A coder fed 20 years of his messages to AI to audit his friendships
A software engineer analyzed 20 years of his messaging history using AI to evaluate his friendships. Vadim Drobinin discovered unexpected patterns in his relationships, such as a decrease in vocabulary overlap with some friends and a rise in question-asking with fading connections. His findings led him to realize that his social life was more limited than he had perceived, fitting into a surprisingly small digital footprint.
- ▪Vadim Drobinin used GDPR data-access laws to download his entire chat history from various platforms.
- ▪He found that his vocabulary overlap with some friends decreased significantly over time.
- ▪Drobinin's analysis revealed that asking questions often indicated a thinning relationship rather than a deepening one.
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 276 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/05/28/a-coder-fed-20-years-of-his-messages-to-ai-to-audit-his-friendships.html |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 23:53:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T00:24:38.883Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T00:24:38.883Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 46bH0PCtNLvw |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A coder fed 20 years of his messages to AI to audit his friendships Ellsworth Toohey 4:53 pm Thu May 28, 2026 Image: Chatty G 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.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
