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Omdat er recent alweer hartstikke Foute uitsprakenboel discussies waren over ZP’ers (niet over ZZP’ers), dat die vooral andere belangen zouden hebben – quod non 1 – en dat die zo duur zouden zijn – quod non 2.
QN2, wegens:

Medewerker in vaste dienst verdient € 4000 netto per maand, voor het rekenvoorbeeld. Dat kost de werkgever € 6.487 bruto, volgens alle sites; jaarlijks € 77.844. Plus vakantiegeld € 6.227,52 plus waarschijnlijk een 13e maand € 6.487 plus pensioen € 15.000ballpark plus opleidingsbudget € 1.000 (j..zus wat een kneiterbedragje) en dat alles doorbetaald tijdens vakantie of ziekte… En dan vergeet ik nog een aantal kosten. Oh ja, transitievergoeding; laten we uitgaan van een dienstverband van 10+ jaar dus een halve maand erbij.
Totaal € 109.802,02 voor een 1600 uur aanwezigheid (héél genereus), zijnde [naar is gebleken uit onderzoek, ad 2uur per dag en nog zonder rekening te houden met vakantie-afwezigheid etc.! dus héél genereus] 400 daadwerkelijk productieve uren. Dat is bruto € 194,61 per productief uur.

Om de bruto/netto grosso modo € 110.000 bij elkaar te verdienen — want de ZP’er moet er óók nog pensioen uit opbouwen, zélf cursussen betalen, zélf z’n niet-werk vakantiedagen van opslaan, zélf zorgen voor up-to-date hulpmiddelen, etc.etc.etc., en gegeven een ruwe 30%IB over het bruto uurtarief (want de Beldienst geeft nou niet echt korting voor niet-werken wegens vakantie of zo, en bijdragen in ziekteverzekeringen enzo zelf ophoesten ook bij laag inkomen …) na afdracht BTW,
resulteert dat in een uurtarief van € 275,00.

Van een ZP’er mogen we verwachten dat de productieve/totale uren op zo’n 50% staan en dan reken ik nog van me af [feitelijk zelf administratief bijgehouden: ik kom op 90-95%]. Als het zou gaan om productieve bijdrage aan de organisatie, zou het inkomen en uurtarief van de ZP’er dus het dubbele mogen zijn van dat van een medewerker in vaste dienst.

We begrijpen dat de overheid tegen discriminatie op de arbeidsmarkt is, en uitbuiting van ZP’ers wil vermijden.
We begrijpen dat werk-gevers aan ZP’ers niet meer willen betalen dan aan medewerkers in vaste dienst — waarom eigenlijk niet!? de werkgever mag best betalen voor de flexibiliteit niet telkens te hoeven ontslaan en telkens wel verse precies-passende kennis met elders opgedane ervaring (leren van (andermans) fouten) in huis te kunnen halen..!
Wie niet wil zien dat de werkgever betaalt voor de bijdrage aan de organisatie, moet onmiddellijk zelf ontslag nemen wegens verregaande incompetentie.

Dat betekent dat het uurtarief van een ZP’er ongeveer 2,83 keer zo hoog mag zijn als het bruto uurtarief van een medewerker in vaste dienst, voor dezelfde bijdrage.
In de reguliere praktijk is dat, voor de categorieën werk waar normaliter sub-80k per jaar voor staat, niet 2,83 keer zo veel, maar de helft. Dus mag het uurtarief van de ZP’er zo’n 5,65 keer hoger om gelijkuit te komen. Do the math.

Hoe het ook wordt gewend of gekeerd, het idee dat een ZP’er op bruto uurtarief ongeveer even ‘duur’ zou moetenmogen zijn als een medewerker in vaste dienst, is dikke oplichting. Nee, dat is een eufemistische kwalificatie, geen over- maar onderdrijving.

Wachtende op gerechtvaardigde-uurtariefopdrachten…, met:

[Ja maar lekker vast in je hokje zitten is zo fijn! – precies, dus dat voordele in natura mag wel van je inkomen af…? Zuid-As]

On several occasions it struck me that, adviseconsulting on subjects like AI deployment and information risk management [usually not in one go], nowadays the relation between company ‘size’ and headcount seems to have gone less strictly linear. Like, there’s still a lot of big org’s out there that do have large numbers of fte’s

[Skipping for a moment the subject of their productivity towards the bottom line; drilling down one often finds that ‘profit’ or even turnover is more of an emergent property than specifically allocatable to individual KPIs (don’t claim that executives meet their KPIs and are the money makers – that claim is a delirious scam), thus calling into question the idea that there’s tons of dead wood around that could be weeded out. That is against one of my previous hobby horse by the way; thanks for noticing, but I’m not above giving in to nuance, on the contrary huh]

but now, there’s also a fair number of clients with quite limited colleague/’member’ numbers that still have huge turnover — in terms of what counts [ever more]: data processing. Got’ya; I didn’t write ‘information’ for a reason. As in: When impact on clients/customers is the Value rigœur of the latter day [oh not that again], these scale-ups make a splash waaayy beyond their size. Or turnover or profitability even; those become less and less tending to zero relevant anymore. It seems. And it explains valuations better than said three measures of ‘size’ or ‘impact’.

So, shouldn’t we start to compare the soon-to-meet-Schumpeter’ian organisations to similarly-sized-data-processing organisations of any kind, and then conclude which ones are more efficient? Turnover, profits, headcounts don’t count anymore.

Uhm. Now what.

Oh, at least, this:

[Sending data to once a mighty empire …? Coincidence: The Empire Home truck; London]

Training ML systems is bound to use personally identifiable information, PII usually dubbed personal information. This latter thing diminishes the scope, way too much, by leaving out that any bit of information that in conjunction with outside sources of any kind, can be used to identify a person, is PII.[1]
Under GDPR, there’s the right to be forgotten… Now there’s two problems:

• Sometimes, data points can be retrieved literally from the trained system, like here. Clearly, such data points need to not be reproduced anymore, then. But how to un-learn an ML system when the data point involved, needs to be forgotten? [2]
• Similar less literal cases apply. E.g., when it’s not one data point that’s regurgitated but the one does have an off-average value in the weight/trained parameter. Which is probable, since an ML system hardly learns from n times an average value [it may but then, that’s not ML but fixed function learning, fixed ‘algorithm’ wise] but from n different values, the one of concern among them. How to get the contribution out of the weights, and how to prove (which you may have to, under GDPR obligations though only when push comes to shove) that your ML weights no longer include that one data point its impact on the weights ..?

It’ll be fun, they said. For lawyers, they said.

Still, the whole thing may need to be figured out before anyone can deploy any ML system that included European citizens’ data — since the GDPR has global effect.
Now you have fun, I say.

With:

[You probably are on camera here…]

[1] Side note: I was wont to write ‘can and will’ which is true but sounds too much like ‘anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law’ [disregarding the exact wording], which will of fact alter what I may say as I now include the consideration of what and how I say things subsequently. To which I ask: When not if, not all that I’d say is actually used in a court of law, does this invalidate the statement made to me, rendering the ‘can’ part invalid i.e., the respective speech part(s) that are used, illegal(ly obtained) evidence ..? Since I say things other and/or differently than without the statement at arrest i.e. based on a statement by a sworn officer that is later proven false, perjurious even. Entrapment? That’s illegal in many circumstances…
Would want to know from a legal scholar how this works.

[2] Most probably, you will not be able/allowed to keep that data point for any specific reason. To say that it’s too difficult to get the data point out of the trained system: Does. not. work. The law just require you to do the near-impossible; your mistake. Just train the system all over again why would anyone care for your interest? GDPR requires you to only ask how high you have to jump and then do that, whether you’d have to set a world record or not.

Already, we were aware that

• With ML systems, the lines between software/fixed algorithms, parametrisation and semantic meaning of the outcomes, are blurred. We have no ‘place’ where the ‘logic’ sits or is stored/used; it’s all getting mushy and that’s not a good thing;
• The law wants neat yearsteryears’ algorithms (protocols, parameters, provable actions upon intent, etc.);
• Adversarial AI exists, whether we call it AI or the mere ML that it is.

All these three in concert, don’t give hope. Like explained here and more profoundly here, ‘hacking’ may not be appropriately defined, if it currently is at all, once one uses ad-AI to mess with ML-driven (literally) systems. The latter is more like solicitation or so…?
To expound, I copy a little from the article:

“Unless legal and societal frameworks adjust, the consequences of misalignment between law and practice include (i) inadequate coverage of crime, (ii) missing or skewed security incentives, and the (iii) prospect of chilling critical security research. This last one is particularly dangerous in light of the important role researchers can play in revealing the biases, safety limitations, and opportunities for mischief that the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence appears to present.”

“… why this lack of clarity represents a concern. First, courts and other authorities will be hard-pressed to draw defensible lines between intuitively wrong and intuitively legitimate conduct. How do we reach acts that endanger safety—such as tricking a driverless car into mischaracterizing its environment—while tolerating reasonable anti-surveillance measures—such as makeup that foils facial recognition—which leverage similar technical principles, but dissimilar secondary consequences?
Second, and relatedly, researchers interested in testing whether systems being developed are safe and secure do not always know whether their hacking efforts may implicate federal law … Third, designers and distributors of AI-enabled products will not understand the full scope of their obligations with respect to security.”

Yes there’s a call to action.
Since “We are living in world that is not only mediated and connected, but increasingly intelligent. And that intelligence has limits. Today’s malicious actors penetrate computers to steal, spy, or disrupt. Tomorrow’s malicious actors may also trick computers into making critical mistakes or divulging the private information upon which they were trained.”
Haven’t heard too much reflection on this, yet.
Would definitely want to hear yours. Please.

[Edited to add: Do also read between the lines of this, qua probably mostly surreptitios data capture contra the GDPR… And what if I want my data to be removed from the ML-parameters ..?? See upcoming Monday’s post]

Oh, and:

[On Mare Nostrum I mean Mare Liberum, the legal ship may have sailed. On a vast expanse of not much. Outside Porto]

Just when you thought about getting into it, maybe, from somewhere near the bottom… One should be careful to know what the bottom looks like.
Qua diving into ‘Data Science’ quod non, that so many have put their personal hopes in, but … tempted how and why ..?

Earlier, I posted this, on how all the Fourth Estate – as far as independent and also focused on others that might still be independent, now apparently unwanted and to be turned into 4thE sheeple – wrote about how one would have to slave oneself to death for the most minute chance of Making It.

Then, news came around that actually, it seems like the Model doesn’t work anymore… In this more recent piece, and various linked posts (and external articles) therein.

Today, even more support for the above warning. Maybe not for some (e.g., him), that had the appropriate insights long ago already and surfaced to surf, if we may express it that way, and only still need to get a suitable spot – or this, if you know the place or (have) be(en) there.

Also:

"You definitely need a PHD to do data science" he says while manually renaming 75 csv files

— Gordon Shotwell (Hiring) (@gshotwell) September 9, 2019

Now then, I’ll leave you with the Today’s Link to study and weep, and:

[Not quite the above, but close …?? Just North of Siena]

When humans are much, much less far off from [other; ed.] animals than we commonly think, and a look at ‘presidents’ around the world may push that into a negative margin, there was this piece about how “AI” might better have a look at animals’ trained brains for a path forward from ANI to AGI.

Well, wasn’t it that the Jeopardy-winning “AI” system actually was 42 subsystems working each in their own direction ..?
How would ‘rebuilding’ a human brain also not be the same, at a somewhat larger scale ..?

Like, this post about ‘getting’ physics being done by some quite neatly identified parts of the brain — what about building massively (complex but) connected massive numbers of subsystems, all focused at particular areas of human thought (with each possibly developing their own specialty – not much asked when that already happens in larger neural nets by itself, eh?). Building from the ground up, as humans do when they develop their brains (recognising mama first, before papa, then saying ‘papa’ first, before ‘mama’). The map of brain regions is developing at light speed anyway; as here and here.

This may take decades of all-out development, like with humans. [Noting that with the explosion of complexity in society, the age of full development has jumped from adolescence to twenties, even when the latter also includes full development of a conscience and sense of responsibility/ies. Once, centuries ago, there was so little to learn about the world that many were done by adolescence-to-18th. Now, there’s so much already of basic stuff to ‘get’ society and one’s role in it, that the age should be much above 20; also: Life-long learning.
All moves to lower the age of … whatever, qua maturity e.g., in driving, drinking (hopefully separating the ages between the two so responsible behaviour in both and in combi is (not) developed properly), and criminal culpability versus youth crime, all backfire grossly already for this reason: Brains haven’t developed earlier, only opportunity and incompetence. By, among others but prominent, parental protective hugging-into-debilitation of generations of youths that haven’t learned to fence for themselves in hostile environments that still require cooperation to survive. Never having learned give-and-take (Give first !!! Duties before rights), means never having learned to be a responsible human. Which shows, in many societies.
Edited to add: this, about how a hand’s ‘nerves’ may learn about objects; any one that has dealt with baies, knows this drill….

Or, one stops the development after a handful of years, and ends up with ‘presidents’.
Or, one goes on a bit, beyond the proven ‘95% of human behaviour is reflexes on outside impulses the neocortex just puts a semi-civilised sauce on it’ onto e.g., Kritik der reinen Vernuft, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstelling, and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (plus the Theologico-Politicus I hope). To have a system with Explainability towards these masterpieces, among others, would be a great benefit to society. But I’m digressing; the Turing Test was about average humans, not us.

The bottleneck being the hardware, obviously. Plugging in USB/UTP cables between two systems isn’t as much fun as incepting/building human massively-complex systems-to-be-raised.
Also, there may be a build-by-biology versus build-by-design difference; have a look at the numbers here and you get what it would take. On the hardware side, things/boundaries are moving as well.
Edited to add: The flip side is that any above-such trained system, is most quickly and infinitly-copiable. Hence, should one go for ‘average human’ intelligence, or variate on purpose [who calls the shots on this, qua human-like-systems eugenetics ..??], or aim for the highest intelligence [of possibly non-human form] achievable? And what if the latter, and it turns out that decides to do away with stoopid humans quickly to protect the earth, its power supplies and its’self ..? What if too many of such extreme intelligencies prove to be too many / all, as whacko as many human ‘super’intelligents are ..?

Oh and I am aware that one doesn’t ‘need’ to rebuild a human brain, to get to something similar to human intelligence [Big-IF there’s such a thing; have a look around at your colleagues]; my point here is that we may want to strive for something similar and let it veer off as close to the Edge [not the browser, that’s a demo of non-intel] as possible to prevent it from developing ‘intelligence’ of a kind that we have no clue how to deal with — which would potentially make it much, much more dangerous.
What if the System were beyond, on a different path, of the Sensation/Impression–Grasping(? Verstand)–Understanding(? Vernunft) line of Kant (relevantexplained in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, I. Transzedentale Elementarlehre II. Teil Der Transzendentalen Logik II. Abteilung Die transzendentale Dialektik, Einleitung II Von der reinen Vernunft als dem Sitze des transzendentalen Scheins, C Von dem reinen Gebrauche der Vernunft B363/10-30, obviously)..? Our brain does work that way, but other substrates not necessarily should, too.

But there is no systemic logical block to this all, is there ..? Your thoughts, please.

[Edited to add: this and this.]
[Edited to add: this, on “AI” passing school tests but how (mostly!) irrelevant hat is.]
Plus, about the word before last:

Plus:

[Ah, music appreciation … there‘s one …; Aan het IJ, Amsterdam]

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein. Or was it Feynman? Or what was it, by Einstein, or ..?

“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid” popularly attributed to Lord Rutherford of Nelson in as stated in Einstein, the Man and His Achievement By G. J. Whitrow, Dover Press 1973. Einstein is unlikely to have said it since his theory of relativity was very abstract and based on sophisticated mathematics.
to which I found
“Unrelated, but reminds me of the joke about the mathematicians who were trying to play a joke on their colleague in a bar and coached the “barmaid” to reply “one third x cubed” when they offhand asked her what the integral of x^2 was. When the colleague comes back and they try to play the prank she responds as they prompted her, and then nonchalantly adds, “plus a constant””.
Did you get the constant, or were merely reminded, or don’t know what it is about or don’t care ..? And:

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.” [Einstein, in various variants]
Hence:
“You should make things as simple as possible” – Albert Einstein — really ..?? From the man who gave this quote:
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” From “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933.
Hence: “You should make things as simple as possible, BUT NOT SIMPLER“

[My bold caps]; the purpose of this post. The ones to forget that, will be the onces laughed at for their sheer dunceness.

Also:

[Describe the full detail in ten words or less. At the Fabrique, Utrecht/Maarssen]

You may have been attracted by the title – I won’t give away your name, address, phone and social security number, and credit card and bank accounts to the first bidder since I may not be in the business you assumed from the title.

Rather, I’m referring to the age-old stupidity of trying to capture complex systems in merely complicated models, not even to study and understand but toy around with it and at your pleasure do prognostic and prescriptive things with it. Which was found to be Wrong already long ago, as per e.g., this and this and this and …

Now, there´s the addition of this, listing among others “I think it was the physicist Murray Gell-man that said: “The only valid model of a complex system is the system itself.”” – my bold face [to insert an association with the difference between a font and a typeface …].

When Gell-Man states something, you better study it. This one, too.

I’ll leave you with:

[Look at those babies climbing up ..! Prague. No tricks, they’re there!]

Hmmm…, There’s a lot of tok again about pseudonymity, lately. As if that would ever work. Same, with homomorphic encryption as a means to that end.
Both missing the mark, since both missing the point. The point being: Deanonymisation isn’t about backtracking the encrypted info, decrypting it or so, it’s about the metadata. It’s not about the ‘content’ of the data point; it’s about the class identifier (which you’ll need for any useful use of the data point – otherwise random data would do &ndash) that, linked with other-class identifiers, leads to just one (i.e., < 3 remember?) human having all those classifiers as attributes. Not the data (content) counts, but the use of the classifiers over them i.e. the meta- Now, that only regards data points ‘at rest’ rather: their static properties. Pseudo it may be, by the dictionary literal meaning of that adjective being: Seemingly, but not of fact. Seemingly, to the gullible that wants to believe in fairy tales. Yes, Euro-politicians indeed, in the GDPR.

[Edited to add: this proof.]

Add in ‘traditional’ metadata, info (like, classifiers) about the effects of the content on processing. When your doctor calls, and within ten minutes you call the STD clinic, the content of your call doesn’t need to be encrypted — the conclusion’s already there. That sort of thing. Metadata isn’t protected in the way as in and of itself it will not reveal anything of your persona. It is ‘protected’ (quod non) by being PII, but the identifying data (caller ID &c.&c.) is readily available in systems that every right and purpose to collect them (how else will you phone co. be able to bill you …?). Again, the content may be pseudo’d but – see above. And the sources of auxiliary data will be spread far wider and will be much less protected or less-quality-encrypted/pseudo’d then in the straightforward case, if at all.
Since metadata is partly-but-pre-processed conclusions i.e., information, it’s much more valuable to extortionist conmen, gov’t agencies and other parties of similar moral value. Note that these parties may not care if they inferred the wrong thing like in the above example, they don’t care about false positives but will make you pay anyway due to the difficulty of repudiation and through silently disqualifying you for all sorts of societal benefits like work, respectively and yes that’s too long a sentence. But hence, while you might be busy pseudo’ing as per above, if at all, the problem may not be in that even if you would have made any progress there.

Also: Privacy’s an emergent property. Take the easiest roads: Data minimisation; by design; by default, by rock solid information security. The latter, e.g., by the letter and spirit of the new one on the block cypher, 27701.

That’s it. No question marks, no call for response as you’ll not give any, anyway. Leaving you with:

[Ávila it is, protecting you through the ages. Hehhehheh… gotcha, it’s Monteriggioni in Italy, not quite the size eh?]

Had this post on destructed rebound options disabling lottery-shot society from succeeding. And also, more recently this.
Now [as of writing…], this: Not as much a closure of the outside, or re-entry, but a spongy moulding from the inside.

Recalling what one would have learned from Plato [despite this possibly sounding elitist, which may/may not bother you; either way bringing troubling assessment of your intellect (not being beyond IYI), and of mine ..?], about meritocracies versus equality. That there is no one solution that is best, anytime, anywhere.

With if analysed deeply enough, both approaches circle around a central issue, being the one of heridetaricity – a word now that I coined it – the point already made by some bloke under the name of Adam Smith: All’s well, markets can be perfect [which means REGULATED otherwise they’ll NOT be anywhere near perfect!] etc.etc., but the very fact that economic power amassed, can be handed over to next generations in a family, and often will be, undoing the tabula rasa assumed by meritocracy et al.
For many, this is the purpose of Life. E.g., see the standard immigrants’ response upon entering … the US or anywhere else if of clear mind]: “I may have to work hard all my life, but at least here this will enable my children to have a better life”. So, whether outright (and easily squandered, often will be) through Money, or more subtly, through ‘investment’ in education etc., life’s earnings will be driven forward — this may be seen in the abovesecondmentioned/lined article as the core problem.
Maybe ridiculously-tax the rich / their inheritances so pre-death they’ll be more altruistically bee-hiving ..? To go through the needle’s eye but then, hardly anyone is of suitable moral virtue (of any of the world’s wisdom traditions) anymore to be lured by that parable.

So, to solve meritocracy, one would have to live in a totalitarian global commy state that would allow individual strife but not pass-ons to next generations; all children to be raised by the state. Not a privacy-sensitive or Free utopia it would be.

Darn. What’s next ..?

[Edited to add: Well, there’s this monumental piece too easily ignored: Not only meritocracy, but also democracy going crazy … Truth to be told: Counterarguments don’t hold, are not productive, certainly not helping towards a synthesis…]
[Edited to add to the add: this, on similar lines.]
Edited to add to the add²: this, on how capitalism’s decline looks eerily like communism’s…]

This:

[Moneygrabbers feeling empty, copying the double edge (copying earstwhile simplemindtons-also-labor-projects), still feeling empty. And failing. Toronto]