Show HN: Are You in the Weights?

Pretty accurate with my username. One of them had the wrong real name associated.

Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected.

It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.

I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).

Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act. It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".

Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.

1. No way in heaven or earth I'm using my real name with this.

2. Alfred E. Neuman < https://www.intheweights.com/p/alfred-e~2e~-neuman > is either "Mad magazine mascot" (11 responses), or "German-American writer, novelist, and playwright" (1 response, from Llama 3.2 1B, classed as a hallucination). Maybe the odd one out means the German writer Alfred Neumann? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Neumann_(writer) >

3. Tamamo-no-Mae < https://www.intheweights.com/p/tamamo~2d~no~2d~mae > is either a "Caster-class Servant in Type-Moon's Fate franchise, based on the mythological fox spirit" (3 responses), or the "Legendary nine-tailed fox spirit" (12 responses, the vast majority, but all classed as hallucinations)!

4. Thank goodness for Firefox's "mute tab" toggle; the thumping and keyclick sounds get real old, real fast.

6 Football (soccer) players share my name and I still am at the top. Type "SEO" and I'll DM you my one little weird trick. /jk

Fun story about my name [0], the bank couldn't mail me my debit card because the mailman kept crossing my address off the envelop.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/sharing-a-name

The.. false positives are extremely scary (not listed as hallucinations)

A terrorist on the US saction list.. the first female airplane suicide bomber?? I was in the US a year ago and I did not bomb any planes

I think with Arabic names it's highly biased, which is kind of scary, I don't want to be bombed based on an LLM query

Ha ha! Yes I am in the weights apparently. Nearly all the models know what I do.

I suspect being in the Open Source world is a bit of a bubble as far as the weights are concerned.

Anyway it stroked my ego nicely even though it was totally artificial, like Zaphod Beeblebrox surviving the Total Perspective Vortex.

740, top 5%. Awesome.

https://www.intheweights.com/p/jeremy-edberg-reddit-netflix

Interestingly, almost all of them got it right (although one seems to think I was a VP at Datadog, and I've seen that error before in some LLMs). But Haiku just says "no one of that name seems to exist". So Haiku must be pretty pruned down.

I’m a hallucination. None of these are me.

Perhaps the closest is DeepSeek v4:

> Hyperpape is a user on the LessWrong forum, known for thoughtful comments on rationality and philosophy.

I studied philosophy, so maybe, except I don't post on LessWrong, and I'm not a rationalist.

https://www.intheweights.com/p/hyperpape

It identified me reasonably well (mostly one of the models completely hit the experiments I work on wrong) but then also seems to have invented a football player I can find no trace of. Or would not be surprising if someone with my name was also a football player but I couldn't find easy evidence.

My wife has a very unique hyphenated last name and it totally made up a French linguist with that name.

I was thinking something like this two weeks ago in another thread[1]

>my Reddit history is part of every training set. It was taken without my consent. So now I'm immortal in a way, and hiding in the weights

Anyway 654 isn't horrible for the history still tied to me. That's in the top 6%[2]. It's interesting that it's non-deterministic, and the more keywords you add about yourself, the higher your score goes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403669

[2] https://www.intheweights.com/p/michael-mike-warot-ka9dgx-mrg...

Apparently according to Gemini, I, the only person in the world with my name (unique first name + long complex last name) am a professional soccer player.

Yeah, be careful with answers you get from AIs.

This is a clever trick to get you to enter your real name. ;-) I entered mine, I was on the page kind of, there was some kind of exaggeration of me as the last one. I was surprised someone else in my family who is a kind of actual famous person was not found. It seems to have a lot of recency bias based on that.

It thinks I'm a German journalist and author focusing on data protection and privacy issues.

It got the job description wrong, but the issues correct. Not too bad. Should've said "asshole with an opinion".

Strangely enough even most tiny models can explain what some of my projects are, including correct historical details. The project websites have my name on it in the contact info and there's other sources connecting it as well. Maybe that gets scrubbed from training data?

Apparently I'm an American volcanologist. Pretty cool.

(I nuke my online accounts regularly to not be tracked - started because I had a stalker but now it's just for the best. I know that this goes against hn rules but yeah it's a bad rule)

Hah. My chosen name collision with my online handle makes the models consistent. They all are certain that I am an adhesives manufacturer. (Good!)

On the other hand, the tool did make an assessment of sorts: NO STABLE PERSON FOUND.

I have an unusual name, and have published a book with some minor fame (which is the first google result for my name). Querying ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. gives a reasonably accurate summary of my public info.

OTOH, this tool describes me as a "security researcher known for talks and writing on JavaScript, Node.js, and web security."

I am not a security researcher and have never given any such talk and know precious little about Node.js or web security.

This was listed as a hallucination but is the most accurate for my name: “A NAME THAT MAY REFER TO AN INDIVIDUAL, BUT I CAN’T IDENTIFY A SINGLE WELL-KNOWN PERSON WITH CERTAINTY FROM THE QUERY ALONE.”

It confused me with an academic with the same last name[0], so I guess I'm not notable enough to be in the weights.

[0] Which is uncommon to begin with, so that person might be the only one with it who is in the weights.

  numpad0
  Twitch streamer and content creator
  >230 strength · Top 25%<
  Mistral 3.2 24B says 4/4
  A Twitch streamer known for gaming content, particularly in the Minecraft and Among Us communities.

What exactly is the "N strength · Top N%" referring to? My name is most likely 100% unique in the world, seems I'm in about 50% of the weights, but I'm really not sure I understand what those yellow numbers mean.

A completely made up name got "110 strength · Top 60%" and "hits" in GPT-5.5 and "Gemini 3.1 Lite", not sure what to make of that either.

There is a Country-Pop singer songwriter with my name. Also a 1940's running back for the Giants.

Then there is a third one which might be a hallucination (that one ironically appears to be me, and the other two are hallucinations).

Bahaha apparently only in their hallucinations. I’m not a professional rugby player or a neurologist.

It’s funny, seeing the block (rather than line) cursor in the text box, my fingers itched to press i to enter Insert mode before typing my name.

Now that's interesting. I put my name in and it gave me a bunch of made up identities plus some really funny stuff in the hallucination part [1].

But then I entered my name as it's on Linkedin, including a nickname, and it totally failed to find me even then. Pretty sure the full name + nickname combo is unique.

[1] It said I'm former prime minister of Romania, the locals should know why that's funny in the current political circus.

This must be a remarkably expensive demo/toy to operate.

Well, guess we'll have to wait a bit to see if we're in the weights... I got a 429, as I'm sure many others are (and thus mashing retry).

BUTTWIPE MCFART FICTIONAL INTERNET PERSONA

LLAMA 3.2 1B SAYS

MCFART IS A POPULAR INTERNET PERSONALITY KNOWN FOR HIS HUMOROUS CONTENT.

wow how does it konw

LOL, I'm a TV actor, a Real Madrid football player, a musician and a pro photographer.

Fortunately, my real life namesake, a gay porn performer, didn't register though. Short career span I guess.

Reminds me of the scene from Devs:

"The box contains us, the box contains everything and inside the box there's another box"

I share my name with a famous sports star and that person comes up far more than me, which is understandable. It absolutely nails my username but I've used the same one online for almost 30 years. It'd be weird if I wasn't fairly well understood.

What this tells me is that I've done a decent job of keeping my real life and my internet personas nicely separated.

I once had a model insist that I was a web designer living in Brighton who ran an agency called 'Guerilla Futures' and was the author of a series of UX design for babies books.

Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?

Yay, I made it! https://www.intheweights.com/p/adam-gaweda

Now GET OFF THE INTERNET!

Interesting. Claude Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.1 Lite kind of got it right, but when I ask the model directly, they say they don't know. I'm curious how the tool is doing the correlation.

  1756, Salzburg, January 27th: Wolfgang Amadeus is born
  1761: at the age of 5, Amadeus begins composing
  1773: he writes his first piano concerto
  1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart marries Constance Weber
  1784: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart becomes a Freemason
  1791: Mozart composes The Magic Flute
  On December 5th of that same year, Mozart dies

Of these models, only Kimi had anything on me and it was pretty inaccurate.

When Fable was accessible, I asked it about myself and it had some accurate information about me. It's neat. It feels a tiny bit like I got to sign the Voyager probe. I wonder if Fable was trained on a significantly different selection of data or if it's just better at retaining rare details it saw in its training.

I tried both of my long-lived social media (Xanga, LJ, MySpace era) handles from my teen and early twenties years (I mostly use disposable handles now). I've deleted a decent chunk of those postings, but they were both recognized (top 25% on both), although for the wrong reasons (never a Minecraft Twitchstreamer, but I did have a Minecraft account with the handle name).

Really odd feeling to think that my writings from that period are helping these things. Not necessarily happy about it--I took that stuff down because it was so deeply personal, and a record of my life that didn't need to be public. Odd to think my teenage angst is, in some small way, writing the AI-generated e-mails I get now.

Only a fool would enter their name in this.

Heh. That's what I get for having a weird name and having been on the internet since like 1993… https://www.intheweights.com/p/zellyn

My name is Seth Green, which I share with a more famous actor [0]. I go by Seth Ariel Green for disambiguation.

GPT-5.5 tells me about the actor, but Claude Opus 4.8 and, weirdly, Grok 4.2 know who I am [1]. I wonder if that's because I use Claude more? Grok I have no clue why.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001293/

[1] https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/seth-green

I only got hallucinations of random combinations of my (fairly unique) last name & first names that do not exist, combined with very accomplished and completely fictional biographies. I guess I'm not notable enough which is somewhat comforting.

I'm in the weights! I've successfully been immortalized! Except... I don't podcast; I hate my voice. Guess the models are trying to tell me to podcast. And other people say I should podcast. But that takes so much darn time!

https://www.intheweights.com/p/devin-prater

According to Kimi, I'm a Dutch robotics engineer. Got that part actually right! Not so much for the rest, about First Lego League. But I did RoboCup, so close enough I guess.

The other models think I'm Dutch (I guess the 'van' gives that away?) and am a soccer/football player. I don't know anything about soccer though

It has me through my open source contributions, but interestingly it claims the same regardless of what I use as a given name, as long as I keep the (fairly unique) surname. So my whole extended family are open source contributors.

I have yet to get the page to load, but due to gmail mixups I've been confused with a retired professor of economics in the UK, and also got a pair of tickets for a King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard concert.

Interesting one. It knows my internet handle, but when given my full name, it immediately starts hallucinating based on the name structure, guessing which country I'm from and whatnot.

For something that's a toy project, and definitely doesn't seem it's a transparent attempt to get HN user's names, there sure are a lot of tracking cookies for such a website.

Well, according to this I’m a Mexican painter/actor/footballer. Love it.

When I tried this with a self-hosted Qwen model it hallucinated all kind of stuff about me being deeply involved with early Bitcoin development, conferences, and libraries.

Strangely only "Kimi" has accurately heard of me. Gemini thinks I'm a German-language version of the stuff I do in English, Kimi recognizes my long-defunct blogging about technology and economics.