Gemini figured out my nephew’s name
23 comments
·May 19, 2025paffdragon
bsimpson
For the last 2 decades, sites like reddit have been pseudonymous. You might mostly be careful not to give too much context about your daily life, but every once in a while, maybe you leak a little detail. Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity.
As these models are trained on every piece of content ever written online, there are going to be a whole bunch of identity cracks, the equivalent of brute forcing a password.
AIs are going to make judgments about your character and personality based on everything you've ever written.
Guesses are going to come out about which burner accounts you've used, because the same password was used on otherwise unrelated accounts.
Essays you wrote in high school are going to resurface and be connected to your adult persona.
There was a time when an 8 character password was the state of the art, and now it can be cracked instantly. In the same way, sleuthing that would have been an impractical amount of work until recently is going to pierce the privacy veil of the internet in ways that could be really uncomfortable for people who have spent 3 decades assuming the internet is an anonymous place.
SchemaLoad
Don't even need to match passwords. You can find alt accounts by just matching word usage frequency and other language style. Anyone can do this with just the public comments. It's going to be awful.
simonw
You may well be able to do this on-device right now. The latest local models are all capable of tool calls and summarization, which is what this demo needs.
A decent sized Qwen 3 or Gemma 3 might well do the job. Mistral 3.1 Small is great too.
(Personally I'd be happy to pipe my email through an LLM from a respectable vendor that promises not to train on my inputs - Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini all promise that for paid API usage.)
colechristensen
Today I put together a demo of gemma3 27b parameter running locally looking through my photo library for event fliers, it extracts the information satisfactorily well. With some enhancement I expect it will be quite useful.
delichon
> This thread is also about a cousin’s son, Norbert’s son, named Fulham Rod
For Norbert to name his son Ful Rod seems like a cycle of abuse.
cooper_ganglia
Norbert is, in fact, breaking the cycle. Rock on, Ful Rod.
the_lonely_time
Full ham rod. Wild name.
qntmfred
I told ChatGPT my mom's name the day my account got persistent memory, last april. I also told it to figure out my dad's name. Once a month or so I would ask it my mom and dad's name. By november it had figured out my dad's name.
skylissue
Unfortunately I feel like the fact that your dad's name is the same as yours somewhat diminishes that accomplishment.
rubitxxx10
The post should be titled “Gemini figured out my son’s name.”
qmr
Page layout broken on mobile.
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bryan0
Reader mode fixes this. It’s a handy feature when you see broken layout
gregschlom
Yes. Thankfully reader mode on Firefox mobile works well.
IX-103
It works in landscape mode on mobile, but is broken in portrait mode.
zoklet-enjoyer
That's a unique name
If you're on Chrome, go into desktop view and zoom out
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
you wrote a MCP tool and it searched your email in the way you instructed it to? what is the point of this article? why are you saying readonly access to emails? what other access would a email message have? why is it presented with a clickbait title?
Nice. One thing that I am concerned about is giving my emails to Gemini (or any other third party). The article mentioned that they wrote a new MCP server because they didn't trust existing third party tools. For me it is the same, but including third party LLMs. Someone told once that if optimizing your algorithm is to much work, just wait until computers get faster. Maybe I'll wait until I can do this on-device.