- 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).
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?
But Google and the rest of the "advertising" (euphemism for surveillance) industry track and create "profiles" based on a basket of data points, from ip/MAC address to the rest of their bag of tricks.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p...
And then a combination of pup and jq to parse the video titles from the HTML file:
cat watch-history.html \
| pup '.outer-cell .mdl-grid .content-cell:nth-child(2) json{}' \
| jq -r '.[] .children[0] | select(.tag != "br") | select(.text | startswith("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=") | not) | .text' \
> videos.txtWhat you do at work today doesn't mean you can't switch to a related ladder.
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.
If they get out of the way and let you do the thing you love how you want to do it you'll get good results for you and them.
If they treat you like a cog in a machine and assume they need to carrot and stick you into doing things because you might not really want to be there, you'll be miserable.
You probably still are, even if that's not your career path :)
I hope it can help you
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.
Man, you helped me realize how much the RSS era helped me out. I followed so many different sources of articles and had them roughly prioritized by my interest in them. It was really helpful reading thousands of articles and developing better and better mental models of how technology works while I was in high school. A lot has changed, but many of the mental models are still pretty accurate and handy for branching off and diving in deeper where I'm interested.
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?
I’ve been paying close attention to what YouTube shorts/tiktok do. They don’t just show you the same genre or topic or even set of topics. They are constantly in an explore-exploit pattern. Constantly trying to figure out the next thing that’ll keep your attention, show you a bunch of that content, then on to the next thing. Each interest cluster builds towards a peak then tapers off.
So it’s not like if you see baking videos it’ll keep you in that comfort zone forever.
Twitter is an example of being entirely in the comfort cage - it links you with people who you agree with, even going out of the way to create these bubbles.
Meta seems to end up with a rage cage. If you criticize say, videos on how to become a billionaire, it would show more billionaire videos.
HN used to be the default. A forum where everyone is in the same cage. People criticize HN culture and thoughts, but sometimes it's just people being shown a side of the world they're not used to.
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.
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!
Platitude! Here’s a bunch of words that a normal human being would say followed by the main thrust of the response that two plus two is four. Here are some more words that plausibly sound human!
I realize that this is of course how it all actually works underneath — LLMs have to waffle their way to the point because of the nature of their training — but is there any hope to being able to post-process out the fluff? I want to distill down to an actual answer inside the inference engine itself, without having to use more language-corpus machinery to do so.
It’s like the age old problem of internet recipes. You want this:
500g wheat flour
280ml water
10g salt
10g yeast
It was at the age of five, sitting
on my grandmother’s lap in the
cool autumn sun on West Virginia
that I first tasted the perfect loaf…OpenAI has said they are working on making ChatGPT's output more configurable
People say they want one thing but then their actions and money go to another.
I do agree there's unnecessary fluff. But "just give me the recipe" isn't really what people want. And I don't think your represent some outlier take because really have you ever gotten a recipe exactly as you outlined — zero context – and gave a damn to make it?
The structure of recipe sites has less to do with revealed preferences and more to do with playing the SEO game.
Ratings or poster reputation.
I often use recipes from a particular chef's website, which are formulated with specific ingredients, steps, and, optionally, a video. I trust the chef since I've yet to try a bad recipe from him.
I also often use baking recipes from King Arthur based on ratings. They're also pretty consistently good and don't have much fluff.
I'm no expert, but with the "thinking" models, I'd hope the "be concise" step happens at the end. So it can waffle all it wants to itself until it gives me the answer.
Does it mean that AI knows more about us that many of our friends? Yes.
LLM understood the verbal assignment and gave an answer "from the top of its head" without performing any specialized analysis.
It'd be interesting to run it on yourself, at least, to see how accurate it is.
> 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.
I’m sure any profiler would be very confused by my reading history, but I really, really like poetry and Plato. So New Yorker, Atlantic, First Things, N+1.
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.
I wanted a tool that clean the data, tag them and bring a way to analyze them easily with a Notebooks and migrate.
I had a lot of "feels" getting through this :)
Every advertiser can access data like this easily, when you click "yeah sure" on every cookie banner this is the sort of data you're handing over... you could buy it too.
Every time someone says "they're listening to your conversations" we need to point out that with a surprisingly small amount of metadata across a large number of people, they can make inferred behavioral predictions that are good enough that they don't need to listen (it's still much more expensive to do so)
On a macro level people are very predictable, and we should be more reluctant about freely giving away the data that makes this so... because it's mostly being using against us.
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.
From my perspective the most interesting thing might be the blind spots or unexpected results. The unknown knows which brings new aha effects
What makes a huge difference here is the ease and speed. I recently did a similar analysis of my HN posts. I have hundreds of posts, and it took like 30 seconds with high quality results. Achieving this quality level would have taken me hours, and I have some relevant experience.
This certainly opens up some new possibilities - good ones like self-understanding, potentially ambiguous ones in areas such as HR, and clearly dystopian ones ...
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.
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.
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.
Did you try it on yourself?
What prompt do you use to avoid bias?
It’s funny and occasionally scary
Edit: be aware, usernames are case sensitive
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.
Ouch.
The Roast section was hilariously cutting, and not untrue.
Top Three Technologies: Are these supposed to be my favorites? Or just what I post about? Either way it got them wrong.
Predictions: I didn't know LLMs were capable of that type of sarcasm. Very clever.
Kudos
Absolutely savage.
This is great/hilarious, thank you.
> 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.
You know what must be done.
Brutal, and very accurate. This is great!
"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
https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/pjmlp
Feels like the predictions part picks a few random posts and generates predictions just based on one post at a time though.
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.
Finally I am understood.
Touche LLM
> An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details.Amazing.
Thanks!
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
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.
~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.]
seriously though, i have struggled with tab/bookmark hoarding, it's a huge relief when you recognize it for what it is and quit. IME the bigger/dustier the backlog gets the more vague psychological guilt accumulates, a weight which isn't truly recognized until it's gone.
Or maybe we just need to learn how to prioritize better? Or do some kind of stagewise workflow where the superficial ingestion/collection is followed by multiple steps of culling the less relevant stuff (but still without real deletion, just in case for later). Or perhaps we could now write a sentence of why we think the link may be relevant and what future event or future state of some project or development might make this link gain in relevance again? And then again we could declare that this has happened and what are now the links that are relevant?
I could see some LLM product in this space, but I think this market is fairly niche.
> 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.
PS: is your blog self-hosted ? what's the stack here ?
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.
Seems to be a fairly common issue.
---
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.
Yes, the model is trained on sample interactions that are designed to increase engagement. In other words, manipulate you. =)
I don't think of HN as a source itself but rather a way to discover sources. So I think my Pocket data reflects sources that I've discovered, but to your point, doesn't represent everything I've read from those sources.
[1] https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=85000&ot=2000&ic=2&oc=8&sb=in...
This is pretty impressive!
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
> 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]
"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."
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"
Though if it were me I would go with "Self-profiling with Pocket and O3"
Linkwarden is open source and self-hostable.
I wrote a python package [1] to ease the migration of Pocket exports to Linkwarden.
I would go even further: "I profiled myself ... using o3".