics or against the wishes and goals of authoritarian regimes would be placed at unnecessary risk by identifying themselves. This makes sense if you think about it. The first step is for the government to require sites like Wikipedia to have this information about their users. The next step is to require Wikipedia to hand that data right on over. Wikipedia states that rather than comply with these requirements, users would simply stop contributing. They would shy away from controversial topics rather than run any personal risk, to which, again, I assume the British government would reply, Yes, and?

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Ned: Vmware wants you to cease and desist. Shaking, rattling, and rolling is up to you. As part of the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom made the bold decision to end perpetual licensing for ESXI and vSphere. Perpetual licensing was an where you paid once for the license to run the software and then paid an annual fee for support and security patches. Paying only once for software? Broadcom no likey. They're all about the recurring subscription revenue. It's got what rent extraction craves. Those with existing perpetual licenses are still allowed to run their software, but once the annual support runs out, they're no longer permitted to download software updates and security patches. To put too fine a point on it, Broadcom has been sending aggressive cease and desist letters to perpetual license holders, emphatically warning them of possible violations if they dare to download as much as a single patch. The letters do not appear to be connected to any actual illicit activity on the part of the license holders. Rather, it seems like Broadcom is hoping to rattle some cages and see if new subscriptions fall out. The letter also reminds customers that per the terms of service, Because Broadcom has the right to roll in and audit any customer for potential violations, a not too subtle intimidation tactic that some customers are nonplust about.

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Ned: Honestly, if VMware were trying to accelerate the adoption of Nutanix and Proxmox, they could not have done a better job. Then again, I don't think Hok Tan, the CEO of Broadcom, cares all that much as he is the highest paid CEO in the US, raking in 161 million last year.

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Chris: People always sleep well on mattresses stuffed with $100 bills. Apple developing smart glasses chips. It's like a smart watch for your face. It's the excited way I saw someone talking about this Nightmare Hillscape in the making on Twitter, which... Talking about a Nightmare Hillscape product on a Nightmare Hillscape platform? Hashtag, YoDog, etc. Anyway. Late last year, Facebook put out their surveillance Raybans to muted applause. It was just announced now that Apple is continuing to try and get into that game, going so far as to develop new processors to cater to the new product line. Previous efforts along these lines of smart glasses have primarily repurposed already existing microprocessors, emphasis on micro, obviously, size is a factor, that had previously been used in phones and also in other wearable devices such as earpods. Airpods? Earpods?

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Ned: Both.

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Chris: Why not? This new effort, according to anonymous sources, is going to specifically try to build low power processors that will be able to handle the, quote, multiple cameras on the glasses frames, unquote, and for the higher priced version, I should say, augmented reality features. Apple is also apparently developing a lower priced version of the glasses that will not include AR. I guess just to be used in conjunction with an iPhone or some other computational device to do that heavy lifting? Sounds good.

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Ned: Great.

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Chris: No official announcement has been made as of yet, but allegedly, the release of these products should be end of next year or early 2027.

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Ned: I hope they call glasses. Out. Clippie's back. Back again. Clippie's back as an LLM. Developer Felix Riceberg best known for his work on the Electron framework, also known as what powers Slack and VS Code, has published a new project to his GitHub account. As a fan of nostalgic Windows software, he has resurrected Clippie as an Electron app that you can run locally to host various LLM models. The app is a reference implementation of the Electron LLM module that makes it easier for developers to integrate local LLMs into their Electron apps. Clipy can run a slew of different local LLMs as long as they are in the GGUF format. That includes popular models like Google's GEMA 3, Meta's LLaMA 3. 2, and Microsoft's Phy4. The esthetic of Clipy is in line with Windows '98 era graphics and interfaces, and it presents a simple chat interface. There's no complicated setup either. I pulled down the Zip Archive, extracted the files, and opened the clippy. Exe application. From there, it automatically downloaded the Gema 3 model and plopped a clippy animated figure on top of my primary screen. Clicking on Clipy brings up the chat interface and clicking again removes Honestly, that's the best thing I found all week.

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Ned: It brings me infinite joy. I'm only sad that he didn't also resurrect the cat, if you remember the cat. Felix says in the GitHub read me, I'd like you to enjoy a weird mix of nostalgia for 1990s technology, paired with one of the most magical technologies we can run on our computers in 2025. Thanks, Felix. Enjoy it. I shall. Did the cat have a name?

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Chris: French fry.

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Ned: All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.