andrewmg

Sort of. The company released a new model and deprecated its older ones. It’s still possible to control the amps with the (really neat) physical remote.

Ditto (except not being an AI detractor): I used Claude and Codex to reverse engineer the proprietary protocol for controlling Devialet amplifiers and then build an iOS controller app to replace the manufacturer's abandoned official app.

The whole thing took about a day, spread out over a week or so. Without AI, I wouldn't have even started the project, because I couldn't spare the time it would have taken.

I am an audiophile, and for me the AirPods Pro replaced literally thousands of dollars of portable headphones, amplifiers, etc., which I don't miss a bit. Apple's audio engineering is truly top-notch, and all the convenience features are icing on the cake.

It retains past passwords. Open the entry in the Passwords app and then scroll down to "View History" button.

This seems backwards to me, mostly. A decade ago, quality sound on the go meant a pocket headphone amp wired to deep-seated inner-ear earphones or clunky over-the-ear cans.

Today? Airpods Pro do the trick: the second- and third-generation models rival or exceed most wired options. And that makes sense: Apple's R&D spending and engineering capabilities for a product like Airpods dwarf the resources of traditional audio companies--the built-in DSP alone is a staggering achievement. So they ought to sound great, and they really do.

And that's before you even consider all the other capabilities, like taking calls, etc. My pocket amps and wired 'phones (Etymotic, Shure, B&O, a few others I'm forgetting) have been gathering dust since the Airpods Pro came to market. I do not miss de-tangling the cables.

Of course, it is possible to do better, but not easy or inexpensive. On my desks at home and at the office are dedicated headphone rigs: DACs, amps, and wired open-backed cans (Focal, HifiMan). Those set-ups sound great--although not nearly so great as my two-channel speaker systems. But that's what it takes to get appreciably better sound than Apple's Bluetooth sets, and forget about portability.

Since I'm a reasonably well-known textualist, I'll bite:

First, the court was not asked to reconsider the meaning of the First Amendment. In the US, we generally hew to the rule of "party presentation," which generally provides that courts will consider the parties' arguments, not make up new ones on their own.

TikTok's claim was that application of the statute in question to it violated the First Amendment's clause that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." The Supreme Court has considered the interpretation and application of that clause in...well, a whole lot of cases. TikTok asked the court to apply the logic of certain of those precedents to rule in its favor and enjoin the statute. It did not, however, ask the court to reconsider those precedents or interpret the First Amendment anew.

Since the court was not asked to do so, it's no surprise that it didn't.

Second, as noted, the court has literally decades' worth of cases fleshing out the meaning of this clause and applying it in particular circumstances. Every textualist, so far as I'm aware, generally supports following the court's existing precedents interpreting the Constitution unless and until they are overruled.

Third, even if one is of the view that the Court ought to consider the text anew in every case, without deferring to its prior rulings interpreting the text, this would have been a particularly inappropriate case for it to do so. A party seeking an injunction, as TikTok was, has to show a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That generally entails showing that you win under existing precedent. A court's expedited consideration of a request for preliminary relief is not an appropriate time to broach a new theory of what the law requires. The court doesn't have the time to give it the consideration required, and asking the court to abrogate its precedents is inconsistent with the standard for a preliminary injunction, which contemplates only a preview of the ultimate legal question, not a full-blown resolution of it.

Fourth, what exactly was the court supposed to do with the text in question, which is "abridging the freedom of speech"? The question here is whether the statute here, as applied to TikTok, violates that text. Well, it depends on what "the freedom of speech" means and perhaps what "abridging" means. It's only natural that a court would look to precedent in answering the question. Precedent develops over time, fleshing out (or "liquidating," to use Madison's term) the meaning and application of ambiguous or general language. Absent some compelling argument that precedent got the meaning wrong, that sort of case-by-case development of the law is how our courts have always functioned--and may be, according to some scholars, itself a requirement of originalism.

They're employees. The employer pays them for their time and can demand that they attend whatever activities the employer chooses, from work training sessions to anti-harassment training sessions to sessions talking about corporate culture to sessions expressing the employer's views on topics like unionization.

If you want, you can hire someone to listen to you talk 8 hours a day on whatever topic you choose--there's no law against it.

What a tendentious headline. Of course an employer has the right to hold an information session for its employees and convey its views. The Supreme Court held in 1941 that nothing in the National Labor Relations Act prohibits an employer "from expressing its view on labor policies or problems" unless the employer's speech "in connection with other circumstances [amounts] to coercion within the meaning of the Act." NLRB v. Virginia Elec. & Power Co., 314 U.S. 469, 477.

Subsequently, in 1947 Congress enacted an express speech protection in NLRA § 8(c): "The expressing of any views, argument, or opinion, or the dissemination thereof, whether in written, printed, graphic, or visual form, shall not constitute or be evidence of an unfair labor practice under any of the provisions of this subchapter, if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit."

That provision "implements the First Amendment," NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co., 395 U.S. 575, 617 (1969). It also manifested a "congressional intent to encourage free debate on issues dividing labor and management." Linn v. Plant Guard Workers, 383 U.S. 53, 62 (1966).

So, yes, it has been well established for nearly as long as we've had federal labor law that employers can tell their employees why they think unionization is a bad idea. The First Amendment guarantees them that right, and Congress also guaranteed it by statute. And those rights obviously apply to statements like (from the article) "Unions make money by collecting dues from their members." One can certainly disagree with such a message, but the notion (asserted by a union attorney quoted in the article) that speech protections don't apply to employer speech is bonkers.

I don't think your second point is correct. Congress could most certainly empower EPA to administer a cap-and-trade scheme or even some kind of phase-out, as it did with (respectively) acid-rain precursors and CFCs. Congress could do the same for GHG emissions, without spelling out the impact on each and every affected industry or source. Congress might, for example, set an economy-wide emissions cap, set a schedule of annual caps or a formula, specify how EPA should go about determining the cap each year, or some combination of those things. If Congress specifies that all sources economy-wide (or some subset of them) will be subject to a cap, then it has answered the major question.

On your third point, see the paragraph on page 38 of my brief linked above. "Generation-shifting," as used in the CPP, was EPA's claim that it could set "achievable" emissions standards based on turning off a source. One can argue about whether new-source standards satisfy the statutory test (BACT) applicable to major industrial facilities and whether the agency's decision to set those standards at a particular level is supported by the evidence or otherwise arbitrary and capricious. But that's an entirely different inquiry from whether Congress empowered EPA to switch off more or less every source of emissions in the country as it so chooses.