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I used o3 to profile myself from my saved Pocket links

(noperator.dev)
523 points noperator | 4 comments | 07 Jul 25 12:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.841s | source
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saeedesmaili ◴[07 Jul 25 14:09 UTC] No.44490550[source]▶
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).

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juliendorra ◴[07 Jul 25 14:53 UTC] No.44491019[source]▶
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?

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1. yubblegum ◴[08 Jul 25 12:43 UTC] No.44499423[source]▶
This can give a false sense of what Google (Alphabet) actually knows about you. That above is Google playing the game of 'ok, here is what we know of your activities on youtube when logged in!'

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.

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2. dietr1ch ◴[08 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44500827[source]▶
Internally at Google a toy tool to peek into your own personal advertisement profile was released and taken down within a week or two because it was creepy knowledgeable about you.
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3. ariwilson ◴[08 Jul 25 20:40 UTC] No.44503885[source]▶
when?
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4. dietr1ch ◴[09 Jul 25 15:00 UTC] No.44510840{3}[source]▶
Probably sometime around 2018 or 2019, I don't recall, but it was before the covid lockdown