Pseudpocalypse

There's been some interesting threads about stylometry over the years [1]. The top link was quite decent at unmasking HN alt accounts with basic ngram analysis whipped up in one day [2].

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stylometry

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756141

I wonder if this could be used to unmask satoshi. I remember a piece about applying stylometry to satoshi's writing, but they just compared him to the usual list of suspects (finney, back, etc.)

Entropy is unfortunately a very bad metric to estimate if these identification techniques will scale. Plugging my work here as example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-55296-6

"Pseudpocalypse"... why not "pseudocalypse" or "pseudoapocalypse"?

As an aside, it's always surprising to see how English speakers split Greek words like "Apocalypse". That is to say, they always split them in the middle of Greek syllables, or just drop letters like "pseud[o][a]pocalypse" and often in a way that ends up sounding clunky and weird even in English.

Can't think of other examples now. Brain going to sleepzzzz....

Edit: oh wow there's actually a word for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libfix

OK, now I go to sleep.

I wondered something almost the opposite the other day. With consistent interaction with chat bots and AI output, their linguistic ticks are surely bleeding into every day speech ("smoking gun" and other turns of phrase). What if our linguistic output starts to conform?

> Do they, incorrectly, position their adverbial clauses? Underrated line.

Sooo, this implies such deep profiling hasn't been in use for a decade for target advertisements. 500M is not that large a number with the amount of traces we leave behind online :)

Related articles:

- Claude knows who you are: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jkb4CBB7rf4XYP5eb/claude-kno...

- ~ Opus 4.7 is the first model to correctly guess who I am based on unpublished articles: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/2044962428547695007

I've gotten several dozen accounts banned on reddit over the years. I don't remember the names of them all. It would be hilarious to me if someone mined the archives and stitched them all together.

One would think that it could be possible to make a tool that takes some text and "anonymizes" it by making it a little more standard and boring (uniforming punctuation and sentence structure, changing words with some synonyms, etc). Maybe wouldn't make it particularly compelling, but would be valuable for political dissidents and other people with a high threat model.

Does anyone have some tools to share?

So anonymity of written speech is toast. We should, however, strive to preserve other forms of anonymity. For example, donations given to political causes should be kept confidential. Let protesters wear masks up to the point where they break the law.

yes but no, can't we just ask AI to sufficiently shuffle our words or for algos to do so?

"boom", pseudoanonymity (spell?) restored?

Huh, I just realized he (she?) was pseudonymous and not Matt Might[0] this whole time. Oops.

Also, I wonder about this analysis in the age of AI slop. I wonder how much that removes the identifying bits, vs how much carries through of the original prompt (e.g. topic and guidance). It's interesting that a pseudonymous blogs might take on very generic Claude-voice, which could be worthwhile if the topics were interesting, but could also just be a completely humanless bot.

[0] https://matt.might.net

This always seems theoretical. Has it happened?

> A stronger conjecture is that we’re heading towards a sort of generalized pseudpocalypse. Perhaps, in the future, if you interact with the world through essentially any high-bandwidth channel, then you identify yourself. Say you wear a mask in public and only speak by sub-vocalizing into a voice changer. That’s fine, you’ll still be identified using your body shape, gait, or chemical signature. Or say you don’t like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.

Forensic research, NSA, Palantir…

Btw 42. Sleep, eat, have sex, have fun, be useful.

See the classic Gwern post: https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity

Which quotes Tao on using deliberate disinformation to preserve anonymity.

> …one additional way to gain more anonymity is through deliberate disinformation. For instance, suppose that one reveals 100 independent bits of information about oneself. Ordinarily, this would cost 100 bits of anonymity (assuming that each bit was a priori equally likely to be true or false), by cutting the number of possibilities down by a factor of 2100; but if 5 of these 100 bits (chosen randomly and not revealed in advance) are deliberately falsified, then the number of possibilities increases again by a factor of (100 choose 5) ~ 226, recovering about 26 bits of anonymity.

Intentionally adding writing "tics", scheduling posts to appear between 2am and 6am in your timezone, or pretending to have a different gender/location/age should help a lot in staying pseudonymous for a while longer.

As long as you're fine with losing your distinctive voice (which should be taken as table stakes for people who value anonymity to the extent of worrying about this), it's perfectly reasonable to use tools to stymie stylometry. I'm not even suggesting using an LLM (which may or may not be sufficient, it would be difficult to verify either way); it would suffice to have a tool that rewrites your prose (or analyzes it and flags it for manual correction, etc.) if it isn't written in, say, a form where every sentence is primitive subject-verb-object, limited to the 1,000 most common English words, with no contractions, idioms, or exotic punctuation. Yes, this doesn't completely eliminate all possibly identifying bits of entropy, but it would more than suffice for hiding in a crowd ("hiding" in the sense of obviously standing out as someone trying not to be noticed, and as long as you're also careful about your opsec in other ways, like time of posting, etc).

Eh isn't authorship linking a whole field of study? Yes it is, called stylometry. Here's a review paper form 2006 [0]. Its an old subject, with literally thousands of papers. Really wished the author had taken a cursory glance at the literature.

[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11889342_20

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One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.