As a daily wearer, *I* know that I’m not constantly recording video or taking pictures of people without their knowledge and consent, but for folks who only read about wearable technology, it seems reasonable that they’re always “on”, so I don’t blame them. Stories like this are part of the reason why: Meta Just Patched a Major Privacy Flaw With Its Smart Glasses. And this: Meta Quietly Added Facial Recognition to Its Smart Glasses.

In truth, I very rarely used the camera. Its single best use was in recording my puppy as I played with her with both hands. The Meta AI never proved helpful when I asked it to tell me about what I was looking at. It’ll get there, and had I been able to hook them up to a different LLM, my results might’ve been different.

The one feature of the glasses that was groundbreaking for me was the speakers. While wearing them (assuming the battery hadn’t died), I could watch the quick video a friend sent on my phone w/o my family having to hear the audio. I could listen to podcasts whenever I had a few moments, but didn’t have earphones handy. I caught up on a lot just walking to and from my parking spot. And of course, I could use them for phone calls.

So I got another pair of connected glasses, but without a camera. I still have the audio always available, and I can go back to the half-rim glasses I prefer over the heavier look of the Ray-Bans. They’re just glasses with Bluetooth speakers, treated by my phone like headphones, so I can also have conversations with an LLM by tapping one of the arms. I’m really hoping Siri improves as much on iOS 27 as the beta testers say it will. There are surprisingly few audio-only glasses easily available in Canada. I tried and returned a couple of very cheap pairs from Amazon (one wouldn’t allow my optician to swap in my prescription lenses, and the other didn’t isolate the sound at all). There are a couple of name brands that ship from the States, but in the end, I went through AliExpress and got a pair of Mijia Smart Audio Glasses from Xiaomi shipped from China.

They do the job I want nicely, and the battery easily lasts all day, which couldn’t be said for the Ray-Bans. That said, there are a few things I miss about the Ray-Bans. I initially thought the charging case was kinda dumb, but now that I have yet another proprietary cable to keep track of, I can see the convenience of the case, which charges via USB-C. I miss the hardware switches and buttons (one of each). I miss the transition lenses I had installed in the Ray-Bans when I’m outside, but not when I’m inside.

So now I’m wearing normal-looking glasses but still have the benefit of private audio always available. Feel free to ask any questions, or to yell at me for ever giving Zuck some of my money. I found it a worthwhile experiment with an emerging technology.

1. Ithaka S+R released a new LibGuide titled “Understanding the Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence.” There is a LOT of good information linked within, but the blog post does a really good job introducing the reason for the guide, IMHO, so do start there.
2. The Verge posts “Amazon’s data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year.” Amazon released some data in which they compare themselves to some of the other big data centre players, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. You won’t be surprised to learn that Amazon claims to be more efficient than the others. This, though, is a rare instance where you should read the comments, because many folks there point out that context really matters. 2.5 billion gallons of water sounds like an awful lot, but is it?

And I continue to add resources such as these to my bookmark list at Energy and AI.

Man, that IS a gross picture on the front of the Libguide.

This morning, NVivo 15.5 threw up this warning that the software won’t be compatible with future versions of macOS.

I found the following FAQ entry on the Lumivero Community pages, so fingers crossed they get there in time!

When Rosetta 2 Support is Ending
Apple Support for intel-based apps will continue through MacOS 27 (expected in October 2026)
MacOS 28, due in late 2027, will be the first macOS version without support for intel-based apps.
See the article below for details: Using Intel-based apps on a Mac with Apple silicon – Apple Support

Will NVivo Mac continue to run?
Lumivero intends to offer a native Apple Silicon version of NVivo by the time MacOS 28 is released. There should be no interruption in the ability of NVivo Mac to run on future MacOS systems.

Some of the quotes I highlighted in John’s post:

• “First test on a sample bank statement: clean, accurate text in 2.1 seconds. Tesseract was faster but dramatically noisier. Second test on a tall Fred Meyer receipt: disaster. The model entered a repetition loop, hallucinating “TILL YGRT” endlessly.”
• “The models love regex.”
• “On the fourth attempt I said “I would have expected we start a new process per batch.” That was the fix… Codex patched it, launched it in a tmux session, and the ETA dropped from 12 hours to 3. Not a hard fix. Just the kind of thing you know after you’ve watched enough overnight jobs die at 3 AM.”
• “I asked Claude to build me a labeling tool – keyboard-first, receipt image on the left, classification data on the right, arrow keys to navigate, single keypress to verdict. It built the whole Flask app in 22 minutes. I sat down and hand-labeled 375 receipts.”
• “Real-world data is messy.”
• “Here’s what made the quality good: every time I caught something, I could show the agents what to look for and they’d go fix it everywhere.”

This reminds me, for the umpteenth time, of the aphorism: “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI might.”

Here’s a link to the example in question (now up to 56 citations!), and here are the sections being discussed:

My solution is to pay librarians to flag these suckers. Someone at Google (does anyone know if there’s someone doing QC on this project?) would then have to investigate and then remove the ghost citation. Let’s make it $10/USD for each one that gets removed – Google can afford it. While it’d be a game of whack-a-mole, surely it would help?! Others have proposed the same thing, so it must be a good idea! The biggest issue is that someone would have to vet and manage the list of librarians for whom the Dispute button would appear.

One of the links in Aaron’s post goes to a project called LLM Citation Verifier, which might be worth checking out further. It seems more technical than most people would want, but I love that it verifies citations produced by LLMs in real time. One drawback is that it seems to work only if there’s a DOI, which would rule out older stuff.

Maybe this will serve as my kick in the pants to finish the hallucitation project I started about this time last year!

We have also refined the scope of the tracker. While our tracker previously sought to include all products that might reasonably be used by instructors, researchers, and students at the postsecondary level, the current version focuses on products that are marketed specifically towards these same users for teaching, learning, and research activities. We are no longer including general purpose AI products (e.g., ChatGPT, image or code generation products for various contexts, etc.) with use cases that can extend significantly beyond higher education in the tracker.

Sadly, one of the features missing from the original tool is not addressed by moving to Airtable. There’s still no way to receive updates when anything changes on the site Airtable doesn’t offer an RSS feed, and the one tool they appear to have partnered with that does, miniExtensions, doesn’t offer a free tier. USD$50/month is too much for me to eat! I spent a LOT of time yesterday with ChatGPT trying to create a workaround, but so far, the best option, Visualping, only offers an email option. That’s fine, and is what I’ll use for now, but it sure would be nice to have that feed, so I’m still poking around.

The other update I’m happy to see is how easy it now is to suggest a change to a particular product (or an entirely new tool). I submitted a tweak yesterday, and it’s already been added.

She goes on to suggest that libraries might consider subsidizing reviewers rather than covering article processing fees for open-access titles. The idea is that if professionals were paid rather than volunteering, the whole peer-review process might move a little faster. I like that idea

But what I *really* took away from her post was the reminder of something those outside the profession probably don’t know about us; how strongly we take patron privacy, and how, in going directly to the consumer (student, faculty), publishers can learn an awful lot more about users than they ever could when users were consistently anonymized behind a proxy server.

Ehh, I’m sure that’s just fine.

There, I find that I can personally subscribe to ScienceDirect AI for US $25 / month or US $249 / year. There’s also a link to get in touch with sales for institutional access; I wonder how many hits that gets.

The FAQs go on to explain that purchasing SDAI won’t actually get you access to any additional content you don’t currently have. “Access to underlying content depends on your institution’s existing ScienceDirect subscriptions or any individual content purchases you make.” And, “…you can use ScienceDirect AI’s features regardless of your institution’s content access. However, the Reading Assistant tool is only available on documents you are entitled to access.” So that’s a strange potential mish-mash of institutional and personal accounts.

Do any other academic vendors market services directly to the end user? I can’t recall seeing anything like this before!

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Here’s your jaw-dropper:

Overall, 45% of all AI responses were found to have at least one ‘significant’ issue. When including ‘some issues’, 81% of responses have an issue of some form.