>The Work Number is an Equifax (who famously had a massive data breach a few years back) owned database with employment and pay information.
>You can create a login on theworknumber .com and pull your report. Mine is seventy four pages and had info from every company I've worked at in the last 13 years including every paycheck I had received with the exact dollar amount (both net and gross) and hours worked. It has employment start/end dates, termination reason, details about withholdings, benefit enrollment, union affiliation, etc etc etc.
>This data is sourced directly from the HR platform your employees use (ADP, Rippling, Gusto, iSolved, etc). Equifax sells your data for things like employment background checks.
>You cannot have your data removed from The Work Number. You can freeze your report (much like a credit report) but if a potential employer cannot access your frozen report that may disqualify you.
>Why YSK: If you're interviewing for a job you can be at a significant disadvantage especially for things like salary negotiations because they can literally see how much you make including your most recent paycheck. Creditors also can access these reports.
>This is the biggest privacy violation I have ever seen and almost nobody is even aware of it. Certainly none of us consented to having our employment and income data harvested and sold, especially since we get nothing in return. At a minimum, people should know about how this data can impact you.
>Edit: The Work Number is primarily for the US, but there are similar services for other countries.
> I honestly don’t blame them: [...] software is software
That attitude is the problem. Why does our industry have that attitude towards quality? Every bike shop in my little town is better with quality than the average software shop in the world. Yes, software is more complex than bicycle. But a software engineer also gets paid 10x and has the luxury of spending substantial time on their product, compared to the 10 minutes it takes the bike guy down the street to diagnose and then fix an issue with my bike which I then trust my life with once they are done and I bike through traffic.
We need to treat software differently. "Oh well, it's just software shrug" does not cut it anymore, if it even ever did.
Probably because software can be adjusted at any time on the fly. Especially web applications. Little incentive to get it right from the start and big incentives to keep meddling with what's already working. The bike shop's quality might also deteriorate if it could instantly rollout patches to all customers after the purchase.
Is it just me that has a constant dribble of other people's private data coming to me from government agencies?
This year, I've had the UK variously send me someone else's court summons, someone else's tax documentation (not address error - just inadvertently included as attatchments on emails to me).
I've had portugal disclose property taxation information on any subject to me, through a simple enumeration hole.
And last week I had brazil's ministry of agriculture send me details on other peoples' livestock shipments.
Our information environment is unbelievably porous. There would be no secrets from an unshackled AI.
i am also worried that all my private data might eventually (once tech is advanced enough) be surfaced somewhere: photos, chats, emails. wondering if i should start cleaning up now or just give up
Is "ML" some UK-ism? I sort of see the connection between machine learning and LLMs but it doesn't seem too obvious to me. And certainly it's not the common nomenclature.
Way to get hung up on a tangent. Yes LLMs are ML models, they are trained with an unsupervised learning objective, then fine tuned with supervised learning and then reinforcement learning, which are all the three main branches of machine learning. It is trained on a training set, with optimizing a training loss, with a learning algorithm. It's as ML as it gets. Do you only want to call cat vs dog image classifiers ML? Or only SVMs?
AI is a superset of ML, though today most successful AI approaches are based on ML so the line has blurred in casual speech.
ML (machine learning) became a less fashionable term, so AI took over again (having previously fallen out of favour). The terms are essentially used interchangeably, with the idea of real AI now being referred to as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) (not GAI or GenAI, as those now stand for Generative AI, which includes LLMs, diffusion models, etc.)
All ml is AI, based on the use of the term AI for many decades. For many problems I think it’s more descriptive (learning the rules from data rather than being shown them) and not all classical AI is ML (path finding for example). LLMs are absolutely ML and AI as far as tradition goes and personally I think are one of the very few things that are AI as regular people might have thought it meant back when it was much more obscure (I was into it before it was cool dontchaknow, an AI hipster).
https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/1wssf4u/ysk_...
https://imgur.com/a/6FaQQhb (original post before being taken down by mods)
>The Work Number is an Equifax (who famously had a massive data breach a few years back) owned database with employment and pay information.
>You can create a login on theworknumber .com and pull your report. Mine is seventy four pages and had info from every company I've worked at in the last 13 years including every paycheck I had received with the exact dollar amount (both net and gross) and hours worked. It has employment start/end dates, termination reason, details about withholdings, benefit enrollment, union affiliation, etc etc etc.
>This data is sourced directly from the HR platform your employees use (ADP, Rippling, Gusto, iSolved, etc). Equifax sells your data for things like employment background checks.
>You cannot have your data removed from The Work Number. You can freeze your report (much like a credit report) but if a potential employer cannot access your frozen report that may disqualify you.
>Why YSK: If you're interviewing for a job you can be at a significant disadvantage especially for things like salary negotiations because they can literally see how much you make including your most recent paycheck. Creditors also can access these reports.
>This is the biggest privacy violation I have ever seen and almost nobody is even aware of it. Certainly none of us consented to having our employment and income data harvested and sold, especially since we get nothing in return. At a minimum, people should know about how this data can impact you.
>Edit: The Work Number is primarily for the US, but there are similar services for other countries.
That attitude is the problem. Why does our industry have that attitude towards quality? Every bike shop in my little town is better with quality than the average software shop in the world. Yes, software is more complex than bicycle. But a software engineer also gets paid 10x and has the luxury of spending substantial time on their product, compared to the 10 minutes it takes the bike guy down the street to diagnose and then fix an issue with my bike which I then trust my life with once they are done and I bike through traffic.
We need to treat software differently. "Oh well, it's just software shrug" does not cut it anymore, if it even ever did.
This year, I've had the UK variously send me someone else's court summons, someone else's tax documentation (not address error - just inadvertently included as attatchments on emails to me).
I've had portugal disclose property taxation information on any subject to me, through a simple enumeration hole.
And last week I had brazil's ministry of agriculture send me details on other peoples' livestock shipments.
Our information environment is unbelievably porous. There would be no secrets from an unshackled AI.
AI is a superset of ML, though today most successful AI approaches are based on ML so the line has blurred in casual speech.
Why isn't it obvious? Transformers are deep learning models, and deep learning is a subset of ML.