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Gemini figured out my nephew’s name

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/May/gemini-figured-out-my-nephews-name/
88•BeetleB•3d ago

Comments

qmr•4h ago
Page layout broken on mobile.
IX-103•4h ago
It works in landscape mode on mobile, but is broken in portrait mode.
zoklet-enjoyer•4h ago
That's a unique name

If you're on Chrome, go into desktop view and zoom out

gregschlom•3h ago
Yes. Thankfully reader mode on Firefox mobile works well.
bryan0•3h ago
Reader mode fixes this. It’s a handy feature when you see broken layout
paffdragon•3h ago
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.
simonw•2h ago
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•2h ago
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.
bsimpson•1h ago
For the last 2 decades, reddit and its ilk 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•1h ago
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.
flashblaze•1h ago
Yeah, I believe it is called Stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
whatnow37373•1h ago
Trigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.
flashblaze•52m ago
Was it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
delichon•3h ago
> 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•3h ago
Norbert is, in fact, breaking the cycle. Rock on, Ful Rod.
the_lonely_time•3h ago
Full ham rod. Wild name.
qntmfred•3h ago
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.

https://x.com/kenwarner/status/1859637611595214888

hattmall•2h ago
Is the tweet saying that you also told it your name and then it guessed that your Dad's name was the same as yours?
qntmfred•2h ago
correct
skylissue•2h ago
Unfortunately I feel like the fact that your dad's name is the same as yours somewhat diminishes that accomplishment.
rubitxxx10•3h ago
The post should be titled “Gemini figured out my son’s name.”
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•2h ago
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?
Iwan-Zotow•2h ago
Little Bobby Tables we call 'im
anoopelias•1h ago
https://xkcd.com/327/
fcatalan•1h ago
I'm trying to lose some weight, and while bored I pasted a few data points into Gemini to do some dumb extrapolation, just a list of dates and weights. No field names, no units.

I specifically avoided mentioning anything that would trigger any tut-tutting about the whole thing being a dumb exercise. Just anonymous linear regression.

Then when I finished I asked it to guess what we were talking about. It nailed it: the reasoning output was spot on, considering every clue: The amounts, the precision, the rate of decrease, the dates I had been asking about and human psychology. It briefly considered the chance of tracking some resource to plan for replacement but essentially said "nah human cares more about looking good this summer".

Then it gave me all the caveats and reprimands...

deadlypointer•35m ago
The post seems to be unreadable on mobile, the sides are cut off.

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Gemini figured out my nephew’s name

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/May/gemini-figured-out-my-nephews-name/
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