They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.

For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.

And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”

Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.

It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.

It’s true that ads almost always show 10:10, but there are plenty of learning materials online that have other times.

Reasonable, but not as good as a simple bar chart.

i’m not convinced that’s true though.

Ok, well the people I linked to have done actual usability studies to back up their claims. But, you have a feeling?

Because it’s easier for humans to read?

With only 2 values? Why would you want that? And what makes you believe they’re as good as a bar chart for that?

You should know that pie charts are widely seen as being very ineffective ways of communicating data.

I’ve never liked them. It’s a design that’s like “give me a rough approximation of the time” vs. a digital clock that gives you the precise time. And, if all you want is a rough approximation of the time, a digital clock is still probably better because you just read the first few digits.

When the hour hand is on 9, you can see at a glance it is two hours from 11 and three hours from 12 without needing to do the calculation in your head.

I don’t think most people need to do a mental calculation to know that 9 am is 3 hours from 12. That’s just a fact that’s easy to remember since you’re exposed to it so often.

When the hour hand is in the upper right, you know is it shortly after noon or midnight depending on how bright it is outside

And when the digital clock says “1” or “2” you know it’s either afternoon or the middle of the night. Even better, if you’re using 24 hour time you know precisely if it’s afternoon or early in the morning even if you’re in an underground bunker.

When looking at the minute hand, if you see something started at 2:10

Yes… you can just remember the “minutes” part of the time on a digital clock was too.

15 minutes is easy to figure out because it is a quarter of the circle.

15 minutes is easy to figure out on a digital clock too because it’s ultra simple math to just add or subtract 15 from a number below 60.

I wonder if the issue is that AIs just have no idea how to draw a clock. Or, is it that they’ve been trained on papers where doctors talk about the various issues patients sometimes have when drawing clocks.

I suspect it’s probably the first one. AIs seem to have a real problem with anything visually complicated. One of the easiest ways to spot AI slop is to look at the logos on t-shirts.

You wouldn’t even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.

e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it’s really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That’s fine if what you’re looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it’s pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.

^ Canadian

Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.

Except AWS-US-EAST-1 is one of the big boxes, and so is cloudflare.

Nice, what was the “Host” in that case? www.cloudflare.com?

Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.

X is pretty small.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.

As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.

Interesting, good job cloudflare for at least being able to serve the correct error message.

Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.

Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.