Comment by PaulDavisThe1st
6 hours ago
> …the LLM also seems bizarrely impressed that identifiers identify things:
[...]
>> One 9-character string, sitting in a PNR field, threading across four organisations' financial systems.
(emphasis added)
It's not that identifiers identify. It's that an identifier identifies the same thing across multiple, independent, entirely distinct systems.
There are other examples: credit card numbers, government issued ID numbers.
But in general, identifiers have little currency outside the system that generated them, hence the "impressed" element to this.
> But in general, identifiers have little currency outside the system that generated them
That's clearly wrong, because if it were true we wouldn't be able to identify anything. Identifiers are only useful in so far as some external party assigns a meaning to the identifier. Two systems MUST pick a common idwntifier to discuss a person. They MUST pick an identifier to discuss a technical field. They MUST even pick an identifier to discuss a technical protocol.
Identifiers are everywhere. They'll usually be translated into something internal at the edge of a system, but I bet the PNR is too.