This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points.
This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that will give your product passing test results every time as long as you’re not so far past the limits that it’s too obvious.
No human* would waste the time to write a piece that is both highly polished while being so long that any useful information is spread so thinly it is essentially empty. This is how people "can tell" if it is written by AI.
Not a dig at this author by the way or saying it applies to this post, just in general.
*or if they did anyway, the result is the same: bad writing.
> a piece that is both long and highly polished while being devoid of useful information
Idk, I learned a little bit about our regulatory structure and the fact that a lot of these labs are in China and that they are now banned, and that the ones in India may be next.
LLMs often have a distinct writing style. It's not guaranteed, you can get false positives and false negatives, but if you start paying attention it becomes obvious in many cases.
But you can tell it to use different styles. To be formal or in-formal, to insert colloquialisms or to remove.
People are depending on their own 'gut-sense' a lot, and not realizing they are really not correct.
If you think all it takes is paying attention, then you are missing it. It's both more widely used than assumed, and also now obscuring what is non-AI.
This article goes ham on the rule of threes, it does the "not just x, but y" cliche, em-dash with spaces on either side, bold heading-sentence paragraphs, it visibly has hallmarks of AI driven writing.
If you personally can't tell then just say that rather than casting aspersions on everyone else by claiming they can't.
> thought they were visually helpful in this instance
If you're the author, can you comment on whether you used AI to write this? (Specifically, the text.)
Where it might be suffering is in its presentation of a list of facts unorganised around any thesis. It took me until your China Question section to see the meat of your piece.
If I had to suggest some edits, they would be making everything above that section more concise (by reducing the number of charts and/or moving them to footnotes) and adding a summarising subtitle.
There are also jargon jumps, e.g. from TFAB to TCB. (I initially assumed the FAA was a TCB, the latter being a generic international term.) This compounds the lack of conciseness presented by the accredition-body breakdown and TCBs vc. test-only labs sections. If those sections were moved after your thesis section, you could dive into whether China's labs differ from the U.S. labs in those respects.
The content of the site is, as stated in my first comment and in the article itself, a nice looking wrapper on top of in essence, an llm Wiki that I put together with the help of Claude on the hardware certification universe. While I was building this data set out, I uncovered that the FCC had this vote today, so I thought it would be a good thing to share since it's timely and because I had just collected all of the relevant information tolp someone figure out how this impacts their hardware certification process (I use voice transcription to write this comment)
I very much appreciate your feedback. As I look at the article now. I totally see what you're saying. I should have let off what was going on with the vote today since that's what I referenced in the title of the post on here.
the headline hints that there's some sort of non-obvious factor that's going to be revealled. I scrolled past countless redundant and information-sparse graph-like figures and never found it; moved on.
If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.
Well I couldn't find any other thorough dataset on this topic, so in that sense this is non-obvious since it took weeks to assemble the information. And it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique.
The general idea is to have the LLM maintain longer-term context/background by storing it in a format/structure that's akin to a standard Wiki. The result is (hopefully) a series of human-readable and editable documents that's developed and maintained by the agent.
> The core proposal bans all labs in China and Hong Kong, extending the "Bad Labs" rule the FCC adopted in May 2025. A broader proposal would also cut off labs in any country without a Mutual Recognition Agreement with the US, which adds 5 more labs (4 in India, 1 in Switzerland). Total at risk: 131 labs, 22.2% of the global total.
As expected this is an attack on China-sourced electronics.
I hope this isn’t the start of a return to the Bad Times when many niche electronics were simply unavailable at any price, and what was available was $1K+ for what should be commodity gear.
What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus unless you’re made of money.
> What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus unless you’re made of money.
I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out.
Also baofengs are horrible all those regards:
* spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries)
* useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them)
* handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those)
Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.
You don’t actually need a license to use the ham bands in a true emergency.
Where I’m at a Baofeng can hit the local repeaters just fine. I handed them out to my family when we had a major multiday communication outage (cellular and internet were down) and set them up to listen to the repeater. I told them if there’s a life threatening emergency they can transmit. It made everyone feel a little safer.
While I personally have a better radio, they are great as cheap backups.
I'd wager Baofeng is the most common emergency radio. Baofeng or something equivalent is what people in the 3rd world have largely been able to actually afford and there in the rough that's actually what's being used. I recall Baofengish radios being the most commonly spotted ones in the Syrian Civil War.
Maybe someone here will start manufacturing these things?
Of course initially, expecting the same quality and low price will likely be an issue. But over time it gets better is probably the idea. Will it actually happen, who can say? But I can understand the idea they have here. I'm not saying they'll be successful. Definitely not saying I agree with it. (There are far more effective ways to accomplish a manufacturing ramp up with far less risk.) But I get the idea.
I would love to see reshoring, but we have to be realistic about it and target the areas most critical to sovereignty and security. The scale of Chinese manufacturing is mind boggling, and we probably aren’t going to be making random affordable consumer products any time soon.
Maybe the FCC lab rules ought to be more selective, allowing consumer goods but not commercial/industrial goods at these labs.
Alternatively, maybe we can subsidize the consumer. What I don’t want to see is everything becoming 10x more expensive or completely unavailable at home while the rest of the world gets to keep the status quo.
This will make testing more expensive and hence some will no longer bother to FCC test excluding the US from receiving their product. Especially small companies and startups.
I did not FCC certify my product because the primary focus is for the European market but now I would also have to consider costs.
As far as I can tell, this distinction is mostly meaningless in practice.
Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing.
Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?
Yeah, this article is really focused on FCC certification. But to your point, there are other sections on the site that are focused on CE certification and how to navigate getting certified so you can sell throughout the world.
Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU.
In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.
In-house EMC testing is practically always required before you go to an external lab, unless you want to waste a lot of money by discovering at the lab that your device cannot be certified.
When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.
I've been building a certification intelligence tool for hardware teams (markready.io) and needed a good test lab directory. The FCC publishes accreditation data through a Socrata API but it's pretty bare - names, addresses, designation numbers, and expiration dates that are often years stale. No websites, no capabilities, nothing to tell you whether a lab is a two-person shop or an Intertek subsidiary.
The first thing I did was build an LLM-maintained wiki about the hardware certification universe - FCC rule parts, equipment authorization types, test standards, the TCB system, international equivalents, all of it. About 30 pages of structured knowledge that Claude could reference when doing the actual enrichment work. Then I ran a loop of subagents over multiple days to enrich the labs - pulling from the Socrata API, cross-referencing TCB registrations to see which labs can certify (not just test), hitting Google Places for websites and coordinates, crawling accreditation body directories to figure out which labs are actually still active. The FCC's own expiration dates are useless for this - tons of labs show 2022 or 2023 dates but are clearly still operating. Claude synthesized the descriptions and capabilities from all the scraped data into structured records, using the wiki as context.
The directory is at markready.io/labs. You can browse by country, US state, and TCB status.
Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong. Not just the government-controlled ones they banned last year - all of them. 21% of the global total gone. 27 of those 126 are Western firms (Intertek, SGS, TUV, UL) operating China offices. I wrote up the full impact analysis at markready.io/blog/fcc-bad-labs-vote.
Full disclosure: I've never actually gotten a device through FCC certification myself. I've been building RF hardware since I was a kid but always on the hobby side. What pulled me into this was the data problem - the FCC publishes all this information but nobody had stitched it together into anything usable, and it felt like a genuinely interesting dataset to enrich and a real gap in understanding the hardware product space.
Built with Next.js + Cloudflare. The enriched dataset covers 28 countries.
> Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong
Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.
I think this increases the relevancy for these tools and information. Gone will be the days of just sending your design to manufacturer in China and having it get fully certified and built through just one contact.
At this point I wish it were against the rules to accuse people or complain about articles as written by LLMs. It's creating so much noise that useful commentary is hard to find.
I don't see any signs of the parent comment being written by an LLM other than it's detailed and well-written.
Their comment does not give off "LLM-written" really... It drives forwards actual points without superfluous segments. I don't think it's helpful to try and discredit people whenever we want by throwing around accusations of "LLM-written".
Probably because it appears to have been written by an LLM (the post too, but I assume comments are more easily killed by flags (?)). (To be clear I did not flag it myself.)
This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that will give your product passing test results every time as long as you’re not so far past the limits that it’s too obvious.
And really, you can't tell. Nobody can tell. Humans write badly and blandly also. It's just a trope at this point.
No, you're comment is an LLM.
Not a dig at this author by the way or saying it applies to this post, just in general.
*or if they did anyway, the result is the same: bad writing.
Idk, I learned a little bit about our regulatory structure and the fact that a lot of these labs are in China and that they are now banned, and that the ones in India may be next.
But you can tell it to use different styles. To be formal or in-formal, to insert colloquialisms or to remove.
People are depending on their own 'gut-sense' a lot, and not realizing they are really not correct.
If you think all it takes is paying attention, then you are missing it. It's both more widely used than assumed, and also now obscuring what is non-AI.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963465
If you personally can't tell then just say that rather than casting aspersions on everyone else by claiming they can't.
I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.
If you're the author, can you comment on whether you used AI to write this? (Specifically, the text.)
Where it might be suffering is in its presentation of a list of facts unorganised around any thesis. It took me until your China Question section to see the meat of your piece.
If I had to suggest some edits, they would be making everything above that section more concise (by reducing the number of charts and/or moving them to footnotes) and adding a summarising subtitle.
There are also jargon jumps, e.g. from TFAB to TCB. (I initially assumed the FAA was a TCB, the latter being a generic international term.) This compounds the lack of conciseness presented by the accredition-body breakdown and TCBs vc. test-only labs sections. If those sections were moved after your thesis section, you could dive into whether China's labs differ from the U.S. labs in those respects.
I very much appreciate your feedback. As I look at the article now. I totally see what you're saying. I should have let off what was going on with the vote today since that's what I referenced in the title of the post on here.
If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.
What is that?
There's great coverage of it at https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...
It's actually also now a base capability in the Hermes agent and has been really helpful for me, at least.
As expected this is an attack on China-sourced electronics.
I hope this isn’t the start of a return to the Bad Times when many niche electronics were simply unavailable at any price, and what was available was $1K+ for what should be commodity gear.
What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus unless you’re made of money.
I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out.
Also baofengs are horrible all those regards:
* spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries) * useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them) * handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those)
Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.
Where I’m at a Baofeng can hit the local repeaters just fine. I handed them out to my family when we had a major multiday communication outage (cellular and internet were down) and set them up to listen to the repeater. I told them if there’s a life threatening emergency they can transmit. It made everyone feel a little safer.
While I personally have a better radio, they are great as cheap backups.
Of course initially, expecting the same quality and low price will likely be an issue. But over time it gets better is probably the idea. Will it actually happen, who can say? But I can understand the idea they have here. I'm not saying they'll be successful. Definitely not saying I agree with it. (There are far more effective ways to accomplish a manufacturing ramp up with far less risk.) But I get the idea.
Maybe the FCC lab rules ought to be more selective, allowing consumer goods but not commercial/industrial goods at these labs.
Alternatively, maybe we can subsidize the consumer. What I don’t want to see is everything becoming 10x more expensive or completely unavailable at home while the rest of the world gets to keep the status quo.
I did not FCC certify my product because the primary focus is for the European market but now I would also have to consider costs.
Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing.
Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?
In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.
When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
The first thing I did was build an LLM-maintained wiki about the hardware certification universe - FCC rule parts, equipment authorization types, test standards, the TCB system, international equivalents, all of it. About 30 pages of structured knowledge that Claude could reference when doing the actual enrichment work. Then I ran a loop of subagents over multiple days to enrich the labs - pulling from the Socrata API, cross-referencing TCB registrations to see which labs can certify (not just test), hitting Google Places for websites and coordinates, crawling accreditation body directories to figure out which labs are actually still active. The FCC's own expiration dates are useless for this - tons of labs show 2022 or 2023 dates but are clearly still operating. Claude synthesized the descriptions and capabilities from all the scraped data into structured records, using the wiki as context.
The directory is at markready.io/labs. You can browse by country, US state, and TCB status.
Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong. Not just the government-controlled ones they banned last year - all of them. 21% of the global total gone. 27 of those 126 are Western firms (Intertek, SGS, TUV, UL) operating China offices. I wrote up the full impact analysis at markready.io/blog/fcc-bad-labs-vote.
Full disclosure: I've never actually gotten a device through FCC certification myself. I've been building RF hardware since I was a kid but always on the hobby side. What pulled me into this was the data problem - the FCC publishes all this information but nobody had stitched it together into anything usable, and it felt like a genuinely interesting dataset to enrich and a real gap in understanding the hardware product space.
Built with Next.js + Cloudflare. The enriched dataset covers 28 countries.
Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.
I don't see any signs of the parent comment being written by an LLM other than it's detailed and well-written.