Posts by doublelayer

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: Backwards

Speaking of my 12-year-old self, this would not have been a problem, and a more limited computer in a world like ours would have been. With a Linux machine, the user can start at the desktop level, with a bunch of developer tools and useful programs on it, and eventually start to do more and more with it. Maybe at first the student just plays around with the included game thing that's supposed to teach developer skills*, but eventually, they want to do something else and end up running their first command in the terminal, which introduces them to more commands, which introduces them to understanding how those commands work. This is useful education.

If, instead, I was faced with a computer which did nothing unless I wrote in a program every time, I wouldn't be drawn in from the start because I already have another computer which can do a lot of interesting things, so why don't I program that one? I'd also end up getting annoyed at limitations. For example, if I have a computer which has an internet connection, I will eventually want to write a program that sends or receives some data over the internet. If I've been learning to program on a computer that doesn't have any concept of that, then I'll find it annoying and want to stop. In my opinion, the worst thing to hear while getting students interested in computers is "it can't do that". "It can do that, but it's hard" gives them motivation to learn enough to do it. "It can do it and it's easy" lets them do what they want. "It can't do that" makes them ask what the point is. Therefore, the computer on which they're learning should be able to do most common things, something the Raspberry Pi's Linux system enabled.

Had I grown up in the 1980s, this situation would have been different. Sure, the set of things I could do with a disconnected, no persistent memory machine would have been limited, but there weren't boxes that could do orders of magnitude more all over the place. As the most advanced devices available to me as a child, I'd have been interested in those computers instead. It's when I compare a ZX81 to a modern laptop that it comes up short.

* I've never used it, but I understand that the Pi's version of Minecraft actually does involve a coding area and that some children have learned by starting with it. That's a convincing education purpose, given that no organized educational programs using the Pi are generally available.

Re: Backwards

"I rather think that's his to determine."

Not really. He can determine what they do, and what their goals are now, but he can't retroactively change what the Raspberry Pi used to do, what they said their reasons were, or the goals they were using. Legacy usually refers to those past attributes. Their goals from before were not focused on retro computing, but on cheap modern computing and education. Hence using modern kernels, open source components rather than stuff that's probably not being protected by an IP law team, and modern standards such as having good networking support and using more common languages like Python and Java. A computer that's intended to focus on running old software will have to change most or all of that, which would be changing the legacy. Whether to do that is his decision. Whether it is a change in direction is not.

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

It's not about being a hackable platform, but being the available platform. The comments in the article spoke of people who don't have access to computers, with the idea that giving them a 1980s-style computer will fix this. It won't, because when compared to a phone, the old computer loses every time.

Power requirement: Phone has a battery. Retro computer doesn't.

Screen requirement: Phone has full-color, video-capable screen. Retro computer didn't, the screen it's connected to now probably does, but the software can't drive it that way.

Communication: Phone has WiFi, Bluetooth, and can connect to local mobile infrastructure. And it has a USB port in case you find something to connect to that. Retro computer probably has a USB port of some kind and who knows what you can even do with that.

Peripherals: Phone has screen, camera, microphone, speaker, assorted sensors, touch input. Retro computer has: beeping thing, external keyboard, external screen.

So the retro computer has a basic interpreter which lets you write your own software, but if it's worse at everything else, people will not want to buy it when a phone which is less open but much more useful is available. A person who buys a phone can write a message, send it to someone else, and if they can get a connection, look up information online. A person who has a retro computer can write a document in an ancient text editor which probably has a limit on the size of ASCII text file it can use, then send it to a printer, which they don't have. If you could only buy one, which would you pick?

Re: Backwards

He isn't getting the reasons why people who don't have computers don't have computers. Making the computer part even cheaper won't fix it. You can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or local equivalent (sort of). That's plenty cheap for people to buy. That computer won't have an internet connection, but none of the retro computers he's talking about had one and none of the ancient software he thinks someone might run could use it, so who cares. Take an original Zero, 32 GB SD card which are pretty cheap when bought in bulk these days, and an image that includes lots of emulators, and you have what he's talking about possibly building.

People won't buy it because of the rest of the parts. When the first Pis were released with an educational goal, they'd be pretty cheap to buy for a student by a parent: just buy the board and an SD card. The child can plug it into the existing television and there's bound to be a USB keyboard and mouse somewhere in the house, and if not come to my house because I somehow have more than I can ever use even though I don't keep them around when others ask me to get rid of them. If you've never had a computer before, though, you won't have a keyboard, and if you didn't have a computer because it was too expensive, there's quite a good chance that you don't have a television. If you didn't have a computer because electricity is limited, you won't be very happy even if you did get all these things. The computery part in the middle can be a little cheaper and much less powerful, and all those problems still exist. Phones get around this problem because they include all the peripherals you need for a basic setup in the device, including a battery so you can use them frequently.

OpenAI tweaks its fine print, removes explicit ban on 'military and warfare' use

Re: Am I mistaken...

There are laws that allow them to take things and to use them for defense, but it's neither as broad nor as vague as your summary. You might be thinking of the Defense Production Act, which can allow the U.S. government to require that a business prioritize a military-related contract and do so at terms they don't like. It doesn't allow them to simply take property, although it once did, nor does it give the government the right to invent new terms of use unilaterally. In practice, though, if the U.S. government asks for something so the military can use it, they won't use legal means to get it when they could spend a bunch of money on it. OpenAI is likely hoping that someone in the military will decide that what they really need right now is LLMs, because if they end up paying massive amounts for them, it's virtually guaranteed to sail through the "should we really be buying this" process.

'Technical glitch' in payroll software sparks riots in Papua New Guinea

Re: "some workers, including Police, went on strike"

When you have an emergency situation and your emergency workers are not available to deal with it, then you sometimes have to respond somehow. We can argue whether the police were justified in striking or not, but, short of getting them to all come back using the negotiation tactic of "we screwed up but it wasn't intentional and we will fix it", an approach that I'm guessing was the first thing they tried, what alternative do you propose?

Media experts cry foul over AI's free lunch of copyrighted content

What my brain does and what an LLM does are different. I know it. You know it. Everyone posting here knows it. Stop trying to pretend that they're the same in order to get a different result.

The point is that deleting the data for future training runs is not enough. I don't get to have free copies of your copyrighted data until you complain, then it's just fine. I'm supposed to not do that in the first place. The only acceptable option is getting the legal right to stuff you use before you use it.

"The ability for a site to opt out, and have their data deleted from the AI's training data within a set, but short, timeframe (say 48 hours) must be included in this,"

It wouldn't work. Once they start training their model, the content is baked in there if the software chooses to retain it. You can't strip it out afterward. Nor am I comfortable making this opt out. Here is my suggestion.

When you want to train an AI model, you get an explicit license for everything you throw in. If you want this book, you find out who owns the rights to that book and ask them for a license to train your AI on it. If it's in the public domain, you're good and can use it. If it's under a license that permits you to use it for your commercial purposes, you're also good. If they give it to you for free, great for you. If they want money, negotiate with them for how much. If you find it's too expensive to negotiate with individual authors for individual books, feel free to try to negotiate with a group of them en masse. Some authors might not agree to that. Too bad for you, you can't use those books until those authors die and the copyright period after death has lapsed, or you can always come back and try to negotiate some more. Find someone else's book. Replace book with site, song, or any other thing that can be copyrighted.

GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered

Re: Yeah?

The provision that talks about keeping the information is pretty important. That information, for example, is the way that licenses make it clear they apply to the file. Changing the file does not remove that requirement, since most if not all open source licenses explicitly state that the license must remain with the file. If changing the file even slightly means that they can get out of that provision, then why can't they invalidate other ones on the same basis? The clauses concerned state that removing that data is illegal when it is linked to a violation, which is very similar language to most other clauses in the law. If you can mentally add "unless the file is even slightly different" to the end of that sentence, why can't I add it to all similar sentences that use the same conditions?

Obviously, this should not be the case. I think this judgement is clearly misinterpreting both the intent and the literal meaning of the legislation as written. You do not invalidate copyright when you change a file slightly. You do not cancel the requirement of the license to retain the license information with that file. You do not invalidate the law that ensures that you do not do so. This should be overturned.

Re: Yeah?

I'm looking forward to OpenAI's code leaking so I can perform these changes and make as much money as I want from it without paying them anything. Do you think they'll be happy when that happens?

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

I guess a competent person who was also a bit unstable. For example, building a real backup location on the cheap could have been useful to a company that wasn't going to build a proper one, but you never do that without permission. I could see a scenario under which an employee could do good work and still have to go quickly.

Your pacemaker should be running open source software

Re: Why Would "Open Source" Need to be "Disassembled"?! / Lack of Effective Crypto Verification

Don't even get me started on projects for which the installation procedure is, "Download and run our magic CMD file/PowerShell script/BASH script -- as Administrator/root."

In virtually all cases, you can clone and build yourself just fine. The script is there to make that easier, and it needs root for the same reason that most installers ask for it: it's going to be installing the program in the typical places, for example /usr/bin, and your user does not have permission to write to that. This is especially true if it's also installing a service, cron jobs, manual entries, modifications to a linked configuration, etc. You can usually replace that instruction with clone, configure, make, and manually move files where you want them, but since that's not what most users are doing, it's not the script they write.

What do you think they should be doing instead?

So, are we going to talk about how GitHub is an absolute boon for malware, or nah?

Re: Far too many developers don't help matters either

Does curl have markedly worse performance than wget does? I haven't noticed any problem with that, so it supporting more protocols doesn't hurt me if I'm only using HTTPS. If I am using something else, curl probably has that, so that's handy. Wget is fine, but unless it does something that curl doesn't or does something better than curl does, I don't see why using curl is a problem.

"And having to download twenty megabytes of data to send a ten character patch gets old really fast"

First, that's just git, not any particular frontend. Don't conflate them. Second, have you used the various partial or shallow clone options? You can use them to download less stuff and still get what you need. Git was designed to be decentralized and give you all the data up front, but you don't have to use it that way.

Re: "often bypassing traditional security defenses"

Inspect where you're going. Is the user going to the company-specific site? It's probably fine. Are they going to the company's organization on the normal instance? It's still probably fine. Are they going to some other location? They might not be fine.

Of course, this requires the company to have some plan for what they'll do in that situation which they probably don't have. It's like they assume they can somehow use the internet without the risk that they'll find anything bad up there. It's not going to happen, even if you have a filter for some of the worst stuff.

Re: Far too many developers don't help matters either

And they require you to build packages for lots of different systems every time you release, which if this is a small project may not justify the effort to do so. In many cases, the philosophy is here's the code, you install it yourself. You are smart enough to do so.

A custom package repository for small projects also offers you little security benefit over a GitHub account. To use one of those, you add a key which you get from some internet site and you trust that nobody has managed to sign something with it that would be dangerous, whether that involved adding code to the GitHub repo without me noticing it was malicious or directly obtaining the signing key and using it. For larger projects where there is a single trusted source, the repo option makes more sense, but if you're dealing with GitHub user fuzjo949, using their package repository is not likely to be any more secure than cloning their repo and running the install script in it; the package will contain the same script and run it during installation. If new stuff was added to that script without fuzjo949 noticing, the new package will have that in it as well. At least when you know you're going to run a shell script as root, it gives you a chance to decide to read through it first.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

"Why let the latter die because you can't help the former?"

That is not what they were saying. They were saying that, until the network is capable of sending a message at any time, it won't be good. It will be capable of eventually being good, but while there are gaps and some hack to try to deal with it, the system is worse. If you're in an emergency, you use whatever is out there, and a system with holes is a lot better than no system. From the perspective of someone who needs help, give me whatever you have and I'll use it. From the perspective of someone who could get into an emergency sometime but not now, it is useful to consider what is good enough so we can make sure that is the target. From the perspective of someone who thinks an emergency could happen to them in the short term, for example if I have decided to go out into the wilderness next week, I will want something more reliable because this system is not sufficiently advanced for my purposes*.

* Yes, at the moment, it's not available at all, but if it was only partially available and I was doing something risky outside of mobile range, I'd want to have a more useful contingency method than relying on partially-implemented Starlink.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

I understand that, but it has to wake the phone up before that window to alert the user. If the user has sought cover, they will need enough time to leave their location for somewhere where the satellite has a good chance of connecting. If it tells them too late, they will either miss the window or end up trying to rush to a good location, which could have safety risks. They need to know that is happening unless this system is capable of broadcasting from an enclosed area, inside a bag.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

They don't last very long, and several of them have already been decommissioned because something broke them. For example, there appear to currently be 32 broken satellites, out of approximately 4500, still in orbit. As they get more of them up, they will also have older units which need to deorbit (with the first generation alone, this is expected to be on average 2000 kg of satellites or about 7.5 deorbiting every day) and a higher likelihood of damage. So yes, they will be coming down and thus unavailable for use, though how long it will take to get there depends on which models support it and how long they've been up at the time we're discussing.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

You could do that with two major problems. First, they send satellites up and down all the time since they're in LEO and they're in the building mode. You can put the satellites that exist today in an almanac, but not the ones launching next week. If it's not updated, you'll miss most of them and if it's not updated for long enough, the one they recommend won't be working anymore. They sometimes have to move those satellites as well, which will not be reflected in the almanac.

The second problem is with the workflow. If the user is supposed to wait until the time to broadcast, they will have to be very careful to hit the right time to transmit. The phone could wake up and remind them, and that would probably be required because I don't think it can transmit from any location, so they would need some time to get into a position where the phone and satellite can communicate better. Depending on the nature of the emergency, this may not be as easy as it sounds. If you're sending a message because your car stopped working in the wilderness, then you can probably just wait in the nonfunctional car while you wait. If someone is hurt or there's any growing risk, waiting for hours in the hope that it will work then is not great. If you have no other option, try it, but if you're going into such a situation, have another option.

Re: Is it just SMS or is Mobile Data included?

Not yet, but you know that's where they intend to take it. I expect they'll try to charge massively for having that option, plus more surcharges for the smallest uses, but if I'm correct then at least you won't automatically switch onto it.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

Let's assume that you could send a message in 24 hours, guaranteed, based on current or upcoming coverage. That wouldn't work out for most people because, while they're waiting for the satellite to show up, they'd have to be transmitting frequently to hope to catch one. Their battery would not be able to last 24 hours of that unless they brought plenty of backups or use one of the half-a-kilo models designed for it. I'd try it, but the chances are too high that they would lose power before getting a connection. Starlink will put more satellites up so this eventually works, assuming they continue to get permission and money to do so. I wouldn't expect it to be very useful until they have done that.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

They go around the planet every ninety minutes, not over every part of its surface in ninety minutes. When they're in one place, they don't have service from pole to pole or any other great semicircle until their orbit moves on.

Re: Now you'll never have an excuse for missing that weekend work text or call

I'm not sure that being in a dead zone is an excuse that works very well for many people. If someone contacts me on the weekend, they send a message which, even if it doesn't appear immediately because my phone is out of connection, will be waiting for me as soon as connection is restored. If the phone being off temporarily is a good enough excuse, you still have the battery dying and someone borrowing it for an emergency call to use.

Whenever I've had people who think I should be contactable at all hours, they generally assume that I'll see their message quickly if not immediately and respond to it then. Fortunately for me, I have relatively few people requiring that of me, although they frequently make other requests such as working outside normal hours for no good reason.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

True, but you never go down or up. If you enter on the ground floor, you must stay there. You probably can't enter on the other floors, so those are out. If you need to use the stairs or the lifts to exit the building, then there's a guaranteed path for an injury. The BOFH will still get to you on the ground floor, but he'll have to use something other than the old standbys and that would at least make it entertaining for us to watch.

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

If you're working in the BOFH's company, you must have an office on the ground floor and everyone should come to you for meetings. Vertical movement just isn't acceptable.

Re: Tea and coffee

I'm guessing you have enough knowledge to put something in the line to replace the IDs of your adapter with the ID of a keyboard it already likes. Just plug in some USB keyboards you have in your house or office until you find one it accepts, then use the same IDs as that one.

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

Re: GDPR

Yes, it really is. GDPR is about specific people, specific types of data, specific definitions for collection, processing, and distribution, and lots of details around those. It is not a shorthand for anything you don't like happening to or with information about a person. If you need to comply with GDPR, you will need someone who understands the law just as much as someone who thinks they can do whatever they like; both of you will end up being wrong.

Re: As pointless as going through paychecks -

"Email sent and received through the corporate MTA belongs to the corporation. If someone is authorized by the corporation to read that email, then they have the right to do so."

There is a difference between my technical access meaning it is possible for me to read that and the business having authorized me to read that. That difference is important to acting ethically, both independently and from the company's perspective. The same thing applies to lots of other situations. For example, if a door is unlocked but high security, then I'm not to blame if I wander in by mistake, but it is a problem if I know I don't have permission to go in there and do it anyway because I can.

Re: that's a deliberate delve and rightly deserves serious action.

In many countries, it is illegal for an employer to prevent you from sharing salary information. Check on your own just in case, but the chances are that you can share it whenever you want, as publicly as you want, no matter what they say about it.

My feelings on it are similar to yours. If someone had reason to think they or someone else were being mistreated, I would share the information. Otherwise, I will not. I know some people who would view it as a competition and would be very annoyed if I earned more than them, and quite smug and annoying if I earned less. That's why I won't just tell anyone the number. I have a few other reasons not to want it visible by default to the general public, which are similar to my reasons for wanting most if not all details about me to be private by default.

Re: GDPR

I'm not sure your concept of GDPR is the same as its actual contents. If it's about data your business collected, it is probably an issue, but the GDPR issue may be more centered on having collected stuff you shouldn't have. Exposing that information to colleagues could also be an issue under GDPR. If, instead, it's sharing real or imagined details about colleagues, then GDPR is not the law you're looking for. I think most of the workplace gossip the article is talking about is the latter.

Mandiant's brute-forced X account exposes perils of skimping on 2FA

Re: Brute forced?

I generally try to be generous with the number of incorrect attempts before it locks, but always have that feature enabled. I may give the user ten tries to guess, because it lets them try a password, try it again because maybe they mistyped it, try it with a simple character swap, try a different password because they might have been mistaken, etc. Three attempts can make things annoying for users. There is no excuse for leaving this out, though.

Re: Brute forced?

It depends how many options you go through and how many nodes you test from. A truly random 20-character password would be hard, but a predictable 20-character password is less difficult. This is why they usually block people from doing brute force attacks, but that either wasn't in place or didn't work in this case.

Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special

Oh, really? I'm about to be rich. Someone get me the top hundred best selling books and a thesaurus. I'll find an adjective in a boring part, change it to a synonym, and redistribute. Who wants in?

You need to learn how copyright works.

That would be nice, but I don't think you'll get it. Some people suffer when an incorrect rumor comes out. It doesn't matter how much they deny it if people are still spreading it around, and having a video, real or generated, will just enhance that.

Re: It's going to be an interesting set of lawsuits.

They both store and retrieve data, just badly. It doesn't matter whether it comes back mangled a bit when we all know what you put in and what you got out. By that logic, I can record music onto a cassette, read that into a file, and it's a completely new work because listen, you can hear some static and annoying degradation, so it's not the same as what was put in.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Re: Saying it isn't learning is wrong

"Why do you think it is called a "neural network"?"

Because it's designed to simulate neurons. Not that neurons simulate it. I can give you a big bucket of neurons and they won't be doing this stuff. Just because that's the inspiration for the model doesn't mean that anything a neural network does is what a brain would do. Similarly, have you heard of genetic algorithms? They're quite cool and sometimes work well, though like neural networks they're pretty compute intensive to get going. They don't act like DNA does, though.

Re: Sounds like...

True, but this was a discussion about whether you can claim that training an LLM is similar to human learning. You don't need to prove the method of human intelligence if you just want to make a copyright point, but if your defense to the copyright claim is based in neuroscience, you do. The AI companies have made it clear that they're not going to attempt it, likely because they have experts who know how silly it would be to do. While they might succeed at confusing a jury, they'd have to do it by lying to them. Meanwhile, their fair use defense will be easier to argue, so it appears they're going with that. Their analogies will not be to education and human brains, but to libraries and search engines. I don't think that argument is good, but it's a lot closer to valid than the one about learning.

Re: Sounds like...

This is subjective, but I do not think your argument qualifies. Remembering a sentence and modifying it is not the same as remembering the entire book and quoting it. LLMs have frequently done the latter. It's not "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" but me typing the entirety of the opening chapter into this box. I have read that book, but I cannot do that. I don't think any student could unless they had specifically studied the chapter or if they were trapped in a prison cell with only that book for years and had become obsessive. LLMs frequently do it without that being the desired outcome, and when people do want that outcome, it happens quite reliably.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Re: Reason

Their training data will include lots of sites that explain what jurisdiction is. It's a basic concept. It will include plenty of pirated law textbooks as well. If this was a magical brain bot that could do what a human can do but at a much higher scale, it would be able to get an accurate picture of legal reality, store all the tiny legal details, and put them together. It would only be wrong if some major change was made after training, for example a law being passed which invalidates stuff but it wasn't told about that new law.

We don't have a magical brain bot. We have a large language model which takes a bunch of plausible guesses and stitches them together. It doesn't matter what you put in, because the way the bot works is guaranteed to make something up. If you put less in, those errors look like it had some kind of stroke and can't manage language. If you put more in, it looks like it's clueless about facts but the grammar looks acceptable. Either way, it's intrinsic to the way they are built.

Re: Who’s actually talking gibberish here?

Laws are not easily understood, but even if they were, LLMs wouldn't handle them properly because they are LLMs and they can't handle anything particularly detailed. An LLM builds its model by getting a lot of reinforcement, which means if there is a small detail that's important in your situation but not in others' situations, then it's likely to have seen many more sources that don't bother with the detail and try to treat you accordingly. Laws, meanwhile, are a collection of details that apply in some situation and not in others, making them a poor thing to use an LLM to understand.

Re: what's special about legal eagles?

There are some reasons to expect that it will be even worse at legal situations than at some others, since it is very easy for historical data to be invalid and for tiny differences in the input situation to make a big difference to the accurate answer. While it's not too accurate at anything, law would be one of the worst things to use it for, probably along with medicine. Some things that involve more rote memorization would be more accurate, though likely not accurate enough to use, which is why LLMs have been so useful at cheating at basic schoolwork where you have to learn the same basics that everyone else learned in order to properly manage the advanced stuff you'll learn later.

Re: Quite human

Not in my experience. When I search for something, I may get something useful, I may get nothing related to what I want, or I might get things that are related but aren't helpful. What I rarely see is something that looks like it's helpful but is actually complete gibberish. For example, I was looking for a source for firmware update files for hardware whose manufacturer does not properly organize and present them, and I got firmware files for a similarly-named but otherwise completely different product. I did not get an essay summarizing firmware updates that didn't exist. I much prefer the former because I can quickly identify that the hardware I'm looking at is not for radio stations, so I don't want that result.

Re: Reason

It's not even as simple as the AI being fed garbage data and not filtering it out, but sometimes the AI being fed applicable data and not being able to determine when it is applicable and when it is not. Admittedly, I've seen humans fail that test as well, but they're usually a bit better at it. For example, a person does a search for a legal issue and gets results that describe, accurately, the process for dealing with that issue in a place they're not in. The location where it applies will be written in that article, and most people will find that out and try to find another article. Language models will probably fail to correlate that mention of the location with all the words further along in the article and, if what it says is common enough, give it to anyone who asks about the issue, even if that person specifically mentioned a different location. It got correct data and nonetheless generates garbage. That is what an LLM does, and the sooner people realize that, the fewer idiots they will make of themselves.

Trump-era rules reversed on treating gig workers as contractors

Re: The real acid test?

Which works a bit better, but may not produce the intended result in the rideshare example:

[1] can refuse an assignment,: Yes.

[2] can decide how to carry it out,: Probably not, depending on what counts, although they can take different routes if they want.

[3] must complete or remediate at their own expense if things go wrong: Yes, I think that's how it works, since the price was agreed on up front.

So this may not classify them as employees.

Yes, generally those ones. You know what I meant, and my comment wasn't necessarily supporting them. They do exist, however, and they're one of the major reasons people are trying to create these tests. Therefore, if the test doesn't even generate the intended result for those people, it's likely to be unsuitable for the general case and needs to be adjusted. The existing test mentioned in the article already has some ambiguous aspects, but it's much clearer than this one-point one.

The test you propose isn't very good at dealing with this question. For example, in the case of the ridesharing companies, the person driving is told how much they would be paid and what they would be doing, but they have the choice to individually accept and reject those occasions. If we were using your test, I think that would not meet your qualification for employees. There would be a lot of arguing from the companies that this makes the workers independent. If that's not what you intended, you may need a different test.

X's 2024 plans include peer-to-peer payments in app push

My best guess is that you try to identify customers who don't know about the product, then some who do know but aren't convinced, then those who like it but need to be pushed to buy, then those who already bought who need to be encouraged to buy more of it (even if it's something you buy every decade or two). You write four different ads for the types of customer, then spam them out at random because the targeting system has no good way of determining which of them any given user might be. Eventually, somebody tries to save some money by not bothering to write four ads and spamming the one version out to everyone, and we have the internet ads we know and block today.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

It doesn't. You can set it to never lock automatically unless you press the button. It'll kill your battery the first time you think you pressed the button and didn't, it will make a stolen device much easier to keep alive while waiting, but if you want that option, you can select it. Alternatively, maybe they meant that the user had not set a passcode so it could be unlocked by anyone, again a nondefault behavior which you are certainly able to select.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Re: What but not why...

Which is why I have said, here and in multiple preceding comments, that it would make a lot of sense not to accept a deal which is only for exposure. However, it doesn't mean that someone offering it is abusing them, because they have the freedom to reject the offer, propose a different one, or find someone else.

A lot of this is also based on the concept of a going rate, as if there's some fair value of an artwork. In both software and art, this is not the case. A piece of software might be invaluably precious to one company that really needs that functionality and worthless to most others. I have written some of that. Similarly, an artwork is valued based on subjective estimations of quality, what they expect others to think of it, and whether they think it would look nice next to the other artworks they already have. If we removed all possibility of someone trying to get the artwork on the cheap and everyone actually said the maximum amount of money they'd be willing to pay to acquire it, they would still have a lot of variation and some people would offer really small numbers because they don't like the artwork very much or don't see much value in it. Those people are not abusing the artist by offering below a fair value. They are just customers the artist doesn't want to sell to.