Offices in Silicon Valley are emptier this summer than their counterparts around the country: San Francisco office attendance averaged just over 45% in June, according to data from the city. (In the weeks leading up to the pandemic, the rate was always above 90%.) San Jose offices were even emptier, with attendance averaging under 39%. That’s compared to averages of around 59% in Austin and roughly 50% in Los Angeles and New York.

As tech companies have grappled with how to get often-resistant workers back into offices, tactics like badge tracking and attendance performance metrics have been met with petitions, letters to the C-suite, and anti-RTO Slack channels.

Perhaps the secret to enticing tech workers back to the office has a very Silicon Valley answer.

“The world freaking changed, and Silicon Valley has been living in a little bubble for a while, thinking all those perks would attract the best talent,” Honghao Deng, CEO and co-founder of body-heat sensing tech company Butlr, told Tech Brew. “It used to be some kind of signature thing that a tech company had all this fancy stuff, but only ideas attract the best talent, nothing else.”

Keep reading here.—MA

If you’re reading about “smart energy” solutions in the news lately, it’s probably because we just lived through the hottest month on record, creating mass demand for household electric cooling systems.

But the intelligent technologies that comprise smart energy—like intelligent home energy insights and usage monitoring systems—are also being implemented at an industrial level, where companies are being pushed (by consumers and policy) to reduce their supply chains’ carbon footprint.

A recent survey conducted by global intelligence firm ABI Research, which queried 114 manufacturing companies, found that the manufacturing industry is struggling not only with the cost of energy (which 42% of companies reported as their top challenge) but also with interactions with energy utility providers for things like billing, reliability, and purchasing.

Manufacturers also report regulatory and legislative challenges, limited availability of renewable energy, and a lack of relevant knowledge and expertise, which 45% of responding companies ranked as their second biggest challenge.

Despite those barriers, manufacturers say they’re already implementing certain smart energy solutions or they’re in the works.

Keep reading here.—MA

Amazon has begun the largest overhaul of its grocery business since it planted a flag in a Whole Foods papaya six years ago.

The revamp comes after the tech giant has struggled to work its usual industry-reinventing magic on grocery sales.

Now, under the guidance of seasoned grocery executives, the online purveyor of every product ever is launching new strategies to beef up its in-person stores and grow its share of the $1.5 trillion US grocery market, which Walmart and Kroger dominate.

Keep reading here.—ML

Stat: One-third. According to Pew data, that’s the portion of adults in the US who have used a dating app, the New York Times reported in a story about the rise of “date-me docs” as an alternative to the apps.

Quote: “If you’re just blindly using historical data and not carefully looking into if bias has crept into your hiring system, then it just becomes a biased AI system…Candidates are right to be worried.”—Sameer Maskey, an adjunct associate professor of machine learning and AI at Columbia University, to the Washington Post regarding hiring software that relies on AI

Read: How will artificial intelligence change the news business? (New York)

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

See the light: The light produced by LED light bulbs is notoriously not great, but it’s kind of all we’ve got. As of the end of July, “federal regulations increasing the minimum efficiency levels for light bulbs went into effect,” CNET reported, “effectively banning the sale of most incandescent bulbs across the US.” We’re journalists, not businesspeople, but it feels like there’s a big ol’ TAM for a reliably dimmable LED bulb…

The scarlet checkmark: If you pay for Blue on Twitter X, you can now obscure the fact that you opted into paying $8 a month for access to a dubious list of features, including longer tweets (exes?), using an NFT as a PFP, and editing posts within a certain time window. But unchecking yourself only goes so far: “Using any of those features might tip off others that you’re an X Blue subscriber,” Ars Technica noted.