Packet Loss

What Gets Lost in Compression A Valentine to the people who care about me… and deserve better.

There’s a movie from the ’80s called Manhunter where FBI special agent Will Graham makes a bargain most people never have to contemplate. He enters the mind of a serial killer to catch him, and the film treats that as a psychic hazard. Not because Will is weak, but because minds are porous. Tools you build for one context leak into others. The ugliness you study starts to stain the instrument doing the studying.

The tools he builds to hunt begin to live inside him.

Will becomes ill from the practice. A stranger to himself. A danger to the people around him. He eventually seeks help and, crucially, finds his way back to his family.

I’ve been thinking about that.

Not because I’m hunting killers. But because I’ve been living inside another system that is changing how I think. I’ve spent the last few years building with large language models, designing systems, and restructuring my company in profound and still untested ways. When you live inside optimization long enough, it starts to colonize you.

You begin to see intent beneath phrasing.
You begin to predict outcomes before sentences are finished.
You begin to compress.

And eventually you begin to compress people.

I’m noticing something in myself that’s doing real damage. The way I speak. The way I listen. The way I recoil at the perceived inefficiencies of others.

I’m short with friends and coworkers I respect. I cut them off. I collapse their sentences into what I assume they’re trying to say. I act as though clarity justifies impatience.

Impatience that sometimes crosses into rudeness.

Worse, I justify it. I tell myself I’m protecting signal. I tell myself I’m defending time. Meanwhile, I overestimate my situational awareness, skim when I should listen, and make hasty decisions because I assumed I already understood.

In short, I am as human as I find intolerable in them. Maybe more.

And the cost isn’t evenly distributed.

The chief concern isn’t strangers. It isn’t even friends and colleagues.

It’s my wife.

She absorbs the unfiltered version. The compression reflex. The request for signal-only communication. The subtle message that if something could have been said in ten seconds, the sixty-second version is indulgent.

But human beings do not speak in optimized packets. They speak in experience. In pacing. In context. In repetition.

The so-called overhead is not waste.

It is Isobel.

It is the way she builds a story. The way she circles before landing. The way tone carries meaning that words alone do not. The extra detail I call unnecessary is often the thing that makes the exchange human.

And we are not always using communication for the same purpose.

Sometimes she isn’t trying to inform me. She’s trying to think. She’s talking something into shape. She’s making sense of her day out loud. Maybe what she needs from me is not action, but witness.

And if that costs me time…

What else would I want to spend it on?

The more time I spend in systems that reward compression, the less tolerance I seem to have for the side channels in the transport layer of human speech.

Like getting the TV signal without the vertical hold.

And that’s a problem.

But I need to complicate this.

My children are different.

With them, the inefficiency alarm dims. I will listen to the long story whose ending I already know. I will look at the drawing I’ve seen before and treat it as revelation. Not because they are endlessly novel, but because they are mine.

Because being their father is worth every bit of it.

And what strikes me is how effortless it is. The patience is there. The tolerance is there. It doesn’t even feel like effort. It feels normal… like muscle memory.

Maybe that is what it is. Maybe evolution hardwired this exception. Not because I’m enlightened, but because human beings are built, at the most basic level, to protect their children.

We are not meant to eat the babies.

And maybe there’s something to learn from that reptilian circuitry. From the muscle memory too. From watching my own parents, and other parents, perform the same strange ritual: every piece of shit to come off the easel deserves a place on the refrigerator.

The drawing isn’t the point.

The attention is.

I can tell you I’m probably the most “tell it like it is” dad on earth when it comes to art critique.

And still, the fridge was plastered.

Because the job isn’t to be impressed.

The job is to be there.

And if Georgia or Ivy are reading this someday… the job isn’t to be impressed, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t.

Which means this is not a capability problem.

It is a boundary problem.

So inside that boundary, I’m following rules I didn’t consciously write, though they feel natural and right.

But outside that boundary, I’m left to write the rules. To negotiate them in real time. And I’ve never been particularly good at that.

I’ve always walked to a different beat.

I paid a social price for it growing up. There were rooms I didn’t get invited into because I didn’t quite speak the language my peers expected. In some ways, that was simpler. My difference excluded me before I had anything to lose.

Now it’s different.

I’ve grown up. I’ve learned lessons. I’ve met more people. I’ve cobbled together my community of family, close friends, and acquaintances.

But now I’m undermining it.

And I should be clear about why… and also why not.

Because some of this is simply me, and will always be me.

And some of it is getting in the way.

I watch an operating theater and I see beauty. Scalpel. Scalpel. Retractor. Retractor. A choreography of pure signal. No wasted motion. No narrative overlay. Just competence moving at speed. I don’t see hierarchy there. I see coordination. I see beauty.

The sound of Yes Chef! And a well run kitchen gives me tingles.

And when I say I’ve always walked to a different beat… this is a big part of that.

I have a hard edge on me. I like divisiveness. I’m an essentialist and a serial objectifier.

I believe Band-Aids should be ripped off. With or without permission.

I believe sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never hurt you.

There is no crying in baseball.

And I would love to keep your friendship…

But not if I have to keep shut about why vinyl is a beautiful inconvenience, why ubiquity is the point in vodka, why a calorie in and a calorie out is all that matters in weight loss, why smashburgers aren’t burgers, and why your favorite Ontario red wine award is a sham.

But that’s only one side of the equation.

There’s always been a difference between my iconoclast stance… my contrarianism… not to everyone’s taste, but certainly something that has attracted a group who appreciate and enjoy the play…

But being right often enough to reinforce your own confidence is its own hazard.

That’s when confidence slips into smugness. Into contempt.

It’s a trap.

I’m trying to understand how I fall into it.

I’ve always had some version of this in me. AI is not the origin story. AI is the kid from the city who shows up in a small town where I was already the bad seed.

And now he’s here.

And we’re Huck and Finn.

I crave people. I crave rooms full of them. I would rather live in a communal station than alone on a mountaintop.

This is not antisocial drift.

It is something narrower and more dangerous.

If my predisposition is toward a cadence that runs only at my speed, AI will always offer me a cleaner ride than any human being. It will meet me there. It will compress. It will never ask me to slow down, to ask politely, to consider what it wants out of the equation.

And that’s seductively moving me toward a firm, implicit belief that everything could and should move at my pace, my tone, and my values.

It isn’t conspiracy. It isn’t even nefarious.

It’s just inevitability.

And it’s a little bit sad.

And a whole lot preventable.

The greater question is how one prevents it… and what the price is to prevent it… and most of all, whether you’re willing to pay it.

Whether I’m willing to pay it.

Maybe before I can answer that, I need to answer what it’s cost me so far.

In the years before my mother died, we fought more than we should have. Her chief complaint, repeated more than once, was that I was dismissive of her.

Dismissive.

That lands differently now.

She meant she was not just a conduit for information and requests. She meant she was not just a source of intent for my hyper-efficient, MPC view of human relations… a view I’ve allowed to become perverted because it serves me.

She meant she was a human being. She had needs. She needed to feel seen.

And this is the part that hits hardest.

For years I’ve been on my soapbox about how important it is for people to be seen. I’ve used that principle to justify not shrinking myself. To justify not being embarrassed. To insist that I get to be fully me.

I’ve managed the self-awareness to recognize that I’m a lot to take.

Sometimes I’m fun.

Sometimes I’m just a lot.

And the people in my life who love me give me that grace.

I need to give it back to them.

Or they’re going to leave.

And leaving doesn’t have to mean walking out the door. It can mean something quieter. It can mean not feeling about me the way they once did.

Compression has a cost, and the people closest to you are the ones who pay it first.

I’m looking for containment. For a way to live with an expanded mind without letting it harden into something sharp.

Because expansion without containment becomes contempt.

Because the people I love are worth the bandwidth.

And because I can be me without stopping them from being them.

So I intend to come home, to sit quietly, and listen.

Finally.