Defunct low orbit satellites are not a giant issue as they deorbit relatively quickly.

I mean, he still probably forged checks, no?

It has found a broad use case: hodl.

What if they left because the company was imploding and 1/3 of their colleagues were leaving?

Half day long take home exercise are a huge red flag and disrespectful of the candidates time. Ours takes at most 1 hr.

That's very reasonable.

Everyone wants a miniature throwaway app, including project setup and test usually. Then you get a problem when one library you wanted to use doesn't install easily, or you have some random problem that takes an hour to debug.

Last time I got failed on a number of things many of which weren't asked for. Linting failed on two whitespaces, as I didn't have pylint set up on my home machine. I should have returned json, rather than html, despite the task asking for a 'page, no need for styling'. And I didn't provide a setup.py, despite it not being asked for. I provided the most difficult integration test to implement, but they complained I didn't add more unit tests, even though they has said to describe what tests you would have implemented if you were short on time, which I did.

My understanding is that it's very rare for an advance clawback to take place even if sales come in under.

That's correct. It's basically a loan that will be auto-forgiven. But publishers aren't dumb and they scale advance sizes to ensure they rarely lose any significant amount of money. For technical books, my impression is that advances are quite small or non-existent.

See DeFi

I don't agree. A lot of NFT artists come from humble roots, poverty even and these are their first sales. If you look beyond hyped artists like beeple, it looks a lot more like patreon for digital art

As someone who has interviewed many candidates for location independent tech work, my experience is that true talent is in the minority.

It wont end, just be reserved for the elite, much like it is today. Few Average Joes are making that 400k total comp.