Even with burnout, overwork, budget cuts, hiring freezes, waves of layoffs, and everything else in 2024, there’s still little regulation in the U.S. to stop employers from responding to requests from employees at their desks or from their smartphones and laptops at home there is
(Of course, France is showing us all by implementing a right-to-unlink policy in 2017. That pesky, totally proper French…)
California State Assemblyman Matt Haney introduced AB 2751 this week.right to disconnect” offer. If passed, it would force every California employer to specify what a person’s hours are and not require them to respond to communications about work hours. The periods during which a salaried employee may have to work longer hours should be specified in their contract.
“I think California is the state that’s creating a lot of this technology, and it’s also the state that’s introducing how we make it sustainable and renewing our defenses for the times we live in and the world we’re creating,” Haney said. San Francisco Standard.
He’s not wrong: California is the home of Gmail, the iPhone, if not Slack — look out for Vancouver, Canada.
– Matt Smith
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Smart Swim 2 is smaller, lighter and more useful.
Form introduced Smart Swim goggles in 2019. They introduced a built-in display that shows real-time data while swimming, and its successor, the Smart Swim 2, is an improvement in every way. The Form dwarfed and squeezed the existing model, with a technology package 15 percent smaller than its predecessor. It also worked on comfort and fit, giving the glasses longer, more adjustable straps and a wider variety of interchangeable nose bridges.
The company is removing Just Walk Out from Fresh grocery stores in the US.
Amazon is removing its much-hyped Just Walk Out technology from all US Fresh grocery stores. The self-checkout system used cameras, sensors and good old-fashioned human eyeballs to track what people were leaving the store with, charging customers accordingly without the need to scan anything.
One of the problems was that the system didn’t use as much AI object detection and advanced smarts as Amazon would have you believe. There are reportedly more than 1,000 people in India scanning camera tapes to ensure accurate inspections.
Amazon tried to sell the technology to other retail chains, but its only major deal was with Starbucks in several locations. These systems require a high ceiling to house the cameras and sensors. Reuters suggested that many retailers consider Amazon a competitor and don’t want its hooks into their systems. For now, the systems will continue in selected UK stores.
