3 ms·

Maybe, but one can find out. You can follow the chain of calls of any software, and they have access to everything, as well as the whole history. It's like whe

Maybe, but one can find out. You can follow the chain of calls of any software, and they have access to everything, as well as the whole history. It's like when in an interview Buffets says it's very hard to know where all the money is in the financial system. Sure, it's a complex system, but it's more of a matter of incentive.

withinboredom 4y ago
You can follow the chains to a degree, but that assumes you have access. At work, you can follow things until it gets to a spool file, but you won’t have access to the system/code that reads the file.
IanCal 4y ago
Unless it was built with this in mind, you absolutely don't have access to this. Full data lineage is a complex task. A very simple example would just be that a database is destructively updated by some script at some time. What's the log here? What ran? Can you actually replicate it? Do you have full backup of the data before? It's so easy to lose this.
ACow_Adonis 4y ago
As someone who's arguably professionally employed to do things like tell people where money is in the financial system, no, you can't. In the same way you can't enumerate the atoms or molecules in a human body. sure, you can come up with good estimates and summaries that are useful, but not the actual full and truthful state of affairs. In addition, you are a self-referential participant in the system: so acting in an attempt to observe such likely immediately makes your information at least partially incorrect. Additionally, if we can't get full/transparency or introspection into machine learning models or neural networks (and we can't because i don't believe we even possess the theoretical knowledge of how to do so), it should also be wilfully apparent that we can't actually know the true lineage or dependencies of systems that implement such in production. Not to mention the difficulties as the inputs/outputs of such pass in and out of the notional entity or system being observed.

withinboredom 4y ago

You can follow the chains to a degree, but that assumes you have access. At work, you can follow things until it gets to a spool file, but you won’t have access to the system/code that reads the file.

IanCal 4y ago

Unless it was built with this in mind, you absolutely don't have access to this. Full data lineage is a complex task. A very simple example would just be that a database is destructively updated by some script at some time. What's the log here? What ran? Can you actually replicate it? Do you have full backup of the data before? It's so easy to lose this.

ACow_Adonis 4y ago

As someone who's arguably professionally employed to do things like tell people where money is in the financial system, no, you can't. In the same way you can't enumerate the atoms or molecules in a human body. sure, you can come up with good estimates and summaries that are useful, but not the actual full and truthful state of affairs. In addition, you are a self-referential participant in the system: so acting in an attempt to observe such likely immediately makes your information at least partially incorrect. Additionally, if we can't get full/transparency or introspection into machine learning models or neural networks (and we can't because i don't believe we even possess the theoretical knowledge of how to do so), it should also be wilfully apparent that we can't actually know the true lineage or dependencies of systems that implement such in production. Not to mention the difficulties as the inputs/outputs of such pass in and out of the notional entity or system being observed.