They have: the answer is "the explanation of how much energy it uses on the sticker with the energy star logo".

If the proposal is to just not provide that information anymore (or, worse, leave the gutted program in some zombie state where you can retain the style but ignore the now-deprecated test standards and put whatever numbers you want in there); what exactly are people going to be looking for?

Is everyone just going to become a rugged individualist with a set of electronic test equipment for best buy runs and a mass spec in the garage so you can verify heavy metal levels when you get home from the grocery store?

I think that there is an important distinction between 'government solution' in the sense of "the Ministry of Efficiency Shall Design All the TVs" and in the sense of "we can't expect The Market to decide if it's either legal or unenforced to just lie on the label".

'Market' solutions tend to absolutely require access to quality information. In its absence people can't really make decisions that align with their interests; and a lot of low-value or unequal party transactions make it either economically irrational or simply not feasible to be a 'sophisticated' buyer. If I'm a cranky electronics hobbyist maybe I value time with my test equipment at a negative rate because it's a hobby; and if I'm buying an entire datacenter I can probably afford to have my own experts to give the vendor's claims due scrutiny; but the random in the grocery store hoping that there won't be lead in their cinnamon can't realistically mass spec their way to information; and the guy in best buy staring at TVs has no meaningful ability to either verify their energy usage or hold the vendor to account if it turns out that, a year from now, it was actually different than represented(the situation is, if anything, significantly messier now that everything has a computer in it, often network connected, so the vendor has a lot more ability to just change things or implement complex anti-testing behaviors if they wish).

There's definitely a principled argument to be made that regulation of something like appliance energy efficiency should be around accuracy and honesty rather than "No TVs over 200w"; but any proposal that is 'let the market decide!' out of one half of its mouth and 'defang anything that risks providing customers information with which to decide' out of the other is quite likely to be a demand for impunity rather than a request to let price signals replace mandates.

It's hard to argue with the idea that people pushing out low-effort nastygrams will also embrace bots if they prove either reliable enough or cheap enough to proofread; but I suspect that(at least with current likely suspects, it's possible that something less predictable will be unleashed) the effect won't be as dramatic just because of how much business process automation and separation of labor you can already manage, especially when you are just sending scary-looking letters to random little people rather than submitting stuff to a judge who may not appreciate your lack of effort.

The rules frown on purporting to be a lawyer when you are not; but they are substantially more permissive in terms of how thin you can spread your lawyer: even in respectable high end contexts it's quite normal for some, potentially much, of the writing to get farmed out to associates and paralegals unless the fancy partner's expertise is required; and in some sleazy boiler room operation there's not much stopping you from mostly using mail merge and the cheapest clerical temps you can find to turn whatever batches of questionably documented and dubiously collectable debt into letters, with the lawyers there to handle putting the templates together and appearing on the letterhead.

That said, I'd also be skeptical of how far this sort of service could go in redressing fights between significantly unequal parties: especially with things like the dodgy end of consumer collections the real killer isn't necessarily that they have a keen legal mind on the case and you don't(since this is often not true; and such situations are more likely to be disputes of fact rather than some sort of subtle argument); but that they, rather than you, are typically treated as the presumptively respectable party while you are treated as having the burden of disproving the allegation.

My, admittedly layman's, understanding was that SIMs used asymmetric key cryptography for authentication purposes; rather than a shared secret or the like, with the private key never leaving the UICC during authentication(or even on request, the user is considered a potential threat for cloning purposes).

I can imagine a variety of weak customer service 'authentication' scenarios where having the sort of data that they obtained would probably be useful to an attacker; there's probably a call center script somewhere that treats knowing the IMEI as a secret; but how would you actually clone a SIM with just the server-side data? Do the telcos generate the private keys outside the UICC and store copies when they load them? Do I misunderstand how the authentication works?

This is, no doubt, going to lead to some absolutely nonsensical frothing screeds about how price signals are the most sinister threat to the free market since cocainized turbo-communism.

As best I could tell that question was about the people doing the implementation; not the system.

They professed optimism that it would be done in less than three years; but that it probably would take three years to get there with an LLM; then asked how radical people were willing to be; which sounds like a relatively polite phrasing of the idea that someone who wants to make real progress is going to need to take an approach that isn't a me-too LLM attempt.

TFA says: "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."; but it also indicates that these are specifically the 'AI' division types; rather than just a small slice of the workforce generally.

Given where the hype is currently; I'd assume that the bot herders would be the segment of the workforce that would be most likely to be able to exert influence. Is this group too small even for that; or is this strictly a question of a legally defined percentage for collective bargaining to kick in, in which case being a small but influential subset of the employees would make no difference because the measure is purely size?

Aside from the question of whether it's a good idea; there are also fairly massively different incentives at work.

New companies have a habit of dying, but they also have enough room for potential growth that equity compensation has a chance of turning into dramatic amounts of money. Not necessarily oligarch island money; but significant alteration of whether work is something you need to do money.

At one of the relatively mature outfits? Aside from the company's performance being down to thousands of people who mostly aren't you; it's overwhelmingly more likely that any employer stock is going to behave like a less diversified version of whatever your 401k has in it; unlikely to get wiped out, but no particularly dramatic gains are expected.

Getting more hours out of the labor units and a better chance that they'll die or be incapacitated enough to be fired before they get old and expensive enough that we'd need to find a pretext to resource action them?

Sounds like a win-win for management.

It's also about where you want to put your complexity.

If you are more or less directly interacting with a user: you will almost certainly want to be able to handle case insensitive searches. You'll probably also want to let them change the font and the text size and color and have the timestamps displayed correctly for their region and time zone.

It's just much less clear how much of that you want to make the filesystem's problem. You could drag a full timezone system into the filesystem so that timestamps could be intrinsically timezone-aware. If you wanted to. Maybe the better part of a CSS implementation so that the color, size, and font of the file name could be as directly connected to the file as the name is. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I'd be interested to know how happy or unhappy Intel is about the situation: on the one hand anything that helps keep fab utilization as close to 100% as possible is presumably a positive; and, in the case of the Lunar Lake parts, the new-hotness may or may not actually be higher margin since there's more TSMC material in there and the co-packaged RAM made dealing with DRAM prices Intel's problem rather than the OEM's problem; but on the other it can't be entirely encouraging that the customer response skews so heavily toward "we don't want your improvements; we want cheap"; and (though Intel's data alone wouldn't be able to tell us whether this is the case or not) it would be actively bad if people do care a lot about battery life, or improved integrated GPUs, but the people looking to sell those are simply not going to Intel to provide them(obviously Apple isn't; but AMD is certainly relevant in mobile again, and not just as an ultra-budget option; while MS is at least trying to make Qualcomm happen).

Given how hard Intel goes on 'system TOPS' (counting the combined computation of CPU, GPU, and NPU if present) in their 'AI PC' marketing stuff; rather than Microsoft's NPU-or-nothing focus in their "Copilot Plus PC" marketing stuff; I would imagine that Intel doesn't much care about people not caring about their NPU all that much: they've got one they can sell you; it meets MS' requirements for their little copilot sticker, so they won't lose out in any tickbox-based procurement contest; but the meaning of OEMs preferring Intel's cheaper parts could be substantially different for Intel depending on whether it's a "buyers are price sensitive; especially with the current state of global trade" thing; or an "honestly, people who care get Strix Point; but someone needs to fill the cheap seats" thing.

The part of this that is genuinely a bit surprising isn't that nobody cares about glorious 'copilot+' NPU AI PC whatever; but that Intel is apparently having a hard time selling people on the actual improvement between raptor lake and meteor lake; which is the battery life.

Performance was basically a wash; but that's the generation where Intel significantly improved the efficiency situation.

Is he honestly so high on his own supply that he buys the "people would love ads if only they were more 'relevant'; because obviously there's not actually any tension between things you are interested in seeing and things that someone will pay to have rammed into your eye" concept; or is this just one of those situations where you look at your burn rate, remaining VC cash, and complete lack of plans for profitability and make a statement that isn't secret but is intended for the investors rather than the targets?

Someone who says "humans who can complete higher-level tasks, such as creativity and judgment, should not be stuck answering emails" is definitely someone you'd want to have to communicate with.

From the unfortunate occasions when I've been forced to try to talk to them; I'm pretty sure that Redmond has already culled anyone meeting this description from public-facing communication.

Either the young men in the US abandoning college education at record rates are mega fucked; or Bloomberg managed to pick a particularly dire case.

Not that this is anywhere close to the only job one could say this of; but I'd be a bit jumpy about that job's future as well as its present.

Vehicles aren't as far along; but the trend toward increasingly elegant and material-efficient frames that are designed for the factory's welder robots more than for service, filled out by nearly expendable plastics kits, looks an awful lot like the same bifurcation into 'uneconomic to service' and 'trivial, if you have access to vendor spares, and the vendor-authorized service center will pay accordingly' that has largely happened to things like consumer appliances and electronics.

Maybe more people than I imagine make the jump to doing comparatively skilled frame surgery and sheet metal operations than I imagine; or the people nursing used cars along because vendors want to sell 100k 'light trucks' because that is where the margin is are able to pay enough to sustain the deliberately not vendor focused section of the market? If not our eager workforce entrant is going to be looking at an increasingly bad day as time goes on.