Ask HN: Smallest amount of working ML weights that can be tattooed on a body?

Recently saw this comment on another HN thread about the US government gating access to GPT-5.6 and how it harkens back to the 1990s encryption-as-export-controllable-tech situation and how people tattoo'd the algo to their bodies:

> I can't wait for the first person to tattoo model weights on their body!

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693721)

And I can't help but wonder, what would be the smallest functional amount of weights from any sort of ML model you could realistically tattoo onto a human body or body part?

8 points | by thoughtpeddler 2 days ago

5 comments

  • xpnsec 9 hours ago
    Love this idea!

    As someone with a couple of code bits tattooed on my body, if anyone is planning on more than a few lines of text, speak to your tattoo artist first.

    I once wanted a long bit of code on my arm. I thought it was a good idea, but speaking to my tattoo artist, he explained that after a few years, the text would likely blur and merge together until it was difficult to read.

    Ended up going with a smaller snippet which is still clear to this day (15 years later). And seen some others who didn’t listen to advice with an illegible blob where their clean code one was xD

  • barrenko 5 hours ago
    Don't do this, it's equivalent to that barcode tattoo that passed it's heyday.
  • asxndu 1 day ago
    Definitely Andrej Kapathy's 250 line code of Micro GPT.

    I think it can fit on someone's back. (if a small enough font is used)

    - https://gist.github.com/karpathy/8627fe009c40f57531cb1836010...

    - https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

    [-]
    • lawlorino 1 day ago
      That’s lines of code, not weights
  • lawlorino 1 day ago
    I don’t think you can get a more simple ML model than linear regression?

    y=w0+x*w1

  • totalconfusion 1 day ago
    Encode it into a barcode