sparr

July 12, 2026

Feedback on my dating doc and personal user manual

When I take a break from much more stressful things that I'm working on, one of my leisure side projects right now is revising my dating doc and my personal user manual. I made some updates to my dating doc then posted a screenshot to most of my social media profiles and invited feedback. I got mostly helpful responses, except on Threads where it went viral and drew a lot of vitriol. After a few requests, I also posted most of my personal user manual on Threads. The user manual thread received much less attention, so most of the feedback was about the dating doc. At this point I've gotten most of the feedback that I expect to get and made some further changes to both documents based on some of it. Today I'm writing about all of the feedback, responding to some of it in aggregate, describing how I used it, etc.

First, feedback on both documents:

The single most common piece of feedback was that I am ugly. Of course I already know this, so there wasn't much to do with this not-new information. A slightly more helpful variation was that the photo I was using was a bad photo, and/or that people would want to see my hair or beard in a different configuration. This was also not news to me, but I had chosen that photo because partners at the time said it was a good photo of me. After a few people gave more specific suggestions, I ended up picking three photos to replace the one in the dating doc, all warmer and more active and less staged. I kept the original photo for the personal user manual.

The second most common was some combination of “you're clearly autistic” and “you should see a therapist”. I already know that I'm autistic, and I've never managed to find a therapist that was useful for me. I'm open to more actionable input on either of those fronts, but don't have much to do with them right now.

There were many complaints about the length of each document. As the TLDR section of the user manual opens, “If you skipped down to this section because this document is too verbose [...] for you, there’s a decent chance that I am, too.” The user manual doc ended up 300 words longer after this revision. However, I did manage to shave about 15% off the word count of the dating doc, also partially motivated by making more space for two more photos.

Many people seemed to object to the existence of either type of document. I am already well aware that most people haven't ever seen such a thing. I wasn't quite prepared for the level of negative response. Obviously I already know I want to write and share these sorts of docs, so I mostly ignored this.

Next, the dating doc:

First, feedback on both documents:

Next, the dating doc:

The most common response was outrage at the age range I listed. I wasn't surprised by the response, but I was by the level of hate that came with it. Despite it being an accurate confidence interval for who I expect a mutually fulfilling relationship with, I ended up cutting it. This is the most dishonest thing I did in this round of revisions, and I'm still figuring out how I feel about that. Surprisingly, there was a sizable contingent who explicitly demanded a symmetric age range; they would be fine with me dating a 28 year old if I also dated a 60 year old.

A very common category of feedback was regarding my relatively early statement that I am polyamorous and kinky. Many people didn't like that it was included at all, that it was in such a prominent position, that it specifically mentioned kink, that it didn't give more info about my poly lifestyle, or that someone who looks like me would say such things. I ended up removing “and kinky”, hoping the Fetlife link at the bottom of the doc will speak for itself, and adding “, usually with one or two partners”.

The biggest miscommunication that I saw repeatedly was a perception of contradiction/hypocrisy in two of the deal breakers I listed, one about me prioritizing people's commitments over their emotions, another about a partner not considering negative consequences of their actions. It seems like a lot of people can't grasp the concept of considering negative consequences but still taking the action in question. I tried rewording that one, but am not sure how effective that was. Based on a bit deeper discussion with some very helpful folks, I think I was able to reword the commitments sentence to make it somewhat more clear whose commitments it is referring to.

I saw a lot of confusion about how I (or anyone) might use a dating doc. I gave some answers in response, but don't think I need to change anything about the doc for this reason. If you get it, you'll already know how you got it.

Many people said the document seems too much like “ordering off a menu”, “build a wife”, etc. I wasn't really sure what to do with that. It seems obvious to me that describing all the things I'm looking for would look basically the same as describing my one perfect partner.

Many within that group were also saying it sounded like I was looking for unpaid labor and project assistance, a bang maid, a business partner, etc. This echos feedback I've seen about intentional community as well. It seems like many people find the idea completely alien that two (or more) people might actually have similar and/or complementary desires and needs that mesh in a mutually beneficial way. I don't want someone to [activity] with me just because we're dating. I want someone who dates me because they are excited about the opportunity to [activity] together. This goes for everything from road trips to barn raising to sex to nonprofit founding. I don't know how to distinguish between those two things to the common reader.

Fewer, but still many, people were concerned by asymmetry in some of my statements, e.g. “you want to share ... aspects of my life”. I reworded a few of these, e.g. “... aspects of our lives”. I also tried to make it a little more clear that all the things I'm looking for in a partner are also things I consider to be true about myself.

More than a few people said that listing “Intelligent, Competent, and Capable” was too braggish, so I ditched that.

More than a few objected to my list of things we might do while dating, claiming that every normal relationship involves the things I've listed. I envy those people the life experience where they have never [had a friend who] had a partner who didn't share hobbies with them, live with them, write letters, exchange skills, etc. I remain confident that there are many people not looking for those things in a relationship, so I'm keeping the list.

A few people objected to my mention of rational decision making, including claiming that they themselves had no problem acting rationally. I threw in a “study” to try to make it more clear that this is a serious pursuit, not just “being normal”.

A few objected to some or all of the online profile links at the bottom of the doc. One person even objected specifically to the order. I kept them, in a slightly different order not related to that specific objection.

I got various disconnected bits of feedback about the verbosity of the opening paragraphs and repetition of some words and phrases. I ended up trimming about a third of that part, some with a more general eye to brevity and some to resolve those specific concerns.

There were many unique concerns, some of which I heeded and many of which I didn't. Two friends convinced me to remove “financially secure” since its temporary inaccuracy has stretched out longer than expected. One person thought the acknowledgements line was totally inappropriate, but I disagreed. Another thought it was about my past partners, so I clarified that.

Then the personal user manual:

Basically every negative thing about myself that I say in this document was called out repeatedly as something I shouldn't tell people, as if letting them know in advance was somehow worse than them discovering it in the middle of a conversation or relationship.

More than a few people were upset at the idea that I would give a copy of this document to a colleague, since it has sections about sex and kink. I added a new second paragraph to the document in an attempt to make it extremely clear that the set of people I am writing for is much larger than the set I would send/give a copy to.

Someone pointed out that there were too many “etc” and similar, so I made a pass of replacing them with more specific elaborations.

Finally, the ugly stuff:

Being this open about myself has some predictable negative outcomes, and this time was no different. Sprinkled throughout the comments were the usual instances of various awful accusations with little to no basis. Mostly games of telephone haunting me from years and decades past, including recurring misinterpretations of things I've written. However, there was one brand new example worth noting. Somehow more than a few people seem to have become convinced that I am banned from Burning Man and/or some regional burns. As far as I know, this is entirely untrue. Unfortunately that won't matter, and I'm sure I'll see many more echoes of this in future years. Time will tell how far this new rumor spreads and how much it hurts.

I suspect I've missed or forgotten a few categories of feedback. If I left yours out, I apologize. Thanks to everyone who has helped with this round of revisions. See you next time!

July 2, 2026

June 2026 Writing Challenge Post Mortem

For the last month, I have been making approximately one long form post per day. I challenged myself to write something every day in June, as an exercise and to get back into the habit of writing. Even though I narrowly failed the challenge, it still achieved most of my goals, and provided some unexpected useful insights as well. I made 28 posts in 30 days, missing four days and having two double-post days. Most of the missing days were spent on legal drafting; I had intended to post motions and memoranda a few times in the month to fill the gaps, but instead ended up spending 35 hours on a single motion that still isn't finished.

Every post, with a few unimportant exceptions, was posted in its entirety to Facebook, Substack, Dreamwidth, Reddit, Glosso, and Paper.wf. Every post was summarized and linked on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.social. This is the first time I've done such widespread cross posting, which led to somewhat depressing realizations regarding engagement and reach, which I'll describe later. Wherever you're reading this right now, you can probably find all of the others if you scroll back/up/down/whatever on my profile.

The biggest category I'd sort my writing into is a combination of communication, awareness of how the world works, decision making, and interpersonal interactions. “What to do when my questions indicate I'm more informed than you think?” and “Rooting out fundamental disagreements with hypothetical questions” are attempts to better connect with people who seem to misunderstand certain conversational patterns. “We need a way to ask Maybe/No questions” is about a pattern that's difficult to convey at all. “Cheating is breaking rules that you agreed to” aims to analogize game cheating with relationship cheating. “Why write about a pattern without actionable followup?” describes a pattern in my writing that people express confusion about. “You feel [verb]ed? That's also an accusation and request.” is trying to help people understand how what they say can convey more than they intend. “Low success rate does not require low skill” and “Some choices are net positive despite increasing negative outcomes” are attempts to address common misconceptions about particular relationships between choices and outcomes. “We need to popularize “anti-” as an alternative prefix to “a-”” is a proposal to stop using some ambiguous terms in self identification.

Coming in second was intentional community, in general and my experiences and my future plans. Those posts included “Doing chores is a normal part of living alone and it gets easier together”, “Lessons from Estate of Mind”, “Hunting for improved real estate for a large intentional community”, “Setting community norms democratically within dictatorial bounds”, “Events that I want to fit at my next place”, and “Adventures in parenting 20-40 year old teenagers”. “My Ideal Day” is ostensibly about me, but it's really a description of a slice of the community environment I hope to build, and I even illustrated some of the posts with an aspirational schedule for CoDwell that I sketched out years ago. A few of these are topics I've written on before and approached with some years of additional experience this time. A few are strictly forward looking. When it comes time to launch CoDwell or some other next big intentional community project, these posts will serve as source material for putting together the thoughts and ideas that I want to share with people who seem interested in collaborating.

Another common theme was the law. “Legal Situation Update” and “I still need a lawyer” specifically covered my current situation and outlook. “The tyranny of civil court clerk delays” is a not very successful attempt to explain a problem with court rules and deadlines. “How I search for professional assistance” describes how I've tried to find a lawyer, which is also the process I've used to [fail to] find a plumber, a side loader rental, etc.

I made two posts about some failures I've had when trying to work for FAANG companies. “An impossible first task at Google” describes how a confluence of policy changes and management missteps wasted my first few months of effort there. “Ruinous Surprises in Company Culture” was prompted by some comments on the earlier post, and describes some ways ICs are expected to interact with each other and managers at Google and Amazon, but which are conspicuously absent from any new hire onboarding.

That leaves a bunch of miscellaneous posts. “Accurate Confidence is a Trainable Measurable Skill” is trying to explain and expose people to the idea of confidence and confidence calibration. “The internet peaked in 2008” describes a bunch of aspects of being online that have gotten much worse in the last 15-20 years. “Most people don't understand giving 100%” laments that so many people find working (or thinking) to exhaustion to be entirely alien. “More local monopolies deserve limits on the right to deny service” suggests that Uber (among others) shouldn't be able to fire a customer. “My online projects that need more hands” describes three things I've tried to do online which haven't really taken off. “Instant communication and fast travel worldwide is a fad” is a shower thought about our world effectively shrinking for the last 100k years, a trend which will reverse as soon as we start living on the Moon and/or Mars.

The final category is two meta posts, “June 2026 Writing Challenge” made on May 31 to describe what I'd be doing, and this “June 2026 Writing Challenge Post Mortem” today on July 1.

On a positive note, this did renew my love of writing long form posts. I don't know if I can maintain that enthusiasm with so much less engagement today than I had 10-20 years ago, but I'm going to try! I'll be looking for inspiration in others' posts and perhaps trying to figure out the Substack ecosystem a bit better. I may also subscribe to Twitter to extend my reach there; I'd like to be better connected to my friends of friends who post and correspond mostly there.

Also, I made a few new friends, and reconnected with some folks I haven't heard from in years. That's always a possibility when posting a new long form thing, and posting a bunch of them really accelerated the process. TBD what comes of this, but I anticipate some positive downstream effects, and maybe even some IRL [re]connections.

The most annoying takeaway from this challenge is that Facebook remains the platform where I can find the most engagement. I don't mean modern influencer “engagement” metrics; I mean literally actually engaging with other people. I post something, they comment, I reply, they reply, eventually one of the replies spills over to a top level post on their wall, I comment there, etc. With 29 posts, I got about 300 comments across all platforms, 196 of which were on Facebook (not counting my own replies). One post there was shared 63 times, but I haven't tracked down the shares to find more comments yet. FB also accounts for a third to half of my total views across all platforms. I was really hopeful that I'd be finding more interaction after a couple of years of connecting with old friends and finding new followers on other platforms, but even Twitter still feels sorta dead to me, let alone less popular platforms. The one exception among other platforms is Reddit, where I find more than a little discussion when I can find a topical subreddit that accepts cross posts, but that only works out for a small fraction of the things I write.

Another sad realization is that I am less capable of critical thought and research and deep writing than I was 20 years ago. I can still do a good job occasionally, but there's no way I could sustain this pace of posting with even this low level of quality, let alone what I was capable of in college. In addition to scraping the bottom of the barrel for post topic ideas, I also did a not great job of both writing and editing. This is just another item on the checklist of long term cognitive decline, and I've been aware of it for a while, but rarely with such stark examples.

I'm also mildly disappointed that I wasn't able to attract attention from acquaintances who participated in Inkhaven. One of the reasons I postponed this challenge until after that event was in the hope that a little bit of what folks had learned there would rub off through their feedback. Maybe next time!

Overall, this was a positive experience, and I'll probably do it again at a less hectic point in my life. I am definitely not in top form lately, and maybe I can recover some of my capabilities after some down time. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

June 30, 2026

Some choices are net positive despite increasing negative outcomes

Never mix friendship and money. Never lend a friend money you can't afford to lose. There are many adages like this, and they are great advice for preserving friendships. They are, however, terrible advice if you're optimizing for the quality of life of your friends. Our society produces a lot of people and households that occasionally have a few hundred or thousand extra dollars (e.g. biweekly payroll giving an “extra” paycheck every six months), but are also occasionally broke enough that that same amount would have a huge impact on future life trajectory (e.g. fixing a broken car needed for work). If you live in that slice of society, as I have for a significant chunk of my life, then you could lend that extra money to a friend when they need it, but you would need it to be repaid. Only gifting what you can afford to lose would mean not helping when your friend needs it. Unfortunately, the course of action here that helps the most also occasionally leads to bad outcomes that would have been avoided otherwise. Sometimes you're going to lose your job when they refuse to repay you, or lose your friend or get them or yourself ostracized from a larger friend group when you insist.

This same concept applies to a lot of social norms and best practices in life and business. Our culture has built up a mountain of tradition focused on maintaining short term happiness and interpersonal relationships, at the expense of long term and more widespread benefits. I am pretty sure that almost all of these should be done away with, and I choose to be the change that I want to see in the world. Unfortunately this leads to me having a lot more conflict than most people do. Where that really goes off the rails is when people don't recognize or understand that connection, and instead conclude that the frequency of the negative interactions must say something else about me that is slightly to significantly worse (e.g. I am actively trying to hurt people). In an attempt to better describe this phenomenon, I'm going to elaborate on a few recurring examples here.

The most impactful example I have is establishing large intentional communities, e.g. coliving or cohousing. This is something almost no one will ever try. Relatively few people will even take responsibility for filling a 3 bedroom flat, let alone getting 5-20 people to live and do other things together or even own property together. Because you don't try this, you never experience the consequences. The moment I pull the trigger on a project like that, I am committing to dozens of very negative outcomes in the future. People will end up crying. Someone will get kicked out of their home. Some romantic relationships will end disastrously. I know these things will happen. I couldn't do this (again) if I wasn't comfortable with those outcomes, and many people refuse to try when they realize what will ensue. You see those outcomes and conclude that I've done something wrong, that there must have been a way to avoid them, but most of you don't seem willing to discuss or apply critical thought to that conclusion.

There's also the lending of money to friends that I described above. You probably never do this, so you never encounter the failure modes. Because you never do this, you probably also don't consider asking your friends, and they don't consider asking you, so you probably aren't even aware of how much good could be done otherwise. You perceive me as being unreasonably confrontational, even though you don't know how confrontational you would be in the same situation. I perceive you as being a less good friend, to all the friends you could have helped but didn't.

On a related note, we have “Never talk about politics or religion in polite company”. This rule optimizes for interpersonal harmony. It reduces the frequency of loud disagreements with people you otherwise want or need to be around. Unfortunately, it also produces a society in which there is very little awareness of political issues and most people's political positions are never effectively challenged. So here I am, talking to acquaintances about politics and religion, even though I know that will lead to arguments and worse, because I think the large scale long term good outweighs the local immediate bad. Fortunately, this one seems to be on the decline as a social norm, and I regularly find myself surrounded by people who consider these topics fair game. Hopefully more items on this list trend in that direction.

Another example is radical honesty. I take pride in not intentionally misleading people. It's an intentional choice that I've put thousands of hours of thought and discussion into. I know that it will cause problems, but I believe that the benefits outweigh those problems. Almost every time someone engages with me on this subject, they start off trying to explain some alternate course of action that they predict would have achieved similar positive outcomes without the associated negative outcomes. Almost every time one of those people is willing to dive deep into their suggestions, it becomes clear that there was a component of intentional misleading buried in some of their ideas. Often they weren't even aware of it. Without that being brought to their attention, they stick to the original position that the less-negative results could have been achieved without dishonesty.

There is also paternalism, or avoiding it, in interpersonal interactions. When you and I are interacting on a contentious matter and I can tell it's making you upset, I could walk away. I could judge that your upsetness is more important than whatever other issue we're trying to resolve. This would be extremely patronizing of me toward you. If, instead, I allow you to be the judge of those two priorities, and to decide whether the upsetness or the issue are more important to you, then we're going to have the unpleasant interaction for longer. By committing in advance to not being paternalistic, I am ensuring that more of those negative interpersonal outcomes happen. I judge that the world would be a worse place if I substituted my judgment for yours more often, so I don't do that, even though I know the consequences.

A relatively broad general category is when someone in authority (or even not) is violating my (or your) civil or property rights. The widespread pattern of letting those people get away with that sort of misbehavior is harmful to our entire society. I decline to contribute to that pattern. I conclude that by fighting back against these things, I am moving a very big needle a very small amount. I judge that good to outweigh the harms of the individual confrontations, even though negative outcomes are extremely common.

As I said in a specific context above, you perceive me as being unreasonably confrontational, even though you don't know how confrontational you would be in the same situation. This actually applies across all of these examples. The most common response I've seen to this is “of course not, I avoid those situations”... but that just brings us back to the question of whether you're helping or harming by avoiding those situations. It's easy to avoid hurt and harm by never doing anything, but I think we can all agree that you should at least occasionally do something, so there must be some acceptable threshold even if you've not thought it through previously.

I could go on. I've encountered many other examples of this thing, including in ways I live my own life, each many separate times. But more examples isn't the point. The point is that there's an underlying pattern here, and that's what I am trying to bring to your attention. My hope is that by gaining even a little understanding of a few of these examples, you'll be able to spot the pattern when it applies to arbitrary other scenarios. That said, I'm happy to discuss other examples that you have in mind, or any of the nuance of the examples I've given above.

June 29, 2026

Ruinous Surprises in Company Culture

I have been working in tech for about 30 years now, in both hobby and professional contexts, on open source and proprietary projects, for myself or companies with 10 or 1000 or 100000 employees. I'm no boomer, but the lessons I learned in the late 1900s are less and less relevant today. My last two FAANG positions have involved more than a few surprises. In particular, there are a couple of major components of company culture that I didn't figure out until far too late. Of course, it seems like no one ever tells new hires about these things, instead just hoping for the best. By writing this, I hope that I can help at least a few people not succumb to the same traps that I did.

Everywhere I had worked in the past, the company organizational chart served as a sort of chain of command. If you wanted to meet with your boss' boss, you got your boss involved first. Doing otherwise would be taboo in most circumstances. If you wanted to plan an effort involving two different departments, the heads of both departments would be involved at the level of setting Objectives and Key Results for the departments for the quarter, and then some manager in each organization would be involved in the ongoing collaboration. Those team / department / organization level plans dictated where effort would be spent and how different groups would work together and depend on each other. Violating this chain of command was more likely to lead to censure than productivity.

Contrast this to Google, where individual contributors are expected to coordinate directly with their peers (including at higher and lower levels) elsewhere in the company. Admittedly, my understanding of this phenomenon is limited, because I didn't figure it out until the very end of my time there. If you need work from someone on another team in order to ship your project, you contact that person and convince them your project is worth their time. One IC might be wrangling parallel contributions from multiple other departments to get a single result out the door. If you fail to do this, the scope of things you can succeed at will be significantly constrained. Attempting to approach managers to coordinate this sort of thing will be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence.

Amazon takes this a step farther. The unspoken expectation is that if you aren't getting the results you need from someone in another team or department, you need to talk to their manager about their project priorities. When I discovered this, I was aghast. The corporate cultures I had “grown up” in were pretty firm in the norm that the only time you talked directly to someone else's manager was if they did something so egregious as to get them removed from a project or maybe even only to get them fired. It was only in the final months of coaching on my lack of success that anyone thought to mention that I could have and should have been reaching out to managers on other teams. Relying on my manager to interface with other managers was perceived as failure.

It has never made sense to me that these wouldn't be things explained to new hires as part of orientation to the company culture and expectations. If I ever work for this kind of company again, I will ask early and often about these sorts of cultural quirks. I hope this inspires you to ask similar questions.

June 28, 2026

Low success rate does not require low skill

I have a lot of niche hobbies and positions on various issues. There are many things that I try to achieve and communicate at which I fail almost every time. To a typical observer, this indicates that I'm not very good at doing or conveying the thing in question. However, a typical observer isn't qualified to make that judgment about many things they aren't familiar with. There are many skills for which a peak practitioner, even the best in the world, would not achieve total success with any regularity, but this concept seems alien to most people.

One example of this phenomenon is founding residential intentional communities. Almost all coliving and cohousing projects fail before ever leaving the formative stages, with their most tangible evidence being communications and documents. Almost all of the ones that actually achieve some practical form of organization with meetings and property visits fail before finding money or reaching any agreements about property selection. Almost all of the cohousing projects that make progress with financing and choose a property fail before breaking ground, and almost all coliving projects that choose a property and move in together break up by the end of the first year. The number of attempts that achieve even slightly more success than this is relatively quite small. I've started three coliving communities that lasted 3+ years, one of which is still going in year 8. Unless you're active in the intentional community organizing scene, I'm probably the most capable and successful such organizer that you know, and that would still be the case even if I failed another twenty times.

Another example is communication about the nature of intimate consent. There is no way to have a productive conversation about the most difficult parts of this topic without traumatically triggering some people and offending many others. Those outcomes don't indicate that the person in question is lacking any particular skill. I've seen professional mediators and therapists involved in those discussions and failing to thread that particular needle. To see those harms and conclude that the person did something poorly or wrong is an error. When people come up to me and tell me all the positive outcomes that came from me driving certain conversations, I know that I'm succeeding at a task that most other people won't even attempt. Their lack of failure is due to their lack of attempts, not their skill level.

A somewhat related concept is errors in solo competitive sports and other activities. There are many sports where a single significant error during competition will drop someone out of the running entirely, such as a bad entry in a diving competition or landing in gymnastics, and many sports fans are only familiar with this sort. There are, however, many others where major errors are an expected part of competition, and someone might still take home a gold medal after, e.g., dropping a yo yo repeatedly during their performance. If you don't know about that sort of competition, then you might be surprised to see that person described as extremely skillful. The underlying distinction is that they tried far more relatively difficult things than the competitors in sports where one error is a deal breaker, not that they have less skill.

I'd like to find a better way to convey this concept. Ideally I am looking for a concise enough form that it can be interjected into a meta discussion about the efforts and failures in question, without derailing that discussion. If you have suggestions on that front, or other examples to add, I'd love to hear them.

June 28, 2026

Instant communication and fast travel worldwide is a fad

TL;DR: Your great grandparents in North America and Asia couldn't call each other and travel took days to weeks. The situation will be worse for your great grandchildren on Earth and Mars. We live in a narrow window of worldwide communication and travel convenience. The biggest impacts of the return to the slower state of affairs will be in politics and warfare.

For the vast majority of human history, it wasn't possible to send a person or a message to the other side of the globe at all. Whole societies rose and fell without ever even hearing of each other, let alone communicating directly. Eventually improvements in food preservation, horse domestication, and sailing made it possible, but it was rare and took months. Millennia later we got the trip down to weeks with roads and better ships and eventually rails. About 150 years ago we finally had long distance telegraphs, and radio arrived even more recently, finally letting communication outpace travel, with latency down to just hours for relayed messages. In the 1930s we developed international radiotelephone links, allowing connections to be made in minutes followed by communication latency of just seconds. This was shortly followed by international air travel in the 1940s, providing passage around the world in a few days. Finally, in the last few decades, we've seen the rise of jet and supersonic air travel, as well as satellite and internet communications, each providing significant improvements to cost and convenience with minor gains in timing. After those many millennia of accelerating progress, communication and travel time across the breadth of humanity have approximately reached a peak.

Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, which is not a safe bet with the variety of apocalypses looming ahead, that trend is going to reverse as soon as we have a colony on the moon. There will suddenly be a group of people with a 3 second communication lag, and travel measured in both days and millions of dollars. That's fast enough for an 1800s-style radio conversation, but not realtime control of machines, and the travel lag would make emergency response impossible while the costs will be prohibitive for most purposes. Fast forward another generation and we'll have a colony on Mars or in the asteroid belt, with 6-50 minute round trip communication latency and travel time measured in months. Even approximately realtime communication will be gone at that point, with increasingly many people reduced to sending recorded and written messages to each other, and almost everyone making the trip will be doing so one way. Some time after that, we'll end up with people living in the outer solar system, with hours of communication lag and perhaps years of travel time unless we get a lot better at exotic forms of propulsion. Eventually, if all goes well, we'll send a generation ship or something even stranger out of the solar system, with a destination light years away with matching communication lag, and no way for people or packages to travel there within a lifetime.

Unless we invent faster than light communication or travel, we will never all be closer together than we are right now. Even though it feels like everything is accelerating and a technological singularity might be approaching, these particular trends are likely to be at an end, with major reversals coming in some of our lifetimes.

This isn't just about passenger travel, civilian communication, and business shipping. These changes also affect international politics and warfare. As recently as the mid 1900s it took hours or even days for critical communications to travel from a battlefield to leadership or vice versa, leaving field commanders to make critical decisions on their own. Within living memory, ambassadors were empowered to make deals without the ability to call home in the middle of a negotiation. Only recently has the idea of a head of state making a quick trip to a non-neighboring country become anything other than nonsense. A single commander having direct real-time decision making control over a worldwide military is basically brand new, and doomed to end just as quickly. The mechanisms that governments use to engage with each other and with their populations today will stop working as soon as some of those people and other polities are too far away to reach conveniently. Ask yourself how (or if) the US and China could maintain their international relationships and might if it took their messages a week and their militaries a month or a year to reach each other. Even though these changes are just reversions to the long term norm, I think we've forgotten that and aren't ready for them.

PS: I do look forward to the enforced return to long form communication across asynchronous transport networks. Bring back messages that are minutes long (to read or hear or watch) with minimum possible response times of hours to days. Viva la FidoNet!

June 27, 2026

An impossible first task at Google

I worked at Google in 2021 and 2022, around the time they were asking people to return to the office after the peak of COVID-19. The return date kept getting pushed back and I had to commit to a move, so I ended up in the office well before most of my team, spending most of my days in a mostly empty office. However, that's not what this post is about; I expect plenty of people had similar experiences with poorly planned “return to office” initiatives, as I did myself at another company later. This post is about something a lot more specific and unique, what I did for my first ~4 months at Google, and how that experience led to the end of my time there. I will acknowledge in advance that my memory of a few technical details might be a bit fuzzy five years later, but the important parts of the story remain.

In case you don't know me, the short version of what I do for a living is that I write software. Mostly the sort that's used by other software engineers while they write and test and publish other software, and occasionally the sort that's used to manage servers “in the cloud” behind websites and apps and other services. No matter what kind of software a company is writing or what kind of service they run, if they are large enough then there's someone (or some team or department) like me behind the scenes building the tools to enable their development process to work.

The team that I joined at Google was responsible for payments in Android apps. Not buying apps from the Play Store, but spending money within an App for things like upgrades, subscriptions, downloadable content, etc. When that team writes new code, they need to make sure it's not going to break existing apps or APIs or other parts of the Android ecosystem. One of the many ways they do that is... probably still a trade secret, so I won't get into details here, but suffice it to say that it's what I was assigned to work on. I would be improving that system to more effectively test the changes that my colleagues were making, before those changes had a chance to cause problems for anyone else.

Joining a new company as a software engineer usually follows a relatively predictable path, and Google was no exception in most regards. The first few days were mostly HR stuff, filling out forms about things like insurance and payroll. I was issued a laptop and given access to various internal documentation, repositories, training materials, team communication channels, etc. I was also, a bit later, issued a company phone authorized to connect to company servers that my personal phone could not. Once all the initial team-agnostic steps were taken care of, I had a few meetings with my manager and a team technical lead. We discussed the project I would be working on, what my goals would be in the first three to six months, and what the initial steps toward those goals would be. In typical fashion, the very first of those initial steps were things like checking out some source repositories, compiling some code, running some tests, etc, all expected to take a few days while I familiarized myself with the environment and tools available. However, that is where things went off the rails...

You see, I was the very first hire on this team after a new company-wide mandate that new employees would get a Chromebook for local use and a specially provisioned VM to use as a virtual desktop computer, rather than a Mac or Linux or Windows laptop and a desktop computer at the office. As far as I know, the primary motivation here was one of security, in that it reduced the damage of intellectual property leaks when someone's laptop was stolen. Unfortunately this had a nasty side effect for my particular situation. Just like all the developers downstream of me would interact with the software I wrote while testing their new code, when I wanted to write new code I would need to test it against something maintained by someone upstream of me. Specifically, I couldn't just deploy untested code changes to the live Android Play Store; I needed to deploy them to an internal test environment “fake” Play Store, and then tell my phone to connect to that fake store so I could interact with my running code.

Reconfiguring an Android phone to connect to a different Play Store requires modifying some internal settings not normally exposed to the user. The way you do this is to connect the phone to a computer with a USB cable, then run a program on the computer called Android Debug Bridge. ADB allows direct access to the phone's firmware, file system, packages, etc, and has commands for modifying or overwriting all of those things. It's a tool that any developer of low level Android apps, let alone a Google engineer responsible for Android ecosystem services, is familiar with, although some of its more exotic functionality is less well known.

In 2021, if you had physical access to a desktop or laptop running Linux or MacOS or Windows, you could install ADB directly, either on its own or as part of a larger Google or Android Platform Tools package, then connect a phone with a USB cable. This is what every member of my team had done, and what all of our onboarding documentation expected me to be able to do. If you had network access to that desktop or laptop from a Chromebook running ChromeOS, Google had an internal Chrome app that would allow the Chromebook to act as a bridge between the computer over the network and a phone connected via USB. If you only had network access to a Google virtual desktop VM and physical access to a Chromebook running ChromeOS... you would encounter a problem that, at least as of mid 2021, seemingly no one had ever considered, let alone tried to solve.

I spent months reaching out to every engineer and team and project that I thought might have some insight toward making this work. This included the developers of that internal Chrome ADB bridge app, the ADB developers responsible for its network server/client mode, the engineers who had contributed to the “Chromebooks and VMs for everyone” policy decision, the team configuring and provisioning the virtual desktop VMs, etc. I made minor progress writing patches to ADB and that internal Chrome app to try to make this work. I tried to get permission to use my personal laptop and/or personal phone for various steps of the process. I kept letting my manager know that this weird confluence of policy and technology was causing me to waste ridiculous amounts of time and effort on what should have been a ten minute item from my onboarding checklist that was instead blocking all of my other progress.

In the end, I was eventually issued a Macbook like everyone else on my team, and I eventually returned to the office and got access to a physical desktop computer, again like everyone on my team, either of which could have resolved my blockers the very first day I encountered them. However, by then the whole project I was to have worked on was gone, partially implemented by other teammates, partially abandoned in favor of other solutions. My enthusiasm had waned significantly and the writing was on the wall for the performance review (“perf”) that would cover those entirely unproductive months. I could tell that my manager had given up on me, and my ensuing minor contributions to other projects weren't what I was looking for in a career or what Google needed from an engineer of my level. I ended up leaving the company a few months later in search of fulfilling work.

June 26, 2026

My online projects that need more hands

Over the last few decades I've started some projects online that didn't attract the contributions from others that would have led to their success. Today I'm describing a few of them that I still have hopes for. My goal is to spark a bit of interest in possibly reviving them, or perhaps just inspire someone to steal one of the ideas and run with it..

Modes of Discourse (https://web.archive.org/web/20241226163258/modesofdiscourse.com) was a wiki where I attempted to catalog all the mechanisms that people use to communicate with each other. The main pages would be things like “Tiktok”, “Facebook”, “ICQ”, “Email”, “Telephone”, “Smoke Signals”, etc. Those pages would each have a description of the thing in question, covering when and how people use(d) it, how it works, what technologies it is based on, etc. Those descriptions would wikilink to another layer of content describing various common aspects and features, with pages like “asynchronous”, “notifications”, “follow”, “internet”, “line of sight”, “plain text”, “algorithmic feed”, “markup”, “images”, “videos”, “instant messaging”, and almost any other such thing that multiple different modes have in common. I tried twice to start this wiki, each time putting a few dozen hours into creating content, but never reaching the critical mass necessary to attract outside attention that could have led to more contributors and incoming links. If I try this again, I'll probably hire a human to do the first few hundred hours of content creation then use AI to fill in descriptions and links once the structure and style of the wiki is well established. This might sound like just a subset of Wikipedia, and some of the pages and content might start out from there, but my intention would be to get into a lot more detail of the specific functionality of each app / site / platform, including how they differ and which features they share. The main pages would also describe how the thing had changed over time, such as a social network app adding or removing markup from posts, replacing a chronological feed with an algorithmic feed, launching a mobile app or eliminating mobile or non-mobile functionality, changes in control or ownership of a technology or company, etc.

VGM Extractor (https://github.com/sparr/vgm-extractor) is a program that extracts music files from locally installed video games. It's coded mostly in Python, with a bit of custom scripts in other languages for handling specific games, and yaml files describing the music file layout of each game. For games with officially published soundtracks the results are sometimes identical and other times wildly different. For other games this is the only way I've found to get the music into my music library without going hunting for it one game at a time. For some games the extraction process involves just copying mp3/ogg files from the game folder to the music library folder. For others, it relies on third party tools to extract from a wide and growing variety of media and archive formats (e.g. zips, Unity assets, Bethesda archives, XACT wave banks), and can even call out to other scripted tools like QuickBMS. What this project really needs is for people with games installed to find the audio files and contribute descriptions of the names and locations of the archives and files so that the tool knows where to find them for everyone else with the same game installed. I have it working with about 115 games so far, but it needs to work with 1000+ games before most gamers would be interested in using it. Code contributions would also be welcome, such as to support more archive types or the paths of more non-Steam installers, or to add a GUI or modernize the project structure and build process.

Cutting Edge Gaming (https://www.reddit.com/r/cuttingedgegaming/) is a subreddit based on https://xkcd.com/606/, organizing people to play old video games on the 5 / 10 / 20 year anniversaries of their release. There is some demand for something like this in the retro gaming community, but it would take a lot of effort and/or notoriety that I don't have in order to bring together enough players to make this work. One major benefit of doing this as a group is that many old multiplayer games have no players online today, or even no servers, so getting someone to set up a server in advance and then a bunch of people to play on the same day(s)/week(s) would work a lot better than an individual trying to do the same. I never had enough time to keep up with making weekly posts about which games we might play, including links to current distributors, patches, mods, etc. If I tried this again today, I'd probably rely on AI to write those posts, and I'd create multiple other online profiles (e.g. instagram, tiktok) and platforms (e.g. Discord) for getting the word out and bringing the players together.

June 24, 2026

Rooting out fundamental disagreements with hypothetical questions

If two people have an irreconcilable disagreement about the trolley problem or the red/blue button question, it's likely there are broad categories of more realistic questions they will never be able to reach an agreement on. This sort of thought experiment helps to distill the essence of those questions and drill down to potentially fundamental disagreements on morals and ethics and other decision making factors.

Unfortunately, many people can't see this connection. They perceive these questions as totally divorced from real life, often a waste of time, and potentially even harmful to discuss in isolation from real world details. This applies not just to famous questions and problems, but also to topical hypotheticals (or even non-hypotheticals) that tease a single issue out of a larger scenario. If you're one of those people, I'd like to convince you otherwise.

Consider trying to choose an ice cream flavor to share with a friend, at a bespoke flavor ice cream shop where every serving has many ingredients. Or perhaps trying to buy a car, or plan a road trip. You keep vetoing their choices, and they keep vetoing yours, and neither of you can figure out the other's requirements. Fortunately in these examples, you probably have some convenient shared vocabulary that you can use to convey “I'm allergic to stonefruit” or “I need a large trunk” or “I want to visit some museums along the way”. But, imagine if you didn't, if the thing you were trying to coordinate on was deep and complex enough that it would take a philosophy degree to explain and understand the underlying positions and factors. How would you proceed?

A quite plausible path forward in those scenarios would be to choose some options that aren't actually under consideration, but which differ in fewer ways, to attempt to narrow down the important factors. “Hypothetically, if we had to choose between just the two options of cherry garcia with pecans or cherry garcia with chocolate chips, which would you pick?”. It doesn't matter that those two flavors aren't on the list, or that you wouldn't pick them even if they were. What matters is that you've narrowed the choice down to a single factor / axis / variable, and the answer to this question will elicit some information that might have been difficult to impossible to deduce from the more complex choices. You will quickly find out about everyone's pecan vs chocolate chip priorities, and you'll probably also learn about nut allergies, without needing to discuss any other factors at the same time. This will allow you to narrow the scope of all the remaining considerations. Even more effectively, this might tell you that the larger scale problem is impossible. If one of you has a nut allergy and the other has a chocolate allergy, and every item on the menu has at least one of those, then you'll quickly discover that you can't share an ice cream order at all.

That last part is the most useful aspect of philosophical and moral thought experiments. If you can narrow the question down far enough to expose a fundamental disagreement in your positions or beliefs, you can disqualify a much larger category of discussions. There's no point having [some] complex discussions about hospital management decisions if you disagree about the trolley problem; you won't ever be able to reach an agreement on certain real world issues.

My favorite example of this is regarding taxation and individual rights to others' labor. There are virtually unlimited depths to that debate. However, before we spend any significant amount of time on that, I want to find out if you support taxation of the wealthy to feed orphans. If so, then our differences are matters of degree and details. If not, there's no point discussing finer details; we are never going to agree on anything downstream of that fundamental position. This is true even if just taxing some people to feed orphans is not a policy that would ever be under actual consideration.

I'd love to hear about some hypothetical scenarios or thought experiments that you don't believe can lead to useful real world conclusions. I consider it a fun game to come up with realistic scenarios that depend on a given distilled question.

June 23, 2026

We need to popularize “anti-” as an alternative prefix to “a-”

In vernacular English, the “a-” prefix gets used with somewhat broad and ambiguous meanings. It might indicate a neutral or indifferent position or the lack of a position or action. It might also or instead indicate an actively opposed position or action. These two meanings are easy to confuse. When a single word is used to mean both or either of them, lack of clarification can lead to significant miscommunications.

Atheist can mean that you don't hold any specific theistic/religious belief. It could also mean that you explicitly believe there is no supernatural higher power. Sometimes “agnostic” is used for the former meaning to clarify this distinction, but that usage is less widespread.

Apolitical can mean that you don't engage with the political process, or that you aren't aligned with existing political parties, or that you are actively opposed to the current (or any) political system. These all have very different implications for what actions you might support or take with regard to the political process.

Asexual can mean that you don't experience sexual desire and/or are indifferent to seeing or participating in sexual activities. It could instead mean that you are mildly to extremely unhappy with exposure to and/or participation in sexual activity. The appropriate responses from a [prospective] romantic or intimate partner to these two different meanings are wildly different.

There are also some lesser examples adjacent to this pattern, such as “anonymous” which might be an incidental or temporary or local state of affairs or an intentional choice and permanent goal. As the effect of the distinction shrinks, so does the need for clarification.

I propose here that our ability to communicate effectively about these topics would benefit from separating these meanings into “a-” for indifference and “anti-” for opposition, in precisely the same way that they are already separated for “apathy” vs “antipathy”.

Someone who explicitly disclaims the existence of god is antitheist, not just atheist.

Someone who explicitly opposes the political process is antipolitical, not just apolitical.

Someone who is unhappy when exposed to sex is antisexual, not just asexual.

This isn't a new idea. These words and meanings and usages already exist, but they are not popular. We should change that. I've made the distinction occasionally in the past, but I intend to approach this more directly. You can expect to hear “Do you mean antiwhatever, or are you really just indifferent?” from me more in the future, especially in rationalist and other communities with a focus on effective communication.