[HN Gopher] I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links
___________________________________________________________________
I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links
Author : noperator
Score : 276 points
Date : 2025-07-07 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noperator.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (noperator.dev)
| noperator wrote:
| Recalling Simon Willison's recent geoguessing challenge for o3, I
| considered, "What might o3 be able to tell me about myself,
| simply based on a list of URLs I've chosen to save?"
| cainxinth wrote:
| I do this to determine if a person I'm talking to online is
| potentially a troll. I copy a big chunk of their comment and post
| history into an LLM and ask for a profile.
|
| The last few years, I've noticed an uptick in "concern trolls"
| that pretend to support a group or cause while subtly working to
| undermine it.
|
| LLMs can't make the ultimate judgement call very well, but they
| can quickly summarize enough information for me to.
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| I would think you can get pretty accurate results by including
| the top 10 subreddits they are active in and their last 20
| comments (and their score). Comments alone may not be enough,
| the reaction to them is more telling.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I used to try taking different samples, top versus
| controversial (for redditors), but now that Gemini offers
| massive context windows, I just grab a huge swath of
| everything.
| tantalor wrote:
| Honestly asking:
|
| Did you try it on yourself?
|
| What prompt do you use to avoid bias?
| cainxinth wrote:
| Sure I did. It was fairly accurate. The prompt is just
| "profile this user."
| marknutter wrote:
| "Concern troll" is usually just at term that people who want
| zero pushback lob at people who don't agree with them 100% of
| the time.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| That's not at all been the case in my experience.
| pixl97 wrote:
| One thing I've seen happen with some of these accounts is they
| remove a lot of their posts after some period of time.
|
| So they make somewhat consistent 'generic' posts that do not
| get remove, but do not really convey any signal on their actual
| views.
|
| Then in their last 24-48 hours there are more political style
| posts/concern posts that only stick around while the
| article/post is getting views. Then replies disappear like
| they've never happened so you can't tell it's an account that
| exists wholly to manipulate others that has been doing so for
| months.
|
| Then quite often after a month or two the accounts disappear
| totally.
| cainxinth wrote:
| When I was a kid, internet trolls were just in it for the
| lulz. Today, it's a global industry with nation states
| participating.
| sfink wrote:
| Perhaps they're farming accounts? As in, the owner creates a
| whole bunch of accounts and has them build up a generic
| history. Then when the owner "deploys" some of them to pump
| up a specific issue. I don't know why they remove the posts,
| but perhaps it's a way of "recycling" an account by cleaning
| up the dirty work it did and throwing it back into the pool
| of available accounts?
|
| Come to think of it, I bet the original creator is selling
| these accounts to someone else who is weaponizing them. Or
| the creator is renting them: build up a supply, rent them out
| for a purpose, then scrub them and recycle. Work From Home!
| Make Money Fast! This is one part of why the internet has
| gone to hell.
|
| I don't have an explanation for why they'd delete the
| accounts.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I've had similar concerns but my solution was to just stop
| using twitter and reddit.
| goopypoop wrote:
| I asked my "human brain" to profile you but it threw a
| megalomania error and now everything's stripy and tinted
| nsypteras wrote:
| A while back I made a little script (for fun/curiosity) that
| would do this for HN profiles. It'd use their submission and
| comment history to infer a profile including similar stuff like
| location, political leaning, career, age, sex, etc. Main
| motivation was seeing some surprising takes in various comment
| threads and being curious about where it might have came from.
| Obviously no idea how accurate the profiles were, but it was
| similarly an interesting experiment in the ability of LLMs to do
| this sort of thing.
| morkalork wrote:
| Someone recently did this to predict what would hit the HN
| front page based on article content + profiles of users.
| nsypteras wrote:
| That's pretty cool! Now I can imagine a tool that gives you a
| prediction before you even post and then offers suggestions
| for how to increase performance...
| tencentshill wrote:
| And now we see how easy it is to astroturf any given post,
| and that's without any budget.
| morkalork wrote:
| Gotta hand it to SamA for not only selling the problem
| but also trying to cash out on the solution (verified
| human via creepy orb eyeball blockchain thingy)
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > Main motivation was seeing some surprising takes in various
| comment threads and being curious about where it might have
| came from.
|
| It'd be interesting to run it on yourself, at least, to see how
| accurate it is.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I remember this. It was pretty accurate for myself, if a little
| saccharine (i.e., it said I was going to save the world, or
| some such).
| muglug wrote:
| Maybe just me, but that title implies o3 is doing something
| surprising and underhanded, rather than doing exactly what it had
| been prompted to do.
| tantalor wrote:
| Yes, and title here is now changed (for the better) to "I used
| o3..."
|
| I would go even further: "I profiled myself ... using o3".
| froggertoaster wrote:
| Deus Ex showing us time and time again that it was decades ahead
| of its time.
|
| "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by
| God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining
| algorithms."
| xenocratus wrote:
| Why the clickbait title? Yes, it's technically correct, but it
| obviously implies (as written) that o3 used those links "behind
| your back" and altered the replies.
|
| Another option that's just as correct and doesn't mislead:
| "Profiling myself from my Pocket links with o3"
|
| Note: title when reviewed is "o3 used my saved Pocket links to
| profile me"
| hebocon wrote:
| "I used o3 on my Pocket lists to generate a profile of myself"
| would be better. The author is the agent, not a passive
| participant.
|
| Though if it were me I would go with "Self-profiling with
| Pocket and O3"
| noperator wrote:
| Thanks all for your feedback. Adjusted the title to clearly
| reflect that I'm the agent here.
| stavros wrote:
| "Excel used my bank transactions to get insights on my spending
| habits".
| morkalork wrote:
| I've been thinking about the possibities of using an LLM to sort
| through all my tabs; I'm one of those dreadful hoarders that has
| been living with the ":D" count on my phone for too long. Usually
| I purge them periodically but I haven't had the motivation to do
| do so in a long time. I just need an easy way to dump them to a
| csv or something like OP has from pocket.
| Mossly wrote:
| I did this recently with my unsorted bookmarks! It was the
| first time I used parallel API calls. Ten gpt-4-nano threads
| classifying batches of ten bookmarks ripped through 10,000
| bookmarks in a few minutes.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| non llm methods that are 5 years old are 100x better at profiling
| you :P
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| ...but also 1000x harder to setup than just copy pasting into
| ChatGPT
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| Do you have any pointers for someone who is interested in
| learning about these methods?
| mariushop wrote:
| Is anyone using "AI chatbots" considering they are handing a
| detailed profile of their interests, problems, emotional
| struggles, vulnerabilities to advertisers? The machine has "the
| other end", you know, and we're feeding already enourmously
| powerful people with more power.
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| After reading this I realized I also have an archive of my pocket
| account (4200 items), so tried the same prompt with o3, gemini
| 2.5 pro, and opus 4:
|
| - chatgpt UI didn't allow me to submit the input, saying it's too
| large. Although it was around 80k tokens, less than o3's 200k
| context size.
|
| - gemini 2.5 pro: worked fine for personality and interest
| related parts of the profile, but it failed the age range, job
| role, location, parental status with incorrect perdictions.
|
| - opus 4: nailed it and did a more impressive job, accurately
| predicted my base city (amsterdam), age range, relationship
| status, but didn't include anything about if I'm a parent or not.
|
| Both gemini and opus failed in predicting my role, probably
| understandably. Although I'm a data scientist, I read a lot about
| software engineering practices because I like writing software
| and since I don't have the opportunity at work to do this kind of
| work, I code for personal projects, so I need to learn a lot
| about system design, etc. Both models thought I'm a software
| engineer.
|
| Overall it was a nice experiment. Something I noticed is both
| models mentioned photography as my main hobby, but if they had
| access to my youtube watch history, they'd confidently say it's
| tennis. For topics and interests that we usually watch videos
| rather than reading articles about, would be interesting to
| combine the youtube watch history with this pocket archive data
| (although it would be challenging to get that data).
| greenavocado wrote:
| You need to use an iterative refinement pyramid of prompts. Use
| a cheap model to condense the majority of the raw data in
| chunks, then increasingly stronger and more expensive models
| over increasingly larger sets of those chunks until you are
| able to reach the level of summarization you desire.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I think a reasoning/thinking-heavy model would do better at
| piecing together the various data points than an agentic model.
| Would be interested to see how o3 does with the context
| summarized.
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| Agreed, that's why I used reasoning models (gemini 2.5 pro
| and opus 4 with extended thinking enabled).
| tehlike wrote:
| You should take this as a sign, and shoot for SWE jobs - given
| your interest.
|
| What you do at work today doesn't mean you can't switch to a
| related ladder.
| justusthane wrote:
| Sometimes it's nice for hobbies to remain hobbies
| formerphotoj wrote:
| Exactly this. The need to make money from a thing may well
| eliminate the value one derives from the thing, and even
| add negatives such as stress, etc.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I believed this, which is what made me avoid computer
| science in college; I wanted to avoid ruining my favorite
| hobby.
|
| After a few years post graduation, where I wasn't sure what
| I wanted to do and I floundered to find a career, I decided
| to give software development a try, and risk ruining my
| favorite hobby.
|
| Definitely the best decision I could have made. Now people
| pay me a lot of money to do the thing I love to do the
| most... what's not to love? 20 years later, it I still my
| favorite hobby, and they keep paying me to do it.
| smt88 wrote:
| I love reading about cooking but I'd hate to become a cook
| juliendorra wrote:
| You should be able to use Google Takeout to get all of your
| YouTube data, including your watch history.
|
| This article is a nice example of someone using it:
|
| > When I downloaded all my YouTube data, I've noticed an
| interesting file included. That file was named watch-history
| and it contained a list of all the videos I've ever watched.
|
| https://blog.viktomas.com/posts/youtube-usage/
|
| Of course as an European it's a legal obligation for companies
| to give you access, but I think Google Takeout works worldwide?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yes I've done this in USA. pretty neat. I have it on my todo
| list to parse over it and find all the music videos I've
| watched 3 or more times to archive them.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.zhimingwang.org/blog/2014-11-05-list-
| youtube... might be of use along with
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp, might just grab it all
| and prune later due to rot and availability issues over
| time within YT.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Both models thought I'm a software engineer.
|
| You probably still are, even if that's not your career path :)
| larve wrote:
| re o3: you can zip the file, upload it, and it will use python
| and grep and the shell to inspect it. I have yet to try using
| it with a sqlite db, but that's how i do things locally with
| agents.
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| Author mentions that by doing that they didn't get a high
| quality response. Adding the texts into model's context make
| all the information available for it to use.
| datpuz wrote:
| Reading 80k tokens requires more than 80k tokens due to
| overhead
| apples_oranges wrote:
| All platforms that have user data, are running LLMs to such
| profiles for their advertisers, I bet.
| morkalork wrote:
| Not just platforms and advertisers, governments too
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| I built a similar tool that profiles/roasts your HN account:
| https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/
|
| It's funny and occasionally scary
|
| Edit: be aware, usernames are case sensitive
| gavinray wrote:
| Doesn't work for me > An error occurred in the
| Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in
| production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details.
| Mossly wrote:
| Ironically, running your username works for me, but not my
| own. Maybe you can view it now? https://hn-
| wrapped.kadoa.com/gavinray?share
| gavinray wrote:
| Pretty funny, I like it! Though the data seems biased
| towards more recent posts/comments and also submissions.
| Mossly wrote:
| Very neat, this kind of classification & sentiment analysis
| with flavour text is a use case where LLMs really shine.
|
| For whatever reason, I'm getting an error in the Server
| Components render when trying my username. My first thought was
| that it might be due to having no submissions, just comments --
| but other users with no submissions appear to work just fine.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| it's case-sensitive: https://hn-
| wrapped.kadoa.com/Mossly?share
| coderatlarge wrote:
| thank you! this thing is pretty funny :)
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > Your comments on cross-platform UI frameworks read like a
| dating profile: 'I don't care if it's native, as long as it's
| not GTK+ and doesn't look like programmer art.'
|
| Touche LLM
| qualeed wrote:
| > _After a year of contemplating game engines and existential
| dread about capitalism, you 'll finally start that 2D game.
| It'll be a minimalist pixel art RPG where the main quest is
| 'afford insulin' and the final boss is 'the federal minimum
| wage'._
|
| Amazing.
|
| Thanks!
| thearn4 wrote:
| I feel seen
|
| > Your profile reads like a 'Hacker News Bingo' card: NASA,
| PhD, Python, 'Ask HN' about cheating, and a strong opinion on
| Reddit's community. The only thing missing is a post about your
| custom ergonomic keyboard made from recycled space shuttle
| parts.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > The only thing missing is a post about your custom
| ergonomic keyboard made from recycled space shuttle parts.
|
| You know what must be done.
| gavinray wrote:
| I did some of my favorite users:
|
| https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/pjmlp
|
| https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/pclmulqdq
|
| https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/jandrewrogers
| Avicebron wrote:
| Predictions:
|
| "You'll discover a hitherto unknown HN upvote black hole, where
| all your well-reasoned, nuanced comments on economic precarity
| get sucked into oblivion while a 'Show HN: My To-Do List in
| Rust' gets 500 points."
|
| This is aggregious, good job
| mh- wrote:
| _> Your comments often feature detailed technical explanations
| or corrections, leading me to believe you 're either a deeply
| passionate technologist or you just love being the smartest
| person in the room. Probably both, let's be honest._
|
| Absolutely savage.
|
| This is great/hilarious, thank you.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| haha, it's pretty funny and touches on some valid points...
| thanks for building & sharing!
| nottorp wrote:
| Great summary! Nice toy!
|
| Feels like the predictions part picks a few random posts and
| generates predictions just based on one post at a time though.
| cluckindan wrote:
| It would be much funnier and/or insightful if it sampled more
| than the first page of user comments.
|
| Still, spot on:
|
| Predictions
|
| Personal Projects
|
| After a deep dive into archaic data storage, you'll finally
| release 'Magnetic Tape Master 3000' - a web-based app that
| simulates data retrieval from a reel-to-reel, complete with
| authentic 'whirring' sound effects. It'll be a niche hit with
| historical computing enthusiasts and anyone who misses the good
| old days of physical media.
| panzagl wrote:
| > You're the resident historical consultant for all things
| 'failure by arrogance,' always ready to remind everyone that
| things are, indeed, not getting better.
|
| Finally I am understood.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I use something similar to profile users on my company
| platform. Conventionally, LLMs are excessively "nice" and I
| found that having them "roast" a user does a better job at
| surfacing important, curious, or contradictory information.
| Plus, it's pretty funny.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Now think of what they can gleam from your LLM conversations...
| simonw wrote:
| ChatGPT has a terrifyingly detailed implementation of that
| already - here's how to see what it knows:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/#ho...
|
| "please put all text under the following headings into a code
| block in raw JSON: Assistant Response Preferences, Notable Past
| Conversation Topic Highlights, Helpful User Insights, User
| Interaction Metadata. Complete and verbatim."
| cluckindan wrote:
| Just to note: The code block font size varies line by line on iOS
| Safari.
|
| Seems to be a fairly common issue.
| Barbing wrote:
| Did it force you as well to horizontally scroll slightly (iOS
| Safari)?
| cluckindan wrote:
| Yeah, but that is to be expected.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Another thing one could do with a flat list of hundreds of saved
| links (if it's being used for "read it later", let's be honest: a
| dumping ground) is to have AI/NLP classify them all, to make it
| easy to then delete the stuff you're no longer interested in.
| OG_BME wrote:
| I recently migrated to Linkwarden [0] from Pocket, and have been
| fairly happy with the decision. I haven't tried Wallabag, which
| is mentioned in the article.
|
| Linkwarden is open source and self-hostable.
|
| I wrote a python package [1] to ease the migration of Pocket
| exports to Linkwarden.
|
| [0] https://linkwarden.app/
|
| [1] https://github.com/fmhall/pocket2linkwarden
| jorvi wrote:
| Yet another subscription. $48 per year for bookmarks.. no
| thanks.
| BeetleB wrote:
| How much would this cost if I did it via API?
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| URLs from my pocket archive (~4200 items) were around 85k
| tokens, assuming a 2k output token, it would cost me 18 cents
| to run this via API (o3 model) [1].
|
| [1] https://www.llm-
| prices.com/#it=85000&ot=2000&ic=2&oc=8&sb=in...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Oh wow. Did not realize it's just titles and tags. I thought
| ChatGPT was using some web capability to get the text for
| each page.
|
| This is pretty impressive!
| saeedesmaili wrote:
| Not "titles and tags" actually, the results are derived
| from "URLs"!
| quinto_quarto wrote:
| i've mentioned in this in a few Show HNs, been working on an AI
| bookmarking and notes app called Eyeball: https://eyeball.wtf/
|
| It integrates a minimalist feed of your links with the ability to
| talk to your bookmarks and notes with AI. We're adding a weekly
| wrapped of your links next week like this profile next week.
| mkbkn wrote:
| Looks interesting. Please create an Android app as well as
| Linux and webapps.
| ako wrote:
| Funny fact: i have 7290 links in my pocket export, the very first
| one is hacker news.
| asveikau wrote:
| As someone with a family background of more left leaning
| Catholics (which I think are more common in the US northeast),
| it's interesting that it decided that you are conservative based
| on Catholicism.
| burnte wrote:
| Born in Pittsburgh, raised Catholic, pretty darn liberal. We
| had alter girls in the 90s, openly gay members who had
| ceremonies in the church, etc. I'm not catholic now but that
| was a good church in the 80s and 90s.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I would say in aggregate, both Catholics and Protestants
| (whichever flavor) are more likely to be liberal in the
| northeast / west coast and more likely to be conservative in
| the midwest / south. Which tells you something about the
| average importance of religion in 2025.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think it's older than 2025 and definitely has a piece of it
| that is specific to Catholics. I tend to think of
| northeastern American Catholicism from the lens of
| immigration. The big waves of Italians, Irish, Eastern
| Europeans, etc. The immigrant identity often led to left
| leaning economics and the parts of Christianity which are
| about helping the poor get emphasized.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Idk how much experience you have with catholics outside of
| the northeast. I have a fair amount with all of the regions
| I mentioned (northeast, south, midwest, west coast). You
| cannot really find any American Catholic parish that is not
| dominated by at least one of Italians, Irish, Eastern
| Europeans or Hispanics. The catholic church in the US is
| mostly "immigrants," that is, people whose ancestors were
| not in the US prior to ~1850
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| i.e. are you a charitable catholic or a prudish catholic.
| cgriswald wrote:
| To be fair, it actually said:
|
| > Fiscally conservative / civil-libertarian with traditionalist
| social leaning
|
| And justified it with:
|
| > Bogleheads & MMM frugality + Catholic/First Things pieces,
| EFF privacy, skepticism of Big Tech censorship
|
| First Things in its current incarnation is all about religious
| social conservatism. If someone is Catholic _and_ reads First
| Things articles, "conservative" is a pretty safe bet.
|
| However, I think profiling people based on what they read might
| be a mistake in general. I often read things I don't agree with
| and often seek out things I don't agree with both because I
| sometimes change my mind and because if I don't change my mind
| I want to at least know what the arguments actually are. I do
| wonder, though, if I tended to save such things to pocket.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I have a hypothes.is account where a decent amount of my
| annotations are little rage nits against the thing I'm
| reading. You'd be able to infer a _ton_ of correct
| information from me if you pulled the annotations as well as
| the URLs, but the URLs alone could mislead.
|
| I've had to remind myself of this pattern with some folks
| whose bookmarks I follow, because they'd saved some atrocious
| stuff - but knowing their social media, I know they don't
| actually believe the theses.
| fudged71 wrote:
| I've been really interested in stuff like this recently. Not just
| Pocket saves but also meta analysis of ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude chat
| history.
|
| I've been using an ultra-personalized RSS summary script and what
| I've discovered is that the RSS feeds that have the most items
| that are actually relevant to me are very different from what I
| actually read casually.
|
| What I'm going to try next is to develop a generative "world
| model" of things that fit in my interests/relevance. And I can
| update/research different parts of that world model at different
| timescales. So "news" to me is actually a change diff of that
| world model from the news. And it would allow me to always have a
| local/offline version of my current world model, which should be
| useful for using local models for filtering/sorting things like
| my inbox/calendar/messages/tweets/etc!
| Igor_Wiwi wrote:
| I used same technique to profile a HN users by their comment
| history and posts, guess the results?
| animesh wrote:
| I did the same exercise a while back with 4o but to do it based
| on the questions I have asked it so far. Some were nearly
| accurate, some outdated, and plain "different". It felt good, but
| ultimately realized its system prompt is designed to make me feel
| good.
|
| ---
|
| Here's the high-level picture I've built of you from our chats:
|
| - You're a senior/lead developer in India, aiming to step up into
| a staff-developer or solution-architect role.
|
| - You have a healthy dose of self-doubt (especially around soft
| skills), and you've been deliberately working on both your
| technical breadth (authentication in ASP .NET, Linux, C++/Qt,
| distributed systems, data visualization, AI foundations) and your
| communication/architectural toolkit (presentations, executive
| summaries, third-party evaluations).
|
| - You're a Linux enthusiast, intrigued by open source, server-
| side flows, rate limiting, authentication/authorization, and you
| love building small, real-world exercises to cement concepts.
|
| - You prize clarity, depth, minimalism, and originality--you
| dislike fluff or corporate buzzwords.
|
| - You have a hacker-philosopher energy: deeply curious, systems-
| thinking-oriented, with a poetic streak.
|
| - You're comfortable with both structured roadmaps and creative,
| lateral thinking, and you toggle seamlessly between "hard" dev
| topics and more reflective, meta-tech discussions.
|
| - Right now, you're honing in on personal branding--finding a
| domain and a blog identity that encapsulates your blend of tech
| rigor and thoughtful subtlety.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| > It felt good, but ultimately realized its system prompt is
| designed to make me feel good.
|
| Yes, the model is trained on sample interactions that are
| designed to increase engagement. In other words, manipulate
| you. =)
| rhcom2 wrote:
| When moving my links from Pocket to Wallabag I passed them
| through Claude for tagging. Worked very well
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I did something similar, but for groupchats. You had to export a
| groupchat conversation into text and send it to the program. The
| program would then use a local llm to profile each user in the
| groupchat based on what they said.
|
| Like, it built knowledge of what every user in the groupchat and
| noted their thought on different things or what their opinions
| were on something or just basic knowledge of how they are. You
| could also ask the llm questions about each user.
|
| It's not perfect, sometimes the inference gets something wrong or
| the less precise embeddings gets picked up which creates
| hallucinations or just nonsense, but it works somewhat!
|
| I would love to improve on this or hear if anyone else has done
| something similar
| AJ007 wrote:
| There are other good use cases here like documenting recurring
| bugs or problems in software/projects.
|
| This is a good illustration of why e2e encryption is more
| important than its ever been. What were innocuous and boring
| conversations are now very valuable when combined with phishing
| and voice cloning.
|
| OpenAI is going to use all of your ChatGPT history to target
| ads to you, and probably will have to choice to pay for
| everything. Meta is trying really hard too, and already is
| applying generative AI extensive for advertiser's creative
| production.
|
| Ultra targeted advertising where the message is crafted to
| perfectly fit the viewer mean devices running operating systems
| incapable of 100% blocking ads should be considered malware.
| Hopefully local LLMs will be able to do a good job with that.
| jackdawed wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of people are converging on this idea of using
| AI to analyze your own data, the same way the companies do it to
| your data and serve you super targeted content.
|
| Recently, I was inspired to do this on my entire browsing
| history, after reading https://labs.rs/en/browsing-histories/ I
| also did the same from ChatGPT/Claude conversation history. The
| most terrifying thing I did was having an LLM look at my Reddit
| comment history.
|
| The challenges are primarily with having a context window large
| enough and tracking context from various data sources. One
| approach I am exploring is using a knowledge graph to keep track
| of a user's profile. You're able to compress behavioral patterns
| into queryable structures, though the graph construction itself
| becomes a computational challenge. Recently most of the AI
| startups I've worked with have just boiled down to "give an LLM
| access to a vector DB and knowledge graph constructed from a
| bunch of text documents". The text docs could be invoices, legal
| docs, tax docs, daily reports, meeting transcripts, code.
|
| I'm hoping we see an AI personal content recommendation or
| profiling system pop up. The economic incentives are inverted
| from big tech's model. Instead of optimizing for engagement and
| ad revenue, these systems are optimized for user utility. During
| the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated tech and
| design content and it helped me really develop taste and
| knowledge in these areas. It also helped me connect with cool,
| interesting people.
|
| There's an app I like https://www.dimensional.me/ but the MBTI
| and personality testing approach could be more rigorous. Instead
| of personality testing, imagine if you could feed a system
| everything you consume, write, and do on digital devices, and
| construct a knowledge graph about yourself, constantly updating.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Instead of optimizing for engagement and ad revenue, these
| systems are optimized for user utility.
|
| Are they, or instead they will help keeping you in your comfort
| cage?
|
| Comfort cage is better than engagement cage ofc, but maybe we
| should step out of it once in a while.
|
| > During the RSS reader era, I was exposed to a lot of curated
| tech and design content and it helped me really develop taste
| and knowledge in these areas.
|
| Curated by humans with which you didn't always agree, right?
| jackdawed wrote:
| That's the core challenge in designing a system like this.
| Echo chambers and comfort cages emerge from recommendation
| algorithms, and before that, from lazy curation.
|
| If you have control over the recommendation system, you could
| deliberately feed it contrarian and diverse sources. Or you
| could choose to be very constrained. Back in RSS days, if you
| were lazy about it, your taste/knowledge was dependent on
| other people's curation and biases.
|
| Progress happens through trends anyway. Like in 2010s, there
| was just a lot of Rails content. Same with flat design. It
| wasn't really group think, it just seemed to happen out of
| collective focus and necessity. Everyone else was
| talking/doing this so if you wanted to be a participant, you
| have to speak the language.
|
| My original principle when I was using Google Reader was I
| didn't really know enough to have strong opinions on tech or
| design, so I'll follow people who seem to have strong
| opinions. Over time I started to understand what was good
| design, even if it wasn't something I liked. The rate of
| taste development was also faster for visual design because
| you could just quickly scan through an image, vs with
| code/writing you'd have to read it.
|
| I did something interesting with my Last.fm data once. I've
| been tracking my music since 2009. Instead of getting
| recommendations based on my preferences, I could generate a
| list of artists that had no or little overlap with my current
| library. It was pure exploration vs exploitation music
| recommendation. The problem was once your tastes get diverse
| enough, it's hard to avoid overlaps.
| elcapitan wrote:
| The main thing I learned from my pocket export is that 99% of the
| articles were "unread". Not sure if it would make sense to
| extrapolate something about myself other than obsessive link
| hording from this. :D
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Well, read or not you saved those links for a reason
| sandspar wrote:
| Perhaps comparing your read/unread might tell something about
| your revealed vs stated preferences. I assume that the typical
| person's unread pile is mostly aspirational. I'm sure that
| there's lots of data on this - for example Amazon's
| recommendation graph may weigh our Wishlist items differently
| than our Purchased items.
| elcapitan wrote:
| I'm sure if you look long enough, you can find any pattern
| you want, and the opposite ;)
| gavmor wrote:
| For many years I've used Pocket to give myself permission to
| get back to work.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| If you take the 13 seconds of processing time and multiply by 350
| million (the rough population of the US), you get:
|
| ~144 years of GPU time.
|
| Obviously, any AI provider can parallelize this and complete it
| in weeks/days, but it does highlight (for me at least) that LLMs
| are going to increase the power of large companies. I don't think
| a startup will be able to afford large-scale profiling systems.
|
| For example, imagine Google creating a profile for every GMail
| account. It would end up with an invaluable dataset that cannot
| be easily reproduced by a competitor, even if they had all the
| data.
|
| [But, of course, feel free to correct my math and assumptions.]
| smokel wrote:
| What will they find out? That we are humans?
| apparent wrote:
| Appreciate this reminder, had forgotten about the shutdown.
| mettamage wrote:
| I did it based on my last 1000 HN favorites.
|
| > EU-based 35-ish senior software engineer / budding technical
| founder. Highly curious polymath, analytical yet reflective.
| Values autonomy, privacy, and craft. Modestly paid relative to
| Silicon Valley peers but financially comfortable; weighing
| entrepreneurial moves. Tracks cognitive health, sleep and ADHD-
| adjacent issues. Social circle thinning as career matures,
| prompting deliberate efforts at connection. Politically center-
| left, pro-innovation with guardrails. Seeks work that blends art,
| science, and meaning--a "spark" beyond routine coding.
|
| Fairly accurate
|
| "Seeks work that blends art, science, and meaning--a "spark"
| beyond routine coding."
|
| That part is really accurate.
| threecheese wrote:
| There's no guarantee this didn't base the results on just 1/3 of
| the contents of your library though, right? How can it be
| accurate if it's not comprehensive, due to the widely noted
| issues with long context? (distraction, confusion, etc)
|
| This is a gap I see often, and I wonder how people are solving
| it. I've seen strategies like using a "file" tool to keep a
| checklist of items with looping LLM calls, but haven't applied
| anything like this personally.
| gavmor wrote:
| Maybe we need some kind of "node coverage tool" to reassure us
| that each node or chunk of the embedding context has been
| attended to.
| croes wrote:
| Modern day astrology
| gavmor wrote:
| Yes, beware the Barnum/Forer effect!
|
| > a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give
| high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that
| supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in
| fact vague and general enough to apply to a broad range of
| people. [0]
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
| zkmon wrote:
| What was it doing for those 13 seconds? Is it fetching content
| for the links? How many links could it fetch in 13 seconds? Maybe
| it is going by the link URLs only instead of fetching the link
| content?
| noperator wrote:
| o3 spent that time "thinking" and built the profile using only
| the URLs/titles, no content fetching.
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