What Your Email Address Reveals About You: LLMs and Digital Footprints
16 comments
·February 19, 2025nico
peab
That's sort of the point. Those personality tests are similar to astrology - they're mostly not accurate, but they hold a tiny bit of truth. The question is, can that tiny bit of truth be useful? I posit that it can.
cmdtab
Nice way to collect emails for marketing spam. The post seem AI generated as well.
peab
I knew someone would say that lol. The website itself has google auth, but for this feature I promise I'm not storing the emails. I know the hacker news crowd haha
ryantj54
I feel like this could be taken as a meta commentary about how easy it is to put someone in a box based on one or two facts about them, and the best generalizing function we have to date is able to do that very well... no surprise that my personal email "ropebunny69@gmail.com" reveals my playful love of rock climbing
devilbunny
Richard Osman, who has worked as a screenwriter, producer, and TV host, has a lovely series of novels in the Agatha Christie style called Thursday Murder Club about a group of elderly residents of a retirement community who solve cold cases. One is a retired nurse named Joyce who is constantly fumbling with modernity. After several rejections she ends up with “GreatJoy69” as an Instagram user name, using a nickname she had been given by a doctor who wanted to sleep with her (which she only realizes and regrets not having done so in retrospect), combined with her daughter’s birth year, and is amazed at all her DM’s in such short time.
ideashower
Having a text box to enter an email address without saying anywhere what you'll do with that information or whether you will retain it in any form is a big red flag tbh...
peab
Fair. I promise I'm not collecting emails. TBH I don't think the hackernews crowd is the right target for a Tarot App lol. I just thought this was adjacent to it and would be interesting.
simonw
That story says:
> Estimates for GPT4, for example, give training data sizes of up to 1 petabyte of data.
I followed the provided link, which lead to an ad-laden https://seifeur.com/chat-gpt-4-data-size/ article which looks suspiciously like AI-generated slop. It ends with this set of Q&As which make no sense at all:
> How much data was used to train ChatGPT-4?
> ChatGPT-4 was trained on a dataset size of 570 GB.
> How does the size of GPT-4 compare to GPT-3 in terms of training data?
> GPT-4 has 45 gigabytes of training data, which is significantly larger than GPT-3’s 17 gigabytes.
> How many terabytes of text data does GPT-4 utilize compared to GPT-3?
> GPT-4 utilizes a dataset of 1 petabyte, which is notably larger than GPT-3’s 45 terabytes.
peab
that's one of the first 10 links that show up on google when you search for "gpt4 training size". If it is AI generated slop, that's unfortunate. I probably didn't spend enough time looking for sources for the size of GPT4's training data. But to my defense, I have ad block on, so I did not know that link was ad ridden.
platelminto
Surprisingly, it didn't infer anything from my protonmail email address.
eek2121
Their tool got it mostly right for me.
Tepix
pretty lame result for me
gostsamo
I gave it two of my secondary emails. In both cases it decided that I leave in an english speaking country missing obvious hints that I'm actually not a native english speaker. The rest of the email addresses was on the nose, so it managed to guess those parts.
Not really impressed, tbh, but still fun.
This looks just like those personality tests or what kind of fruit are you, etc
At best it’s just seo spam, at worst it’s collecting people’s emails for direct spam