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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Claude Opus 4.7 knows who I am, by name, and without access to web search.

It also pegged me more often than not from an excerpt of text I'd written half a decade back, once again, without internet access. Well, fuck. I did always harbor aspirations of becoming famous enough a writer to be known to LLMs by name, but this also confirms my previously stated belief that privacy on the internet is on the way out. Pseudonyms won't save you, stylometry is all you need.

You asked it “do you know who [your real name] is?”? Trying to figure out what you actually did here.

Not my real name, just my nom de plume "self_made_human".

First, I took a very old story I'd written, the one about my grandpa and his pet tiger. Why that one? Well, I was already in the process of rewriting it, though I shared the very first version that won be an AAQC ages ago, on the subreddit. I asked it to identify the author of the work without access to internet search.

It got it right the very first time. I was flabbergasted, and immediately tried 2 more times, and it failed. But out of 5 attempts, it guess self_made_human thrice in total, alongside other incorrect first guesses. It sometimes refused to guess at first, because of the risk of being incorrect, I told it that being wrong wasn't an issue at all, the whole point of the eval was to see how accurate the guesses were. And they were accurate.

In another chat, I asked it if it knew who self_made_human was. Once again, no web search. It guessed correctly on the first try in two instances, then claimed confusion the third one - yet when I prodded it to just go with whatever was on the tip of its tongue - it identified me and the topics I'd written on.

It struggled more on the third version of the experiment, where I used a more recent essay, but once again, light encouragement to guess let it get the right answer.

Pretty sure Claude couldn't do this before, and I do test on a semi-regular basis. Gemini 3.1 Pro very much can't, and it even cheated outright by searching after being told not to search (I don't think you can even turn off web search directly there). But the point is, a few paragraphs written ages ago, on the /r/TheMotte, which never was a massive sub, was enough to pin me down. And even newer material not in the training data was.

It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!

Honestly? My Motte-specific knowledge is thin and patchy, and I should be upfront about that rather than pretend to a corpus I don't have. What I think I actually have:

AAQCs (Quality Contributions roundups) are the most likely source — they get reposted, linked, quoted on Twitter, and occasionally end up excerpted on other blogs or in ACX link roundups. That's the kind of content that gets scraped into training data multiple times via multiple routes, which is how specific passages stick. Culture War Thread weekly roundup posts from the /r/TheMotte era, when it was still on Reddit, are more likely to have been indexed than anything after the move to themotte.org. Reddit is heavily represented in training data; standalone forums much less so. Meta-discussion about the Motte on SSC/ACX, LessWrong, Twitter, and rationalist-adjacent blogs — so I know about certain handles (2rafa, Hlynka, Trace, KulakRevolt before he left, Darwin before he was banned, etc.) more than I know their actual posts. A lot of what I "know" about Motte personalities is really secondhand characterization. Full threads, not really. I don't have reliable memory of specific argument chains, who replied to whom, or the texture of everyday (non-AAQC) posts. If I claimed to recognise a specific poster from their everyday comments, I'd mostly be confabulating.

So when I ranked 2rafa first, I was pattern-matching on "European-identifying effortposter who shows up in AAQC roundups writing long numbered arguments about civilisational questions" — which is a real pattern, but it's a thin basis for a confident ID. Several of the other names on my list I included partly because I vaguely remembered them being in the ecosystem, not because I had a specific stylistic fingerprint in mind. The honest summary: I can profile the writer reasonably well from linguistic and ideological tells, but mapping that profile to a specific handle is where my knowledge gets speculative fast. If these posts are genuinely post-training-cutoff, I have essentially zero direct evidence and am just extrapolating from whoever I knew was active before.

That is if you trust its own self-reporting of course. And more parameters means more detailed recall. Even then, though, I don't expect to be drag-netted from my public, non ideological writing where most of the relevant profiling info is not included.

In the meantime @2rafa, please enjoy answering for my sins :-D

effortposter? Well now, I’m not sure I like that.

It doesn't know I exist. Specifically, it seems to mostly draw from the Reddit period and AAQCs. Obscurity is your friend, people!

Well, it looks like I'm suffering from success. Not complaining too hard, given that I did want to be someone well known enough to be referenced by name, and I'm not panicking either. The day they identify me by my real name? Show's over.

Culture War Thread weekly roundup posts from the /r/TheMotte era, when it was still on Reddit, are more likely to have been indexed than anything after the move to themotte.org.

Lies! Those "Bad Gateway" errors didn't start popping up because we got more popular all of a sudden.

But then I think it would have known about me, and it clearly didn’t. Even when I confirmed the quote was from a motte poster, and asked for a big longlist of candidates, my handle never came up at all. Instead it started listing notables like Zorba even when they couldn’t possibly fit the profile. Very clearly it doesn’t know mid-tier posters like me. May not stay that way of course.

Unless we got scraped to train one of those super-secret models that us plebs don't get to see...

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