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A coder fed 20 years of his messages to AI to audit his friendships

Boing Boing·Ellsworth Toohey·7 days ago
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Software engineer Vadim Drobinin used GDPR data-access laws to download his entire chat history — ICQ and IRC logs from the 2000s, VK, Twitter, and Facebook from the 2010s, Instagram and Telegram after that — then ran the roughly 1.2 million messages through large language models to build a "personal CRM" that judges his relationships from the record instead of from memory. He started, he writes in a post titled "Am I a Bad Friend?" , because Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" grid bothered him: "I realised my life was never empty. My memory was just very selective." One finding tracks how friendships cool. With some people, his vocabulary overlap fell from 69.5% to 8.7%: "We now use almost entirely non-overlapping vocabularies." Another reverses what he expected. Asking lots of questions, it turns out, signals a thinning relationship, not a deepening one. With his partner, the question rate barely moved over nine years, but with fading friends, it climbed (one jumped from 11% to 35%).…

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