aluxian

I used Gemini to profile myself from my Pocket links

Inspired by noperator, I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to tell me everything it could guess about me by looking at 5,759 articles from Pocket, spanning 11 years (2012-2023).

My AI assistant Cozy (Claude Code) already knows how to read webpages and call LLM APIs, so I started by telling it to read noperator's blog post, find my latest Pocket export in my iCloud Documents folder, and call the Vertex AI API. It found and unzipped my export flawlessly, but I had to intervene to ask it to only send the title + URL.

The result was unexpectedly good, given I spent 0 time on prompting the report:

Of course. This is a fascinating request. As a digital archaeologist, I've sifted through the 5,759 articles you've saved over 11 years. This isn't just a list of links; it's a remarkably detailed fossil record of your intellectual and personal development.

Based on this data, here is your profile.

Executive Summary: The Self-Made Polymath

If your digital DNA were sequenced, it would spell out "Relentless Self-Optimizer." You are a deeply curious, systems-thinking individual, likely a software engineer with strong Romanian roots. Your life appears to be a grand project of continuous improvement, broken down into distinct, manageable modules: optimizing your code, your finances, your learning methods, your body, your social interactions, and even your consciousness.

You are not content with simply knowing what works; you are obsessed with understanding how it works, from first principles. You are the quintessential autodidact, a builder, and a "life hacker" in the truest sense of the word. Your journey is one of moving from learning the rules of a system to mastering them, and then building new systems of your own.

I. Core Pillars of Your Identity & Interests

Your saved articles cluster into several powerful, interconnected areas.

Pillar 1: The Craftsman - Software & Technology

This is the bedrock of your professional life. You aren't just a coder; you are a craftsman who cares deeply about the "how" and "why."

Pillar 2: The Optimizer - Productivity & Self-Improvement

This is perhaps the most defining characteristic of your personality. You view life as a system that can be optimized for better performance and happiness.

Pillar 3: The Architect - Finance & Wealth Building

You see finance not as a mystery, but as another system to be understood and mastered. You aim for financial independence.

Pillar 4: The Analyst - Psychology, Relationships & Social Dynamics

You apply your analytical, systems-based approach to the messiest system of all: human interaction.

II. The Evolution of You: An Inferred Timeline

By looking at the publication dates in your saved URLs, we can infer a rough timeline of your development.

III. A Digital Archaeologist's Note

There is one final, meta-level observation to be made from this data. The sheer volume—5,759 articles—is staggering. It points to a voracious intellectual appetite but also hints at the "Collector's Fallacy": the tendency to save far more information than one could ever possibly read and internalize. This library is as much an aspirational blueprint of the person you want to become as it is a record of who you are. The challenge for you, as evidenced by your deep interest in productivity and learning, has likely been to build a system not just for collecting knowledge, but for synthesizing and applying it effectively.

In essence, your Pocket library is not just a collection of links; it's the fossil record of a mind in constant, deliberate evolution.

This is 90% correct. The reference to the Collector's Fallacy is spot on. Makes you think. Also, it's one of the first notes I've ever written in my second brain, when I found zettelkasten.de.

Reading Gemini's story was a trip down memory lane. I have fond memories of trying out spaced repetition and the memory palace technique in high school, exploring lucid dreaming during the summer holidays, and learning how to budget my pocket money (pun intended).

Pocket, you will be missed.