I've been doing this for a long time, it's amazing what ChatGPT can suss out with enough data. I like to feed it comments from message boards to try to uncover interesting business opportunities, or threads to follow for my own research.
Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#52Just pasting my last 100 comments into ChatGPT using the API and cutting out anything positive it said about me…
“Your communication style is direct and often adversarial, using rhetorical questions and sharp analogies to pressure-test assumptions, with little tolerance for what you see as naïve, performative, or abstract reasoning. You prioritize competence, execution, and practical tradeoffs over signaling or theory, and while that makes your analysis grounded and often incisive, it can also make your stance appear combative and less receptive to edge cases or emerging paradigms that don’t yet fit established incentive structures”
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#53Story time: My first full time job (early 2000s) was working for a firm that did online cybersecurity related investigations for Fortune 500 companies (generally via a 3rd party law firm they had retained). A big part of this was running investigations into people running "pump and dump" stock schemes on Yahoo message boards. We would generally start by scraping all of the posts for a user who had instigated one of t…
People search engines do a lot of the heavy lifting and can give you that data on a platter for a few dollars. I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them. It's not great that _they_ have a bunch of data about me, but I'd rather it be in one place that tries to safeguard it than in a bunch of places all over the Internet. (There are A LOT of people search engines.)
As for using clues to discover people's whereabouts and such: lots of police/detective shows have turned "finding where people are through Instagram photos" into a meme. Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#54This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me . The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN. But mayb…
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now. Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
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Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#55This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me . The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN. But mayb…
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now. Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
It's a lot to take in, if I'm being honest. Growing up in the sort of cultures where gossip and tabloids were the norm, this tool is painful to me in a way I'm not sure many folks can understand. It's not even low friction anymore; it's no friction, in the sense that anyone with a chatbot and minimal rails can just ask it to do these sorts of profiles now, on anyone they choose.
We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools.
That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#56hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).
I actually appreciate this. I definitely panicked that one time I posted something spicy about a past employer using this handle and couldn't remove it, but forcing that accountability makes me think about what I say and whether it's worth posting it for everyone to see forever.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#57Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#58Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a shame, I don’t have any feelings about you and wish you well regardless.
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You mispronounced genuinely polite. It is free to be so. Is that not allowed here when someone doesn’t have strong feelings? If you care here about here, you care too much imho, find something that matters to care about.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#60It is interesting that Marc Andreesen was having a bit of a X crash out over his belief that introspection is bad [1]
I disagree because I tend to seek a middle way. I would agree that too much (excessive) introspection is bad. But I would argue that too little is equally bad.
I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive. I'm wondering how much LLM analysis of my public and private life can remain healthy.