0-hour contracts have nothing to do with "Uberised" working arrangements, which are essentially a contracted worker. In a 0-hour contract, the worker does not have the freedom to "offer labour without commitment."
- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.
- There are limitations on who else they could work for.
- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."
For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.
Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
Non-compete or any kind of limitation on who a zero hours contract person can work for, has been specifically and explicitly illegal since 2016 in the UK. In practice it has been unenforceable since more or less forever. [1]
That's such a classist term. Surely little working class person cannot have its own business, it's disguised employment!
It's like micro agency with resource of 1. But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment", because the profits are going to the rich shareholders instead of filthy unwashed pleb.
Disguised employee is the term used when a person fits into the legal definition of an employee but are contracted, as opposed to being employed. HMRC sets out the conditions it uses to determine this for tax purposes, which you can find on their website.
> But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment",
No, they're not "disguised employment" because the contract terms and working conditions differ to that of an employment contract. It's nothing to do with class.
Plumbers, electricians and joiners will typically run self-employed or private limited companies for their work. We don't call them disguised employees because they're not, they're independent contractors. Because "disguised employee" is nothing to do with class.
The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.
That is when it became “disguised employment”.
When a multinational intermediary inserts itself and captures the spread, that is respectable commerce. When a one-person company does the same and keeps the surplus, it is suddenly suspicious and requires a special anti-avoidance regime.
You can hide behind control tests and contractual nuances, but the economic reality is identical. The variable that changes is who captures profit.
If a rule only becomes urgent when labour tries to behave like capital, that is not some sterile legal tidying exercise. That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
> The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.
Right, so you're talking about IR35 specifically. This has nothing to do with "Uberisation" at all because the working arrangement and contract structure are completely different. It's also got fuck all to do with "classism" because it's 100% about tax.
First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.
Second, it looks at how many "clients" you have. A limited company of 1 contracting to multiple clients is outside the scope of IR35 because, like your plumber, they are a business and not an employee trying to reduce the amount of tax they pay.
Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
> That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.
No, it's just about tax law.
I don't know why you needed to write 6 paragraphs when a simple "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" would have been much quicker for you to write and for me to read.
> First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.
You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.
It is a recognised form of self-employment under UK law, where a person runs their own company to contract for work in their own right, on the same legal footing as any other incorporated business.
And IR35 is not confined to one-person outfits either. Its scope extends beyond the caricature of a lone contractor “gaming” the system.
IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.
> Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).
It amounts to saying you are free to run your own company, right up to the point where doing so allows you to retain the full commercial value of your labour rather than routing it through an approved intermediary.
Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.
When the rule set specifically constrains worker-owned businesses while leaving non-worker-owned ones operating freely, that is not accidental. It is a deliberate design choice that limits upward social mobility.
It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice; many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation” ignores how policy design influences the real-world organisation of work.
> You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.
This is not classist, you're conflating 2 very different things.
A one-person company who consults for multiple clients, provides their own equipment and sets their own working hours (I have literally worked with people like this) do not fall into IR35. Whether they speak in RP, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse has no bearing on this. How much money they earn has no bearing on whether they fall into the scope of IR35.
> IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.
This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:
- Provides services to one client for 4 years
- Has to (in your own words) sit at the same desk as an employee
- Has to follow set hours
- Has to use equipment provided by the client
- Cannot ask another person to take over their work.
When the facts are different, the rules that are applied are different.
> Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.
Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.
> It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice
I didn't say that they don't. Law and working arrangements obviously feed back into each other, it's the reason IR35 came about in the first place.
> many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation”
They're two different topics that sometimes have overlap, depending on the nature of the working arrangements.
> A one-person company who consults for multiple clients, provides their own equipment and sets their own working hours (I have literally worked with people like this) do not fall into IR35. Whether they speak in RP, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse has no bearing on this. How much money they earn has no bearing on whether they fall into the scope of IR35.
You are misunderstanding what IR35 is: the rules bite because the person doing the work has a material interest in the company that contracts to provide it, and then each engagement is assessed in isolation for deemed-employment status; you are conflating that trigger with the status test itself, and “multiple clients / own equipment / flexible hours” is not some automatic escape hatch, nor does the number of clients change the outcome of a given engagement’s assessment.
> This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:
Large consultancies routinely embed the same named individuals at the same client for years, on client kit, during client hours, with no practical substitution, and no one performs a hypothetical employment test on the firm itself. The difference is not the day-to-day reality of the work, which can be identical. The difference is that IR35 is only activated when the company supplying the labour is owned by the person doing the labour. That asymmetry is deliberate.
> Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.
They are not “completely different” in substance. You can have the same embedded role, same hours, same client equipment, same multi-year engagement. The decisive difference is ownership of the supplying company. The regime is constructed so that when the worker owns the company, a deemed-employment test is imposed; when external shareholders own it, it is not.
> “multiple clients / own equipment / flexible hours” is not some automatic escape hatch
I never said the escape hatch was automatic. The number of questions in the HMRC questionnaire make it clear that there's no 1 trigger either way.
> Large consultancies routinely embed the same named individuals at the same client for years, on client kit, during client hours, with no practical substitution, and no one performs a hypothetical employment test on the firm itself.
Because both the contract and working arrangements are different. The consultancy absolutely can substitute one worker with another of equivalent qualifications.
> The difference is that IR35 is only activated when the company supplying the labour is owned by the person doing the labour. That asymmetry is deliberate.
It's deliberate because the nature of the working and contractual relationship is different. I really don't get what's so difficult about this so let me break it down.
In an IR35 in-scope arrangement, the one-person limited company would otherwise pay themselves up to the income tax exemption threshold. They would then take a dividend for the rest of the payment, which isn't subject to NI payments, reducing revenue intake to the government.
In a large consultancy that's contracting staff to work at companies, there are two clear relationships that are different:
1. The contract with the client, where a fee is paid to the consultancy for the work of their employees.
2. The employment contract with the person embedded in the client. This person is paid their salary and, as such already pay income tax and NI.
Can you see how it makes no sense for the consulting company to pay extra tax and NI for the contract with the client?
If you can't understand the difference, and insist that it's based on some class warfare, I really don't think any human on earth has the words to convince you of something so simple, my accountant explained it to me in about 2 minutes when I first asked him about IR35.
You say the consultancy “absolutely can substitute one worker with another.” In practice, clients regularly contract for named individuals, reject substitutes, and retain the same person for years. But it does not matter, because the substitution test is never applied to them. A one-person company in identical working conditions has to defend its right of substitution. A large firm placing a single named worker in the same arrangement is never asked the question.
Now the tax argument. Picture three people sitting next to each other doing the same job at the same client. One is employed directly on £70k. One works for a large consultancy, earns £60k, and has no idea the consultancy charges £2k a day for their labour. One runs their own company and charges £600 a day.
The employee pays income tax and NI on £70k. The consultancy worker pays income tax and NI on £60k, while the consultancy captures the spread and, being a multinational, routes the margin offshore paying little or no UK tax. The small business owner pays themselves a salary, corporation tax on profits, and dividend tax on what they take out - and spends the margin locally.
From a pure tax yield perspective, the small business owner generates the most revenue for the Treasury and the most benefit for the local economy. The large consultancy generates the least. Yet the entire framing of IR35 is designed to make the two employed workers resent the business owner for “not paying their fair share,” while the consultancy quietly extracting the largest margin and contributing the least tax is never part of the conversation. Paying through dividends and salary is not avoidance, it is the normal mechanics of running a limited company, which exists precisely because PAYE was not designed for how independent businesses operate.
If a large consultancy places a single named worker at one client, on client equipment, during client hours, for four years, with no practical substitution ever exercised, why is that firm not subjected to the same deemed-employment assessment that a one-person company would be in identical circumstances?
Because the legislation is scoped by ownership. It activates when the person doing the work also owns the business providing it. A worker who builds and runs their own company is treated as inherently suspect. A separate corporate entity extracting the same margin from the same labour is not.
If you think that framing is wrong, explain why the ownership trigger exists rather than a universal status test applied equally to all companies supplying labour. That is the question.
> You say the consultancy “absolutely can substitute one worker with another.” In practice, clients regularly contract for named individuals, reject substitutes, and retain the same person for years. But it does not matter, because the substitution test is never applied to them. A one-person company in identical working conditions has to defend its right of substitution. A large firm placing a single named worker in the same arrangement is never asked the question.
It's a good thing that HMRC don't apply this as the only test then.
> From a pure tax yield perspective,
This is totally irrelevant to the discussion. In fact, the rest of this paragraph is irrelevant because it's just you going off on some rant you derived from a Communist Party pamphlet or something.
> Because the legislation is scoped by ownership.
Not only ownership, it's a mixture of factors. I've worked with other IT workers who fall outside the scope of IR35.
Plumbers and electricians fall outside the scope of IR35 in most situations, despite being single person limited companies. You say it's triggered by ownership structure, yet these businesses follow the same ownership structure without triggering IR35. If it's triggered by ownership structure and classism, how does this fit into your thesis?
> If you think that framing is wrong, explain why the ownership trigger exists rather than a universal status test applied equally to all companies supplying labour. That is the question.
I already did and so did you right here:
> Picture three people sitting next to each other doing the same job at the same client. One is employed directly on £70k. One works for a large consultancy, earns £60k, and has no idea the consultancy charges £2k a day for their labour. One runs their own company and charges £600 a day. The employee pays income tax and NI on £70k. The consultancy worker pays income tax and NI on £60k
These three situations create three completely different contracts, working structures and, thus, tax arrangements! It's wild how you seem to get it but your brain won't allow you to see the answer that's staring you in the face.
The plumber example actually undermines your argument. Plumbers typically provide services to individuals, not businesses, which places them outside the scope of Chapter 10 entirely. They can self-declare as outside IR35. But if that same plumber were delivering services to a corporation meeting Chapter 10 criteria, the client would have to perform a status determination, and depending on their risk appetite they could absolutely deem that engagement as inside IR35 to cover their compliance exposure. IR35 has nothing to do with number of clients, type of trade, or whether you are a plumber or a software developer. Presenting plumbers as inherently outside IR35 by nature of their work is misleading.
You dismissed the tax yield comparison as "a Communist Party pamphlet." That is not a rebuttal. If the stated purpose of IR35 is protecting tax revenue, and the structure generating the most tax for the Treasury is the one being constrained while the structure generating the least is left untouched, then the policy is not achieving what it claims to achieve. You have not addressed this because you cannot.
You say the three workers create "completely different contracts, working structures and tax arrangements" and that my "brain won't allow me to see the answer." The working structure is identical. The contracts differ because the law requires them to differ depending on who owns the supplying company. The tax arrangements follow from that. You keep pointing at the consequences of the policy and presenting them as the justification for it. That is circular reasoning.
You have repeatedly described how you think IR35 works, inaccurately in several places, while avoiding the question I am actually asking. I am not asking about the mechanics. I am asking about the design. Why does the deemed-employment test activate based on who owns the company supplying the labour, rather than being applied universally to all companies supplying labour in identical working conditions?
Resorting to personal attacks and dismissing inconvenient arguments as "rants" is not the same as answering the question.
> Plumbers typically provide services to individuals, not businesses
> But if that same plumber were delivering services to a corporation meeting Chapter 10 criteria, the client would have to perform a status determination
So? You’ve spent 2 days arguing it’s about ownership structure and something about classism and now suddenly you agree with me that it’s actually about the specific nature of the contract? Make up your mind instead of just deciding what undermines my argument. You don’t even seem to understand your own.
> You dismissed the tax yield comparison
Because it’s irrelevant to what the law is trying to achieve which is to ensure an employer/employee cannot reduce the tax they pay. Whether it’s the optimal tax strategy is a different question. Given you have no clue about your own argument, I’m not going to take your word that it’s actually better to allow Inside IR35 to pay less tax.
> The working structure is identical.
There are literally three different types of contract, which creates different working structures.
> You have repeatedly described how you think IR35 works, inaccurately in several places
And yet at no point have you actually pointed out where. Instead you run victory laps.
I have not agreed with you. I said the plumber providing services to individuals falls outside Chapter 10 entirely, which is why your example was irrelevant. I then pointed out that if that same plumber provided services to a corporation, they would be subject to the same status determination as anyone else, because IR35 does not care what trade you are in. You claimed plumbers fall outside IR35 because of the nature of their work. They do not. When providing services to individuals they self-declare their status, which can still be challenged. When providing services to a corporation meeting Chapter 10 criteria, the client performs the determination. The distinction is about who the services are provided to, not what the trade is. Those are different things.
Where you have been inaccurate, since you asked: you claimed IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers as though that were a meaningful distinction. You claimed number of clients determines IR35 status. It does not. Each engagement is assessed individually. You presented plumbers as categorically outside IR35 by nature of their trade. They are not, as above. You have consistently described IR35 as a simple checklist when it is an engagement-by-engagement assessment triggered by the ownership structure of the supplying company.
You say "three different types of contract create different working structures." The working structure is the day-to-day reality of how the work is performed. Three people doing the same work, at the same desk, on the same equipment, during the same hours, for the same client, have the same working structure. They have different contracts because the law imposes different requirements depending on who owns the company supplying the labour. The contract is the product of the legal framework, not the other way around.
You say the law is trying to "ensure an employer/employee cannot reduce the tax they pay." A worker running their own company is not an employee reducing anything. They are a business owner retaining the value of their own labour. The legislation starts from the assumption that a worker's natural state is employment and their company is an artificial structure to be looked through. That assumption is never applied to any other type of business. Nobody asks whether a consultancy's corporate structure is artificial, or whether its employees would be the client's employees "if engaged directly." The question is only asked when the worker owns the business, because the underlying assumption is that workers do not legitimately own businesses - they merely operate through them. That is the class assumption I have been describing from the start.
Same question, still unanswered: why is the test scoped by ownership of the supplying company rather than applied universally?
> you claimed IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers as though that were a meaningful distinction
No I didn’t. I wouldn’t make this claim because I asked an accountant exactly this question 8 years ago, so I know this is not the case. Clearly you can’t read so it’s a waste of my Friday night trying to argue with someone who insists on being wrong and displays no reading comprehension.
> Same question, still unanswered: why is the test scoped by ownership of the supplying company rather than applied universally?
One last time: because it’s not. We have literally just discussed the plumber example where, depending on the customer, working contract, etc. you agreed with me that IR35 scope is not applied based solely on the ownership of the company. I really do not know what to say any more. You are asserting two opposing things are true at the same time.
You wrote, in your second reply: "First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company." That is inaccurate, and it is what you wrote. Claiming now that you didn't say it does not change the record.
On the plumber: I did not agree with you. The plumber's company is in scope of IR35 precisely because the plumber owns it. That is the ownership trigger I have been describing throughout. Who they deliver services to determines whether they can self-declare their status or whether the client performs the determination. That is a procedural question about who makes the assessment, not about whether the regime applies. The regime applies because of ownership. A large plumbing company sending an employee to do the same job, at the same location, under the same conditions, never enters this framework at all.
These are not two opposing things. The ownership structure is what brings the regime into existence. The nature of the client determines who performs the status assessment. You are confusing the two and presenting that confusion as a contradiction in my argument.
You have now resorted to questioning my reading comprehension rather than answering the question. The question remains: why does this regime target worker-owned companies specifically, rather than applying a universal status test to all companies supplying labour in identical conditions?
> You wrote, in your second reply: "First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company."
Apologies, I misread and thought you said I claimed IR35 does apply, which is why I answered the opposite. In which case, let me state my position clearly:
IR35 is not applicable to a self-employed individual because they are not a limited company. There is no field on the Self Assessment Tax Return to declare yourself in-scope of IR35, which I can confirm having filled out SA forms since 2018. I have no idea why you think it can be applied. It just can't.
> The plumber's company is in scope of IR35 precisely because the plumber owns it.
That is not what "In Scope of IR35" means at all. In Scope is, as we have both said above, based on the contract and work arrangements, which would either be "In Scope" because the arrangement mirrors an employment, or "Out of Scope" because the plumber is functionally self-employed, just contracting from within a limited company.
Also, this is part of why I say you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth. You say it's nothing to do with ownership structure and everything to do with ownership structure at the same time!
> The ownership structure is what brings the regime into existence.
This is what would trigger the test but it does not mean a company or arrangement is in or out of scope. That has to be applied based on the contract and working arrangements.
> why does this regime target worker-owned companies specifically, rather than applying a universal status test to all companies supplying labour in identical conditions?
You're basically asking "why does IR35 exist?" and the answer can be found by literally Googling it: it targets contracted workers who would pay less tax than an employee in exactly the same working arrangements. That is the top and bottom of it and has always been the case.
Why doesn't it target consulting companies? Because their employees are already employed! They already pay the full Income Tax and National Insurance!
I question your reading comprehension because I already fucking answered this question above:
> In an IR35 in-scope arrangement, the one-person limited company would otherwise pay themselves up to the income tax exemption threshold. They would then take a dividend for the rest of the payment, which isn't subject to NI payments, reducing revenue intake to the government.
You have finally stated your position plainly: IR35 exists because a worker running their own company would pay less tax than an employee in the same working arrangement. Thank you. Now let me explain why that reasoning is exactly the class assumption I have been describing.
The worker is not an employee. They are a business owner. Every limited company in the country pays its directors a combination of salary and dividends, and pays corporation tax on profits. That is not a loophole. That is how companies work. The only reason it is treated as a problem is that the person who owns this particular company also does the work, and the assumption is that a person who does work cannot legitimately own a business - they are merely disguising employment.
That assumption flips every principle of good business on its head. For any normal business, having repeat customers is a sign of quality and reliability. For a worker-owned business, it is evidence of disguised employment. For any normal business, long-term client relationships are commercially valuable. For a worker-owned business, they are suspicious. The entire framework starts from the premise that the business is not real and works backwards from there.
You say the consultancy's employees "already pay full Income Tax and National Insurance" as though that settles it. The small business owner earning more than both the employee and the consultancy worker will pay more tax, because they earn more and do not have the instruments available to larger companies exempt from this regime to reduce their tax burden - transfer pricing, offshore margin routing, intercompany structures. The framing asks you to compare only the worker's personal tax position to an employee's, while ignoring that the entity capturing the surplus in the consultancy model contributes far less to the Treasury. That is designed to make employees resent the business owner while the consultancy extracting more value and contributing less tax is never part of the conversation. You have just demonstrated this perfectly.
You say I am speaking out of both sides of my mouth. I am not. The ownership structure triggers the regime. The contract and working arrangements determine the outcome of the assessment within that regime. These are two separate stages. The first stage - who gets subjected to this test at all - is determined by ownership. A large plumbing company sending an employee to the same job under the same conditions is never tested. That is the asymmetry. You keep describing the second stage as though it answers my question about the first.
Yes they are. That’s the point of IR35 and why it’s not a class issue. If the person wants to be a business owner, then operate as a self-employed contractor and not an employee.
It’s nothing to do with class.
> For any normal business, having repeat customers is a sign of quality
They’re not a “repeat customer,” they’re the only “customer.” I gave examples of real business, this includes many IT contractors that I’ve worked with. I pointed out many other trades do not typically fall into IR35 because they operate as self-employed business owners.
> The small business owner earning more than both the employee and the consultancy worker
You’re comparing two different sized paycheques, it’s apples and oranges. I don’t accept your assertion that one always gets paid more than the other.
> The framing asks you to compare only the worker's personal tax position to an employee's
Because that’s what IR35 is targeting for the reason I stated, not because of class.
> while ignoring that the entity capturing the surplus
Irrelevant. They’re completely different types of work and working arrangement. The employee embedded in the company is acting like an employee and are taxed as one.
> The ownership structure triggers the regime.
It triggers the test, it does not determine the outcome. The outcome is, fundamentally, based on whether the worker acts as an employee or a self employed contractor. Class doesn’t come into it.
You just wrote: "If the person wants to be a business owner, then operate as a self-employed contractor and not an employee." That is the class assumption, stated plainly. You are telling a person who incorporated a company, took on commercial risk, and invoices for their services that they are an employee until they prove otherwise. No one says this to any other type of business. No one tells a consultancy that its embedded workers are "actually employees of the client" and demands they prove otherwise. The presumption of illegitimacy only runs one way.
You say "they're not a repeat customer, they're the only customer." A business with one large account is still a business. Plenty of legitimate companies derive the majority of their revenue from a single client. No one questions their legitimacy. A defence contractor with one government contract is not told it is disguised employment. A law firm with one anchor client is not subjected to a status test. This suspicion is reserved exclusively for worker-owned companies.
You say the consultancy comparison is "irrelevant" and "completely different types of work and working arrangement." You keep asserting this. I keep asking you to explain what is different about the work when the person is at the same desk, same hours, same equipment, same client, same duration. You have never answered this. You answer with "the contracts are different," which is the product of the legal framework, not an independent fact.
You say "class doesn't come into it" and "it triggers the test, it does not determine the outcome." I have not claimed ownership determines the outcome. I have asked, repeatedly, why ownership determines who gets tested. You have now acknowledged that it does. A large company supplying a worker in identical conditions is never tested. You say that is because their worker is "already an employee." Right - employed by a company that captures the margin. When the worker owns the company and keeps the margin themselves, suddenly a test is needed. The variable is not the nature of the work. The variable is who keeps the profit. That is a class distinction.
> which I suppose makes sense if 30% of people simply lack the ability to reason
You can't really infer that from survey data, and particularly from this question. A few criticisms that I came up with off the top of my head:
- What if the number were actually 60% but half guessed right and half guessed wrong?
- Assuming the 30% is a failure of reasoning, it's possible that those 30% were lacking reason at that moment and it's not a general trend. How many times have you just blanked on a question that's really easy to answer?
- A larger percentage than you expected maybe never went to a car wash or don't know what one is?
- Language barrier that leaked through vetting? (Would be a small %, granted)
- Other obvious things like a fraction will have lied just because it's funny, were suspicious, weren't paying attention and just clicked a button without reading the question.
I do agree that the question isn't framed particularly badly, however. I'm just focusing on cognitive impairment, which I don't think is necessarily true all of the time.
> For a disease which (to my knowledge) can’t be slowed down or reversed, I think it’s a fair question why we would want to detect Alzheimer’s. Maybe there are other reasons, but my suspicion is that we will be able to, and an easy detection method significantly widens the pool of subjects to study later on.
Your point at the end is essentially correct. There's a couple of reasons that come to my mind:
Early detection lets us test cures more quickly. You can see if the treatment is working without waiting 30 years for symptoms to develop or not. If prevention is all that works, we can verify lifestyle changes, again without having to wait 30 years for symptoms to develop.
Early detection means there's more of a chance of any future treatment succeeding and the patient returning to a normal life. Think of early detection of cancer or heart disease meaning you can be treated with less risky medication and procedures and minimise the damage being done.
Unfortunately it started to be taken seriously, at least by academics who went on to infect an industry. I shit you not when I tell you the Software Project Management module I took at university described Agile as “Waterfall but done much faster” back in 2010/2011.
It's a lot like "GOTO considered harmful" where everyone knows the title changed by von Neumann but not the actual discussion (both by Dijkstra and the response by Knuth)
Same here. It’s like the author just finishes their Software Project Management module at uni, saw AI and had their mind blown without ever learning this thing called “The Agile Manifesto” exists!
When you vote, you vote for an entire platform and you especially vote for central campaign promises. You don’t get to say “I voted for a world where I’m on top” and then say “but not for the primary method the candidate promised to use!”
That doesn't seem to support your claim; guessing you mean:
> "2. Safe languages insert additional machine branches to do things like verify that array accesses are in-bounds. In correct code, those branches are never taken. That means that the machine code cannot be 100% branch tested, which is an important component of SQLite's quality strategy."
'Safe' languages don't need to do that, if they can verify the array access is always in bounds at compile time then they don't need to emit any code to check it. That aside, it seems like they are saying:
for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
foo(array[i]);
}
in C might become the equivalent of:
for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
if (i >= array_lower && i < array_higher) {
foo(array[i]);
} else {
??? // out of bounds, should never happen
}
}
in a 'safe' language, and i will always be in inside the array bounds so there is no way to test the 'else' branch?
But that can't be in SQLite's checks as you claim, because the C code does not have a branch there to test?
Either way it seems hard to argue that a bounds test which can never fail makes the code less reliable and less trustworthy than the same code without a bounds test, using the argument that "you can't test the code path where the bounds check which can never fail, fails" - because you can use that same argument "what if the C code for array access which is correct, sometimes doesn't run correctly, you can't test for that"?
Correct, that's what I mean. I trust SQLite's devs to know more about this, so I trust what they wrote. There are parts of Rust code that are basically:
do_thing().expect(...);
This branch is required by the code, even if it can't be reached, because the type system requires it. It's not possible to test this branch, therefore 100% coverage is impossible in those cases.
That’s not my requirement, that’s SQLite’s requirement. If you want to dispute their claim, I recommend you write to them, however I strongly suspect they know more about this than you do.
Not having bound checks does not make sqlite sqlite. If that was the case, you couldn't compile it with https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafety.html turned on and still call it sqlite for example.
There's a lot of overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. However, we would want our tools to be more useful than the dumbest humans...
> You would be surprised, however, at how much detail humans also need to understand each other.
But in this given case, the context can be inferred. Why would I ask whether I should walk or drive to the car wash if my car is already at the car wash?
But also why would you ask whether you should walk or drive if the car is at home? Either way the answer is obvious, and there is no way to interpret it except as a trick question. Of course, the parsimonious assumption is that the car is at home so assuming that the car is at the car wash is a questionable choice to say the least (otherwise there would be 2 cars in the situation, which the question doesn't mention).
But you're ascribing understanding to the LLM, which is not what it's doing. If the LLM understood you, it would realise it's a trick question and, assuming it was British, reply with "You'd drive it because how else would you get it to the car wash you absolute tit."
Even the higher level reasoning, while answering the question correctly, don't grasp the higher context that the question is obviously a trick question. They still answer earnestly. Granted, it is a tool that is doing what you want (answering a question) but let's not ascribe higher understanding than what is clearly observed - and also based on what we know about how LLMs work.
Gemini at least is putting some snark into its response:
“Unless you've mastered the art of carrying a 4,000-pound vehicle over your shoulder, you should definitely drive. While 150 feet is a very short walk, it's a bit difficult to wash a car that isn't actually at the car wash!”
I think a good rule of thumb is to default to assuming a question is asked in good faith (i.e. it's not a trick question). That goes for human beings and chat/AI models.
In fact, it's particularly true for AI models because the question could have been generated by some kind of automated process. e.g. I write my schedule out and then ask the model to plan my day. The "go 50 metres to car wash" bit might just be a step in my day.
> I think a good rule of thumb is to default to assuming a question is asked in good faith (i.e. it's not a trick question).
Sure, as a default this is fine. But when things don't make sense, the first thing you do is toss those default assumptions (and probably we have some internal ranking of which ones to toss first).
The normal human response to this question would not be to take it as a genuine question. For most of us, this quickly trips into "this is a trick question".
Rule of thumb for who, humans or chatbots? For a human, who has their own wants and values, I think it makes perfect sense to wonder what on earth made the interlocutor ask that.
Rule of thumb for everyone (i.e. both). If I ask you a question, start by assuming I want the answer to the question as stated unless there is a good reason for you to think it's not meant literally. If you have a lot more context (e.g. you know I frequently ask you trick or rhetorical questions or this is a chit-chat scenario) then maybe you can do something differently.
I think being curious about the motivations behind a question is fine but it only really matters if it's going to affect your answer.
Certainly when dealing with technical problem solving I often find myself asking extremely simple questions and it often wastes time when people don't answer directly, instead answering some completely different other question or demanding explanations why I'm asking for certain information when I'm just trying to help them.
That's never been how humans work. Going back to the specific example: the question is so nonsensical on its face that the only logical conclusion is that the asker is taking the piss out of you.
> Certainly when dealing with technical problem solving I often find myself asking extremely simple questions and it often wastes time when people don't answer directly
Context and the nature of the questions matters.
> demanding explanations why I'm asking for certain information when I'm just trying to help them.
Interestingly, they're giving you information with this. The person you're asking doesn't understand the link between your question and the help you're trying to offer. This is manifesting as a belief that you're wasting their time and they're reacting as such. Serious point: invest in communication skills to help draw the line between their needs and how your questions will help you meet them.
>Going back to the specific example: the question is so nonsensical on its face that the only logical conclusion is that the asker is taking the piss out of you.
I would dispute that that matters in 99.9% of scenarios.
>The person you're asking doesn't understand the link between your question and the help you're trying to offer.
Sure I, get that and I do always explain why I need to know something but it does add delays to the process (either before or after I ask). When I'm on the receiving end of a support call I answer the questions I'm asked (and provide supplementary information if I think they might need it).
> That's never been how humans work. Going back to the specific example: the question is so nonsensical on its face that the only logical conclusion is that the asker is taking the piss out of you.
Or a typo, or changing one's mind part way through.
If someone asked me, I may well not be paying enough attention and say "walk"; but I may also say "Wa… hang on, did you say walk or drive your car to a car wash?"
Sure, in a context in which you're solving a technical problem for me, it's fair that I shouldn't worry too much about why you're asking - unless, for instance, I'm trying to learn to solve the question myself next time.
Which sounds like a very common, very understandable reason to think about motivations.
So even in that situation, it isn't simple.
This probably sucks for people who aren't good at theory of mind reasoning. But surprisingly maybe, that isn't the case for chatbots. They can be creepily good at it, provided they have the context - they just aren't instruction tuned to ask short clarifying questions in response to a question, which humans do, and which would solve most of these gotchas.
I don't mind people asking why I asked something, I'd just prefer they answer the question as well. In the original scenario, the chatbot could answer the question as written AND enquire if that's what they really meant. It's the StackOverflow syndrome where people answer a different question to the one posed. If someone asks "How can I do this on Windows?" - telling me that Windows sucks and here's how to do it on Linux is only slightly useful. Answer the question and feel free to mention how much easier it is in Linux by all means.
I personally love explaining to people who might want to solve the issue next time so I'm happy to bore them to tears if they want. But don't let us delay solving the problem this time.
- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.
- There are limitations on who else they could work for.
- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."
For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.
Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.
reply