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Rendelloyesterday at 9:21 PM2 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

tarpittyesterday at 11:26 PM

I remember this! it got me pretty good. I have a bad habit of generating alts because I forget the password.

It makes me wonder if we could use non-instruct LLMs to slightly alter the wording of text while keeping the meaning the same meaning. Perhaps by using perplexity or some other metric. I don't know, maybe you compare the distance of the "meaning" vectors.

You might also want to have some "style" vector associated with each pseudonym. For example, I might want it to produce british english under a certain pseudonym, and simulate an ESL speaker under another.

Essentially, you would want some way of re-styling text. The basic way to do this would be to run the same sylometry tools the hunter uses and manually make synonym word/phrase subsitutions to lower your similarity.

It's a cat and mouse game, but I think the mouse eventually wins. Consider a program that translates your english writing programmaticially into a low-entropy symbolic form and then translates them back to english in a procedural manner. Basicially you design an intermediary language that cannot contain style. It would be boring to read but it would remove all the style.

saghmyesterday at 10:42 PM

Looks like the site was taken down. I was curious who wrote the most like me, given that I don't have any alt accounts, but I guess weighing privacy over my curiosity is a good thing in the big picture