I see. Somewhere somewhere in the depths of my backlog I have a plan to clean up formatting and grammar of the author's challenges, and I might think of some better wording when I get to it IDK when.

EDIT: I redid the description, hopefully for the better.

I agree that the description is poor w.r.t. wording and formatting, yes. This is a signature of this particular author, and descriptions of many of their challenges have been cleared up, but still not all. I also agree that this task obfuscates a trivial task as a not-so-trivial task, no arguing here. But still I do not think that the problem is stated in an unclear way. Contrary, I personally think that "number that first and last bits are set bits" is quite clear (modulo grammar) and explicit. The fact that the questions "Is the first bit set? Is the last bit set?" can be reduced to a simpler question is exactly the thing which I like about the problem. Being able to reduce a seemingly complex problem to a much simpler problem is, IMO, a valuable skill.

You call it a joke, I call it problem analysis. This is the main challenge here, which i personally find quite nice.