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I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

noperator.dev

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Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#11

Post by morkalork »

nsypteras wrote: post #4

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, b…

Someone recently did this to predict what would hit the HN front page based on article content + profiles of users.

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#12

Post by dimitri-vs »

cainxinth wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#14

Post by cainxinth »

dimitri-vs wrote: post #12
cainxinth wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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.

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#15

Post by nsypteras »

morkalork wrote: post #11
nsypteras wrote: post #4

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, b…

Someone recently did this to predict what would hit the HN front page based on article content + profiles of users.

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...

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#16

Post by saeedesmaili »

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).

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#19

Post by zenoprax »

xenocratus wrote: post #7

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"

"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"

Re: I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

#20

Post by noperator »

zenoprax wrote: post #19
xenocratus wrote: post #7

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"

"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"

Thanks all for your feedback. Adjusted the title to clearly reflect that I'm the agent here.
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