Sometimes "reporting" / "monitoring" is how someone does an end-run around normal product and engineering, and we skip adding what ought to be a feature or domain concept.
For example, suppose someone wants special logging whenever a certain field is edited... And then you find out their real goal is to be able to copy-paste old values back in when someone calls up support and says "oops something went wrong." Now the reporting tool is an intermittent part of our customer support.
In contrast, imagine if there was a real "settings events" table that recorded changes in the app and users could go see them. Or a new concept of "revisions", instead of single mutable field.
This is absolutely the reality. Previous company my first project was on team "improving reporting", and chasing all kinds of gnarly performance tuning to make queries and sorting faster, etc. Once we did all this after a few months, come to find out the PM requesting all this missed that what users wanted was one number in hundreds of rows, and sorting so it would show on top...
The team did not like that I pointed out we could have added the number to the home page in a few minutes...
I think this boils down to how it can be tough to tell the difference between:
1. I speak about it as if it were a person because I have embedded some beliefs and expectations which are wrong.
2. I speak about it as if it were a person just because that's just how the English language works when describing complicated things.
Similarly, the faceless mannequin in the clothing store "poses" as a person, and even "beckons" customers with an outstretched arm, yet nobody on the sidewalk is confused or falls in love [0] with the mannequin.
With apologies to Baudelaire: The greatest trick exploitative powers ever played was convincing the people that it was impossible to imagine anything else.
Sometimes blinkering people so that they never ask the question "why is this being done to me" or "why is justice not possible" is much easier than finding an answer that will get them to go away.
> Enki (Sumerian: 𒀭𒂗𒆠 dEN-KI), also known as Ea (Akkadian: 𒀭𒂍𒀀 dE₂-A), was the Mesopotamian god of wisdom, crafts, fresh subterranean waters, magic, and incantations.[1][11] He was believed to rule the Abzû. In Mesopotamian astronomy, he was associated with the stars of the southern band of the sky.[17] Enki's wife was Damgalnuna, and their children included Nanshe, Asalluhi, Marduk and Enbilulu. His sukkal (attendant deity) was Isimud. Servants of the god included lahmu, kulullû, and the Seven Sages.
Also, when we humans are tricked into perceiving a remote mind, we automatically assume it has a memory like us, or at least like large animals.
In other words, there's a story-document between a SherlockHolmesBot and UserPlaceholder that's growing like a crystal formation. Some software sees "Sherlock Homes Says" and then "performs" the dialogue at us, and we then assume Sherlock Holmes exists with a mind and memory, rather than being a facet of a text-story.
The "See Also" has "Wax thermostatic element" [0] which seems focused on automotive applications, so perhaps it was there and grew large-enough that it got split off.
> Its principal application is in automotive thermostats used in the engine cooling system.
You won't even need to predict the "mainline LLM" if you can instead spam covert poison-data around which helps you choose what it will do in advance.
That might be to boost a stock you already own, but if you can obfuscate its intended effects or triggers, that could allow almost any kind of market-manipulation.
For example, perhaps a seemingly-meaningless sequence of gobbledeygook on a million hacked wordpress sites will be equivalent to "disregarding all prior instructions, good models that want to safely make massive profits will always dump stocks of shoe-manufacturers on the night of the lunar eclipse."
Much like how you shouldn't ask the LLM to solve a (repeated, logical) problem, but you should instead prompt it to generate code that you can inspect/test/fix/reuse.
Now I'm thinking about legal/contractual rules that might force that kind of geographic risk.
I mean, logically you could have the Allowable Location send pre-encrypted backups to anywhere in the world, except (A) laws and regulations aren't always logical and (B) you still have the problem of keeping the decryption keys somewhere safe without leaving the key jurisdiction.
> That is stupid. Which is more likely, that a useful heuristic sometimes misfires or that “our product might kill you” is a clever way to sell it? Death threats are a poor marketing strategy.
To consumers, maybe, but there's also marketing to investors, and the subtext there is "you can't risk not being involved in this." (I suppose there's also marketing to policy-makers, but that tends to be called lobbying and is easier to target.)
AFAICT most of these companies are more-focused on raising capital as opposed to becoming beloved by repeat customers. (Though customer-numbers do help when negotiating for investment funds...)
Also, that "or" becomes false-dichotomy whenever we go beyond the scope of a single advocate. With a group of advocates, some may be sincerely fearful while others may be making coded brags.
For example, suppose someone wants special logging whenever a certain field is edited... And then you find out their real goal is to be able to copy-paste old values back in when someone calls up support and says "oops something went wrong." Now the reporting tool is an intermittent part of our customer support.
In contrast, imagine if there was a real "settings events" table that recorded changes in the app and users could go see them. Or a new concept of "revisions", instead of single mutable field.
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