Trapped in My Apartment

Childhood Memories

The earliest memories I have of using a computer are from when my parents bought a computer for the family that ran MS-DOS. When we first got the computer, I was so young that I was barely able to use it. I remember typing random things at the DOS prompt just to see what the computer would do. I remember not being able to get the computer to do anything interesting, however it did print the things that I typed.

When I got a bit older, I had learned enough about the computer that I knew that it could be programmed, and I remember trying to use QuickBASIC. If I remember correctly, I think the first program that I wrote was a program that printed this message:

Do you want to quit? [Y/N]

The message was actually a trick, because you actually had to press N to quit the program. If you pressed Y it would repeat the message. This was the most complicated program that I was able to create at the time. I wanted it to operate differently than normal quit messages, and this was the only other possibility. I remember thinking that I wished I knew how to create a more complicated program.

Elementary School

By the time that I was in elementary school, the Internet was starting to become popular. From what I can recall, I think my family first connected to the Internet using some kind of dial up service associated with the local library and university. I remember that we were not able to use it often, and I would sometimes travel physically to the local library and use the computers there to go online. One time when I was there I noticed that I was sitting next to someone who seemed to be using the computer for something very interesting that involved using the computer in the mode where it was filled with text in a monospace font, rather than browsing websites. I tried to watch them and see what they were doing, however they noticed me and got annoyed.

I found the Internet fascinating and I wanted to participate, and so I started creating my own websites. They were on various topics. I used to have websites hosted on GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod and Hypermart. I enjoyed experimenting with the technology. I remember that I was a fan of the <frameset> tag in particular, even though lots of people were saying it was a bad idea to use them. I remember creating a website with lots of frames. One of the frames would constantly scroll what appeared to be movie credits for the site, attributing all of the work to myself, while another frame had a music player that would play one of several MIDI files that I had uploaded. I remember that one of the MIDI files played the soundtrack from the Mission: Impossible movie.

Aside from computers, around this time I also enjoyed reading. I often used to bring books to school and would read them at my desk rather than paying attention in class. I got in trouble for doing this. One book series that I particularly enjoyed reading was the Animorphs book series. I decided that the book series was a good topic for a website, so I created a website with a bunch of information about the books. I started referring to myself online as Animorph90 and I called my website Animorph90's Animorphs. This was the most significant website that I made which it appeared that people were actually reading. I remember one time I wrote JavaScript code for grading a trivia quiz, and I later noticed that the code that I had written had been directly copied onto another website for their quiz. It was a sign that they had been reading my website, at least.

Eventually, I somehow got the idea of buying a domain name for my Animorphs page. I remember that I had some justification that I was able to use to convince my parents to use their credit card to pay the 70 US dollars required to register the domain. My memory is little hazy, however if I remember correctly, I think this might have been because I had found a way to be paid a small amount of money for the website. I think I might have had referral links to buy the books. Unfortunately, I do not remember this part in detail, so I am not completely certain. It is possible that my parents simply gave me the money.

The animorphs.com domain itself was registered by the company that sold the books, and so I registered ani-morphs.com. It did not bother me that the name of the domain was difficult to describe verbally due to the fact that it contained a dash character. I was only 11 or 12 years old at the time, and I felt that it was very cool to have my own domain name.

I was able to use my website to make friends with people over the Internet. I remember that it felt like the Internet was a very social place and that it was easy to make friends there. There were other people online who were interested in Animorphs and were interested in my website. Some of them offered to help me maintain the website, and I accepted their help. I suspect I eventually gave someone the password for the website, as over time, other people starting being able to make changes to the site without needing me to do it. Eventually I stopped paying attention to the site as I got older and grew out of Animorphs. When the time came to renew the domain name I added a message to the top of the homepage saying that the site would be shut down, and did not renew the domain.

Unfortunately, I no longer have any copies of any of the websites that I made during this period, aside from a small number of files that I downloaded from the Internet Archive. I am not sure what happened to the copies of my websites which I should have had on my personal computer at the time. It is an unfortunate loss, because in retrospect the experience with my Animorphs website was an important part of my early life. I remember that I was able to socalize and make friends using the website, somehow. When I read the <meta> tags in the source code for one of the pages that I do have, I can see that the site apparently had a message board and a chatroom. There is also a reference to fan fiction. I asked a family member about this, and they told me that my site would allow others to upload their own fan fiction. I wonder if people were using these features of the website.

High School

By the time that I was in high school, I knew a lot more about computers. I had become interested in Linux and open source. In 2001, while I was in Grade 10, I started trying to write my own operating system. It was very primitive. The only parts that I actually completed were a boot loader written in assembly language as well as some functions in C that could write messages to the VGA buffer so that they would be displayed onscreen. The code that I wrote worked and it was able to boot and print messages. I remember that at the time, Intel would send people physical x86 architecture manuals for free, and I had a copy of the manuals which I read a significant portion of. I liked reading through the manuals and learning what each x86 instruction did.

As part of my effort to build an operating system, I created a small website describing my plan. I also registered the domain name kr4z.com with the intention of using it to host websites about my operating system and other projects. The domain kr4z.com was much shorter than ani-morphs.com and more generic, so I would be able to use it for any purpose. I started using kr4z as my Internet screen name. The name was based on the word zark from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I reversed the order of the letters and replaced the letter "a" with the number 4, as I felt this made the screen name look like it was written in Leet speak. I created subdomains for my friends in Newfoundland so that they could host their websites at kr4z.com, and I also started running an IRC server. Unfortunately, my kr4z.com website did not have anything that would cause people to visit the site on their own, like the Animorphs website did. This made the experience not quite as satisfying.

The high school that I went to allowed people to try to obtain an IB diploma, and this was something that I attempted while I was there. It was an interesting experience. The courses were considered advanced compared to the regular courses and required extra work. I dropped out of the program partway through and so I did not obtain the official IB diploma, however I did do some of the courses. For one of the courses, I was supposed to write a paper which had to be a certain length and I was allowed to choose the topic. I chose to write a paper comparing monolithic kernels to microkernels. Unfortunately, I do not think I finished the paper after dropping out of the IB program.

Avalon Microelectronics

The first job I had after graduating from University was a job at Avalon Microelectronics. They offered me the job because I had already worked there as a student for my last three work terms while I was still finishing my degree. My first work term started in April 2008. After I graduated, I started working there as a regular employee in May 2010.

Avalon Microelectronics was a company that designed RTL for using FPGAs to process data in OTN networks. The most important project that I worked on while I was there was an RTL block that was used to process the overhead data for each OTN frame as it arrived at the network interface.

When I first learned about the overhead-processing project, it was actually a project that a small group of people at the company had already started working on, and they had an initial design. It seemed like an interesting problem to try to solve. The block had to do something fairly complicated and there were a large number of ways it could be designed.

I started thinking about how I would design the block if I were designing it myself. I realized that I had a few ideas for how to design the block so that it would be significantly smaller than the block that the team was already working on. I started to get excited about my ideas, and I wanted to try to create a prototype myself to see if it would work. Over a weekend, in my spare time, I created my prototype. When I started work again the next Monday, I showed the team what I had made. It seemed like they were pleased that I was helping them.

On some level, I suspected that I had done something that was likely to be frustrating to the others on the team. I was not sure what I should do about this. I really wanted to design the block. I suppose I could have told them my ideas before implementing it myself, however they might not have implemented it the way that I wanted to implement it, and if they implemented it, they would get the credit and people might not realize that I had a good idea.

After I showed them my code, since I had written so much and it replaced a lot of what they had already written, we decided that we would use my code and I would take ownership of the block. The team members that had been working on it were assigned to do other work. I felt concerned that I might have annoyed people, however they did not seem annoyed. I tried to compensate by being friendly with people, especially at social gatherings when we were drinking alcohol. I personally do not think I have an alcohol problem in general, however I do enjoy drinking beer at group events.

Moving to Toronto

Less than a year after I started working at Avalon Microelectronics as a regular employee, the company was acquired by Altera. Altera was a much larger company and had an office in Toronto. After I had been working for Altera in Newfoundland for a while, I looked at the jobs that were available at the Toronto office, thinking that I might be able to transfer to that office, and move to Toronto.

It appeared that the Toronto office was mostly based around people working on Quartus, the software that was used to compile RTL so that it could be executed on an FPGA. One of the open roles at the Toronto office was to work on the OpenCL compiler, which allowed people to program the FPGA using OpenCL rather than a traditional language like Verilog or VHDL. This sounded pretty interesting to me. CPUs could be programmed with many different programming languages, and it seemed like this might be a reason that CPUs were much more widely-used than FPGAs. I decided that I wanted to apply for the open role. Unfortunately, I could not apply for the role right away. My girlfriend at the time was finishing her masters degree, and I wanted to move to Toronto with her. I waited until she finished her degree. Unfortunately, by the time that I was able to apply for the job opening that I saw, it was gone. Someone else in the Newfoundland office applied for the job before I could, and were accepted for the role.

When the time came that I actually could move to Toronto, the job opening at the Toronto office that seemed the most interesting to me was working on the timing analysis software that was part of Quartus. I did not know as much about timing analysis as I did about OpenCL and programming languages, however I could tell that the job involved working on a large complicated piece of software written in C++. I did an internal job interview for the position in order to prove that I was able to code in C++, and then they accepted me for the role. In order to prepare for the job, I did a Coursera course on the algorithms used in EDA tools, which had a section on timing analysis (part 1, part 2).

Timing Analysis

Working on a timing analyzer turned out to be fairly interesting. I liked that the software was complicated, and that it involved modelling something that was physically happening inside the chip. I learned a bunch of things about how to write optimized C++ code. I remember rewriting the path finding algorithm used in the report_timing command. My manager also sent me to a tau conference in California where people did presentations on various topics related to timing analysis. I enjoyed the trip. It was the first time that I travelled to another country by myself.

After I moved to Toronto, one of the things that I had planned to do was to start doing a masters degree at the University of Toronto. I applied to do the degree while I was still in Newfoundland. I knew that if I did the degree part time while I was working at Altera, that Altera would pay the tuition. I started doing courses for the degree not long after I moved to Toronto. I did the degree by doing one course at a time in my spare time, while I worked full-time at Altera.

The first course that I did for my masters degree was a course on FPGA architecture. I had to write a term paper for the course. I decided to write a paper that summarized and compared three other papers that were on the topic of timing analysis.

The second course that I did was on GPU programming. This course had a group project that I had to do with another person. I ended up forming a group with another person who was also doing their degree part-time while working at Altera. For our project, we attempted to create a timing analyzer that was accelerated by writing versions of it in OpenCL so that it could be run on either a GPU or an FPGA. I was responsible for the GPU implementation while my group partner was responsible for the FPGA implementation. It was partially successful. I wrote a page on the internal wiki at Altera on the school project so that I could describe it to people at work.

Another course that I did was on parallel programming. This course had a term project which required that I code something and write a report on it. I chose to do a project which attempted to accelerate an FPGA place and route algorithm by writing the algorithm in OpenCL and running on the FPGA.

High Level Design

After I worked on the timing analysis team for a while, a job opening appeared on the team that was working on the OpenCL compiler. This was the team that I originally had been planning to try to join when I was still in Newfoundland. I still thought it would be interesting to work on the project. The team was called the High Level Design (HLD) team.

The way the OpenCL project worked, an FPGA was designed to always be paired with a CPU, which had a host operating system. The CPU was responsible for programming the FPGA and transferring data between the FPGA and CPU. There was a runtime and device driver which ran on the CPU in order to perform these functions. The job opening on the HLD team was to work on the runtime and device driver. I decided to apply for the opening and switch to the team. I was actually more interested in working on the OpenCL compiler itself, however I figured that I could spend some time working on the runtime and then change teams later.

I worked on the runtime team for less than a year. After that, a new project was started that was going to try to use FPGAs to accelerate the execution of artificial neural networks, and they asked me to join the team.

Deep Learning Accelerator

The team that I joined next was the team that eventually became called the Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) team. When I joined, there was one person on the team already who had written a significant amount of code in OpenCL. At that point, the code was able to execute enough of a neural network to prove that the concept would work, however many things were incomplete and the code was not optimized. My job was to help finish the implementation in OpenCL and optimize the code.

I spent a significant amount of effort writing code for this project. Just over a year after I started working on the project, I broke up with my girlfriend who had moved from Newfoundland to Toronto with me. The reason for the breakup was not related to my work, however after it occurred I had a lot more time to work on the project, because I could work on it on evenings and weekends.

There were a lot of optimization opportunities on this project. The OpenCL compiler was functional, however unless you knew how to write OpenCL code in just the right way, it tended to generate very unoptimized RTL. I started to become good at writing OpenCL code in a specific coding style which allowed me to mostly be able to create any arbitrary circuit. Sometimes other people on the team would write an initial version of a block in a coding style which was intended to be clear and easy to understand, and then I would come and replace it with something that looked complicated, because I was actually trying to cause the OpenCL compiler to create a specific RTL circuit. Usually whenever I did this, it would result in a large speedup that I was able to describe on a slide and brag about in our group meeting. I found this very motivating.

In November 2017, I broke up with my girlfriend who I had been dating for 10 years. This was an extremely difficult decision for me and I did not enjoy doing it.

I began using dating apps. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, dating apps do not work very well. Most dating apps use a swiping interface which only allows you to see one person at a time, and requires you to make a decision on whether or not you like them as soon as you see the profile, which are usually short and do not contain very much information. In particular, in a large city with millions of people, looking at completely random profiles one at a time seems like a slow way to find a good match.

I now have a dating profile on my website. If a lot of people did the same thing, it would be possible for someone to build a search engine to find dating profiles. This seems like it would allow people to find a match more quickly, because they would not be forced to look at random profiles one at a time. Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, a search engine like that does not currently exist.

The Offer

In January 2019, I was contacted by a former manager from the DLA team who had left Intel to work at Tenstorrent, an AI chip startup that had been started in Toronto. They tried to convince me to join them at Tenstorrent. In order to convince me, they showed me a paper that Intel had published where my name appeared to have been intentionally removed. They suggested that this showed what the people at Intel actually thought about me.

They offered me a job at Tenstorrent. They offered me a salary of $150,000 (CAD) a year, and equity in the company valued at $200,000 (CAD). I asked them if they were able to give me a salary of $165,000 (CAD) and equity valued at $500,000 (CAD). I did not get a clear reply.

After receiving the offer, I decided to tell my manager at Intel that they were offering me a job at Tenstorrent. I figured I would find out if they would try to convince me to stay. I talked to my manager at Intel about things I could work on in the future if I stayed, and at one point I mentioned the idea of designing a programming language. At the time, I had been writing code for DLA in a combination of OpenCL and SystemVerilog using a compiler that another team at Intel had created. I had some ideas for a custom language based on what I had learned.

After the conversation with my manager at Intel, I later talked to the person at Tenstorrent again about their job offer. Unfortunately, when I spoke to them again they told me that they had changed their mind. They told me that they felt that I did not accept top-down direction, and that they were worried that they might have to lay me off if I got a job at Tenstorrent. They told me that they thought I would be better off at Intel.

After this, I think I remember that the person at Tenstorrent then specifically mentioned that one of the reasons I should stay at Intel was because I could create my own programming language at Intel. This happened to be a specific idea that I had recently discussed with my manager at Intel, making it seem possible that they had recently communicated with each other. This is a vague memory that I feel somewhat unsure of in retrospect, however it would have made sense in the context of what we were discussing.

I later read the wikipedia article for block floating point, which was the main idea from the paper where my name was removed, and saw that the Tenstorrent chip is listed in the article as an example of a hardware implementation. This makes it seem possible that they are using the idea after hearing about it from my work on the DLA project.

Staying at Intel

The Intel office in Toronto, which is now the Altera office, is located in a really nice area of downtown Toronto. It is close to restaurants, multiple subway stations, and most importantly for me, there happens to be a walking trail that passes mostly through parks that I can use to walk to the office from my apartment. By walking this trail to and from work every day, I had managed to lose a significant amount of weight. To be perfectly honest, the location of the Intel office was actually a very significant reason that I had found it difficult to immediately accept the Tenstorrent job offer. After having the Tenstorrent offer revoked, and learning about my name being removed from the Intel paper, it might have made sense to consider other jobs, however I really wanted to continue working at the physical Intel office. It seemed like it would be difficult for any other company to be able to compete with the location.

After the Tenstorrent job offer was revoked, I tried to continue working on the DLA team normally. At one point, one of the managers held a meeting to discuss the technical direction of the DLA project. They had created slides to describe the technical work that they felt needed to be done next. As I watched the presentation, I started to feel frustrated. I had written a lot of the code that was being referred to in the presentation, and I disagreed with what was being proposed. I objected strongly during the meeting. Unfortunately, everyone else in the meeting was in a physical meeting room, while I had called in remotely, and so I was unable to tell how others were perceiving what I was saying. Nobody else in the meeting spoke up to give their opinion. Eventually, I gave up and stopped debating the issue. I felt frustrated about this meeting, and from later interactions with the manager that did the presentation, I could tell they were frustrated as well.

Another time, I had a meeting with a different manager on the DLA team. In this meeting, I had been trying to communicate and resolve the problems I had been having with the managers on the DLA team that made it seem like they did not like me. This manager tried to give me some feedback. They told me they felt that I often did things just so that I could say "I told you so" and that others did not like it when I did this. It was actually useful feedback in the sense that it made it easier for me to understand how others saw me, though I did feel like it was a bit unfair.

The COVID-19 pandemic started at the end of 2019. I had already been spending a lot of time alone in my apartment due to being single, and the pandemic made it worse. Every minute that I was not in a video chat with someone else was a minute I was spending alone in my apartment and unable to leave. I spent a lot of time worrying about my social relationships and convincing people to want to continue socializing with me.

Office Gossip

Around October 2020, I had a conversation with my manager at Intel. He asked me about someone else on the team, and asked me if I thought the other person on the team was looking for a new job. The person they asked about was someone I knew from Newfoundland that I had helped get a job at Intel when they were moving to Toronto. The question made me really uncomfortable, because the truth was that I did know that this person was looking for a new job. I tried to avoid answering the question, however I suspect he could tell that the answer was yes from my reaction and the way I tried to avoid the question.

Some time after this, my team at Intel was told that multiple senior people on the team were quitting, including my manager. It was a significant change and it was not clear how the team would be run after they were gone. I became concerned that it might be a sign that layoffs were coming soon, and the people who stayed on the team might end up laid off.

I had a chat with my manager, who was leaving Intel. He had not officially told the team what his new job would be, however he told me he was going to be opening an office in Toronto for something related to Google. He told me I could look it up on LinkedIn if I was really interested. He told me that he told his manager that he thought that the person he asked me about previously was looking for a job outside of Intel. He implied that he knew this based on my previous response when I was asked about it, and he apologized for telling his manager based on my response. He told me that he did not tell his manager my name. He told me not to worry, and suggested that the other person on the team might be given stocks, and might be treated better by his new manager. I interpreted this to be a sign that the other person was now going to be laid off as a consequence of how I responded when my manager asked if the other person was looking for a job.

These events occurred during the COVID pandemic. Before the pandemic, I had been regularly trying to organize people to have drinks after work every two weeks at one of the restaurants near the office. Once the pandemic started, this social group switched to having a social video chat every two weeks. This was personally very beneficial for me at the time, as I am single and live alone, and so during the COVID pandemic, any time I was not having a video chat with someone was time that I was spending completely alone in my apartment. It was one of the only ways to see any humans at all.

After the senior members on the team quit, others started to follow. The video chat continued however, with many of the same people in it, even though they worked at different companies. I was feeling extremely worried that I had made a comment to my manager at Intel that was going to cause the other person on the team to get laid off. I told someone about it in the video chat who was previously a manager at Intel, but had since gotten a job at a different company.

Leaving Intel

Given that everyone else on the team appeared to be quitting, and it appeared that layoffs might be coming, I started to become worried that I could be laid off as well. In addition, the other people on the team that had quit had been getting jobs at various AI startups that were opening offices in Toronto. I felt that I liked the idea of working on something interesting and potentially making a lot of money. I decided to apply for jobs at Groq, Cerebras, Untether AI, and Tenstorrent again. I received a job offer from Groq. This was the company where my manager from Intel had gotten a job. Multiple team members had later followed them and gotten jobs there. It seemed like a good company and I liked that I would already know people there. I accepted the offer.

Not long after accepting the offer from Groq, it became time to travel back to Newfoundland for Christmas, as I normally did every year. I decided to visit the office in person one last time before flying back to Newfoundland in order to collect my personal possessions that were at my desk. While I was there, I started to feel sad that I would not work in that particular office anymore. There was nobody else in the office at the time, so I decided to walk around and take a few photos of the office for nostalgic reasons. I took photos of the views out of the windows, and looked at the CN Tower. I felt sad and hoped I was making the correct decision by changing jobs.

After I flew back to Newfoundland, I started feeling even more anxious about changing jobs. My daily walking route between my apartment and the Intel office was something that I valued a lot. Walking this route every day was one of the only ways that I had found to successfully lose weight. In addition to that, many of my memories of Toronto were centered around places near the office. I started to become worried that I was giving up something valuable, and started to think that maybe things were not so bad at Intel.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the probability of being laid off if I changed my mind and chose not to quit my job at Intel. I knew that at Intel, my name had been removed from a paper that was published about work that I had done. I felt this was a sign that at Intel, there were people who might be trying to harm my reputation. However, at least at Intel, there were a lot of people who knew me, and were aware that I had technical skills, and so it would be more difficult for someone to harm my reputation and claim I should be laid off. I also started to feel anxious changing to a new company where only a small group of people knew who I was, especially since it seemed possible that my coworkers who had moved to Groq from Intel might have a negative opinion of me, and might have a lot more influence at the new company.

I was so unsure about my decision to leave Intel that I contacted Groq and told them that I had changed my mind about accepting their offer. However, this did not make me feel better. I knew that backing out of a job offer after accepting it was something that companies generally did not view positively, and so I felt bad about that. In addition, I also immediately started to feel anxious from worrying that layoffs might be coming soon at Intel, and I felt that I might be a prime target to be laid off. I was not sure what I should do.

I also started to have another problem. Thinking that I was quitting Intel soon, I had copied personal files off of my work laptop. Most of the files were very obviously personal. However, for some of the files, I started to become concerned that if someone could tell that I had copied them, they might have thought I was copying work files that I was not allowed to take with me. I started to become worried that Intel might have some kind of monitoring software on their laptops, and that people at Intel might see what I had copied, without me having the opportunity to explain or defend myself. I started to become worried that this was another reason I could be laid off.

There were a few different files that I was worried about. The thing that I was the most worried about was that I had saved a short part of the conversation with my manager at Intel where it seemed like they were implying that the other person on the team might get laid off based on something that I had said. I felt like I needed to save this conversation for my personal sanity, so that I could prove to myself what was actually said in the conversation. Aside from that, I saved an internal wiki page that I had created to describe a project that I had actually been doing for school, however I had created a wiki page at work in order to show people at work. I also accidentally copied an image file that I later realized was actually a screenshot of a PowerPoint slide when I opened it on my computer. I deleted the image when I saw it. I was not sure how someone at Intel would interpret the fact that I had copied these things, and so I was very concerned.

I struggled with the decision for a long time, and eventually I decided that it would actually be better to work for Groq. I contacted them again, and asked them if they would allow me to accept the offer again, even though I had previously changed my mind. They told me this was fine. I then contacted Intel and gave my official notice that I intended to quit my job.

Unfortunately, even after accepting the job at Groq and giving official notice to Intel, I was still unsure of my decision. During my last week at Intel, I agonized over it. I had a video chat with one of the managers on the DLA team about it almost every day. It was very important to me that the people at Intel still be willing to hire me back again someday, and I told this to the manager at Intel often. I told the manager on the DLA team that I was worried that the executives at Intel disliked me, and that they were going to put a "do not rehire" entry into the Intel HR system, which would have made it difficult for people at Intel to hire me back again. The manager on the DLA team reassured me. They told me that there were a lot of people at Intel that knew me, and that even if the computer system said "do not rehire", that it would be easy to override it and rehire me if I was going to return.

Making a decision on whether or not to accept the offer from Groq was very stressful, which I expressed to my family while I was visiting Newfoundland. The stress was so bad that my parents suggested that I talk to a doctor about being prescribed medication. The doctor ended up prescribing me some kind of antidepressant. When I took the pills, my body felt physically uncomfortable and it was extremely unpleasant. I tried drinking alcohol after taking a pill, and it caused me to have a really bad hangover, even after consuming only a very small amount of alcohol. I stopped taking the pills almost immediately.

Working at Groq

Once I started at Groq, I immediately felt like it was important to make technical contributions in order to prove that I deserved to be there. The situation seemed very uncertain to me. It appeared that the others who had left Intel for Groq earlier were each given responsibility for important parts of the code, and were being treated like they were going to be promoted to be managers. It seemed like they had a better relationship with my manager, and I strongly suspected they were having conversations and not including me. This bothered me because I felt that I had more experience than those coworkers, both in terms of our time on the DLA team, and in terms of the total length of our careers.

We decided that I would work on trying to find performance optimizations in the code in general. I wanted to find places in the code where it was possible to make an optimization that would cause a large improvement in performance that could be measured, so that I could prove that I had technical skills. I made a few small changes that were reasonably good, before I found a place in the code where it seemed like I could improve performance significantly. Someone else on the team had written the initial version of some code that generated hardware instructions for one of the blocks on the chip. I noticed that the code they wrote was hard-coded to handle a few specific neural network graph patterns well, however it would produce very unoptimized code in a lot of other cases. I realized I could rewrite the code and replace it with a generic algorithm that would handle any situation and would run much faster. I quickly did this, and then showed the team when I was done. Unfortunately, while I believe I did demonstrate that I had technical skills, this was also code that someone else had been assigned ownership of and had been intending to improve themselves. I felt bad about it.

In addition to this, the person who I was concerned was going to be laid off at Intel due to the comment that I had made ended up not getting laid off. I wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that I had told the former Intel manager that I was concerned about it when I was chatting with them in the video chat.

YouTube Videos

By the time I started working at Groq, I had gotten into the habit of watching YouTube videos often. YouTube videos are good when you live alone and want social interaction and do not have other options.

At one point, around November 2021, I stated to notice that the YouTube video suggestion algorithm was suggesting videos that seemed like they were being suggested based on information that YouTube should not have. I started to think it was possible that the suggested video algorithm was being intentionally manipulated by someone who wanted me to see the specific videos that were appearing. I knew it was possible that I was wrong. However, the algorithm is hidden, and technically it is not actually possible to know for sure how it is operating when you are using YouTube. It was also technically possible that I was correct.

Eventually, after I had been thinking about this possibility for a few weeks, and seeing suggested videos that only hinted that someone might be intentionally choosing them, the suggested videos changed suddenly. It suddenly started to seem very explicit and obvious, at least to me, that the videos were being intentionally controlled. This was because I was seeing a lot of videos that had thumbnails that contained strings of text with specific messages in them. Many of the messages had a religious theme. Some of the thumbnails seemed to be telling me that I was being instructed to perform some kind of specific task. I started to become concerned that there might be a criminal gang of some kind of that was threatening me and was planning to force me to do something for them.

I freaked out, and eventually I ended up leaving my apartment and knocking on the door of one of my neighbours and asking them for help. I am not sure how I described the situation exactly however I was definitely very emotional and concerned. My neighbour contacted the building employees using their phone, and then the building employees contacted the police. My neighbour gave me updates and told me that the police were on the way. When the police arrived, at first they listened to what I had to say. However, at some point the conversation changed and the police started telling me that they felt I was exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness and that I had to visit a psychiatric facility. I described this experience in detail in a journal entry, which also contains photos of some of the YouTube thumbnails that I saw.

The experience of being brought to the psychiatric facility after trying to contact the police was traumatic. I did not in any way understand why it made sense to bring me there. It started to seem possible that I had indeed been threatened by a criminal gang using YouTube videos, and the police were actually part of the gang. It seemed like maybe bringing me to the psychiatric facility might have been a method the gang was using to show how much power they had. For a long time after this, I was afraid of the police. There were times when it seemed to me like people might be following me and I suspected it might be the police. A few times I ran from the people that seemed like they were following me and hid in nearby parks.

I found this experience especially disturbing because I had recently started my job at Groq, and I knew that a bunch of the senior management at Groq used to work at Google, which owns YouTube. I seriously started to think that it was possible that the executives at Google might be part of some kind of criminal gang that was secretly running the world, and they had some kind of system that used YouTube to threaten individual people into doing what they wanted. It definitely seemed clear to me that if Google did do this, and people complained about it, that people were not likely to believe them.

Quitting My Job

Given that it seemed like the YouTube videos might have been placed there by people associated with work, I immediately became very anxious about my job. After I had been brought to the psychiatric facility the first time, my dad had suggested that I voluntarily go back a second time and ask for a letter from the doctor saying that they recommended that I take some time off of work, which I had done. At the time, I did feel like I was unable to work, so it seemed like it made sense to me. I sent the letter from the doctor at the psychiatric facility to the people at Groq, and told them that I was taking some time off of work. I did not explain the YouTube videos.

After this it was not clear what I should do. I spent a lot of time contemplating my situation and feeling unsure. It was possible that I had completely misinterpreted the YouTube videos, which meant that I should avoid doing anything else strange around my coworkers or anyone else, and simply continue living my life normally. However, it was also possible that I had indeed been threatened, and they had done so in a way that was designed to be plausibly deniable in order to place me in this exact situation with this uncertainty. It seemed like I somehow had to think of a strategy which would work well regardless of whether I had misinterpreted the videos or not. It was not straightforward.

Eventually, a point came when I was considering the possibility that my coworkers might have indeed manipulated the YouTube videos, and I started to think about other things that it meant that they might be willing to do. I started to have a fear that they might try to fire me with cause and claim that I did something wrong, so that others would not want to hire me. When I Googled this, I found articles saying that if you were concerned that if your employer might do this, it was better to quit without any notice so that they would not have the opportunity to fire you. I spent a long time in my apartment by myself wondering what I should do, and eventually I decided to do it. I sent an email to Groq and quit without any notice. To make sure that I had fully legally quit and they did not have any opportunity to fire me with cause, I even showed up at the house of my manager without any warning and gave them my laptop. I took a photo of myself handing them the laptop.

After this was done, I started to have second thoughts. I still wanted to have a successful career, and I was not sure that the steps that I had taken were actually going to help in that way. It was true that I had not been fired with cause, however instead of that I had done something very strange. After a lot of contemplation, I decided that the best thing to do was to try to undo what I had done, and make decisions a bit more slowly. I emailed the people at Groq, and asked them nicely if I could cancel quitting my job, and come back. They told me that I could. I met my manager and another coworker at a restaurant, and they returned my laptop.

After this, I was still unsure about what I should do. I started to feel a little less afraid that my coworkers had anything to do with the YouTube videos. However, I still felt like the relationship with them was not very good. I also now felt embarrassed about quitting without notice and acting strange in a very obvious way. It seemed like it would still be a good idea to look for other jobs.

Interviewing at RapidSilicon

After I had left Intel and started my job at Groq, I had received a connection request on LinkedIn from someone who had recently quit their job at Intel and had started working for a company called RapidSilicon. RapidSilicon was a startup that was going to directly compete with Intel by selling FPGAs. Both myself and the person who added me on LinkedIn previously worked for Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), which sold FPGAs.

According to the website for RapidSilicon, their plan was to sell FPGAs that were based on an open source hardware design and were designed to be used with open source software tools. I personally already had positive opinions of open source software, as I had been using various versions of Linux as the main operating system on my computers ever since I was in high school. I liked the idea of working on a project that was going to combine FPGAs with open source. Even though it was harder to make money with open source, it seemed like projects that were open source were much more likely to become well-known and be seen as a technical success, which made it easier to justify working on them even if they were not going to be as profitable.

Once I had decided that I was going to look for a new job, the fact that someone from RapidSilicon had recently added me on LinkedIn was extremely convenient. I decided to contact the person who had added me, and we arranged a job interview. From their website, I could see that they were hiring someone to work on timing analysis software. I had previously worked on this type of software at Intel, and so I told them that this was the role that I was interested in. After a conversation with the hiring manager, they decided to offer me the job, with a title of Principal Engineer. I was pleased with the job title.

There were a few other options I considered besides RapidSilicon. One obvious option was that I could return to Intel. However, it occurred to me that the work that I would do at RapidSilicon was very similar to the kind of work they did at Intel. By working at RapidSilicon, I would still be gaining experience that should theoretically mean that I would still be able to get a job at Intel again after working at RapidSilicon, if that was what I wanted, assuming that the people at Intel did not mind that I had previously worked at RapidSilicon. In addition, at RapidSilicon, since it was a smaller company, it seemed like there would probably be more opportunities to work on more technically interesting projects, since there was less of a chance of someone else at the company already being responsible for them.

I also considered working for Amazon. Amazon has a large office in downtown Toronto, and so it seemed like it might be similar to working at Intel, at least in terms of the physical office. However, I had previously read an article about working for Amazon that made it seem like it might be stressful to work there. RapidSilicon was a much smaller company, and it seemed like that might mean it would be less stressful, depending on how the company was run. I contacted Amazon and did one interview, however I decided not to continue the process after that interview.

Visiting Newfoundland

Before making a final decision on a job, I travelled to Newfoundland for Christmas. It was an extremely stressful visit. I was constantly worried that I could not trust the people at work, and that someone was going to try to harm my reputation.

I spent a lot of time thinking about computer security during my visit to Newfoundland. After the experience with the YouTube videos that had caused me to believe that my computer might have been remotely accessed, I wanted to have more control over my computer. I tried to think of ways that I could prevent the computer from communicating over the Internet unless I could examine the data being transferred and be sure that it was legitimate. In the short term, while I was considering the issue, I started using my laptop with the internal wireless card physically removed. This was inconvenient because it meant that there was no Internet unless I used an Ethernet cable, however it felt more secure.

I started thinking about the software on my laptop, and whether I could be sure that the laptop was running the software that I thought it was, without any backdoors. I thought about downloading the source code for the entire operating system and compiling everything myself from scratch. However, even if that I did that, I would still have the problem of making sure that the laptop was actually running the software that I had compiled. It was possible for someone to replace or change the software on my laptop while I was not looking at it, if I left the laptop alone somewhere.

I decided to buy a used Chromebook while I was in Newfoundland. The Chromebook has a secure boot process which should mean that it only runs the software that Google allows, and I wanted to experiment with ChromeOS. I figured that I would use the Chromebook for accessing the Internet, and use my laptop with the internal wireless card physically removed for everything else. At one point, I was using both laptops at the same time and I accidentally played a YouTube video on the Chromebook by mistake. The current version starts with someone saying:

"I'm about 90% sure your home network can be hacked, like it's not safe. You don't believe me? Let me show you."

I remember the opening sentence slightly differently, however I believe I have the correct video. When I heard the first few words it freaked me out because it seemed like the computer was suddenly talking to me and telling me that my computer had been hacked. I wondered if someone had made it do that on purpose.

While I was in Newfoundland, I decided to accept the job offer from RapidSilicon.

Onboarding at RapidSilicon

One of the first things that happened at RapidSilicon was they sent me an agreement about confidential information and assigning ownership of intellectual property to RapidSilicon. The agreement seemed broad. I started to become concerned that RapidSilicon, because it was a company working on open source software and hardware, might try to claim they that owned things that I wrote in my free time as personal projects if I released them as open source.

I sent an email to my future manager at RapidSilicon for clarification. I told them that I had been thinking of doing open hardware projects related to things like home automation or home security, or other small electronic devices that might be useful to the average person. The projects I had been thinking of would be made out of 3D printed parts plus electronic components and open source software. I told them that I was also possibly interested in contributing to pure-software open source projects as well, even if they did not have a hardware component. I told them that I was interested in cryptography and cryptocurrencies in particular. These were all things that I had become interested in after seeing the YouTube videos that had caused me to believe that my computer might possibly have been remotely controlled by a criminal gang that included business executives and the police. I asked RapidSilicon if they would claim ownership if I designed anything similar to what I had described, in my spare time. My manager at RapidSilicon replied and told me that I would own all of those things.

After this, it was time to buy a laptop for use while working at RapidSilicon. I was told that I should buy my own laptop and that RapidSilicon would reimburse me. At the time, I actually needed to buy a new laptop for personal use anyway, and so I emailed my future manager at RapidSilicon, and asked for clarification on who actually would own the physical laptop after it was purchased. Maybe I could buy a new laptop for work use and also use it as my personal laptop. My manager replied and told me that RapidSilicon would own the laptop for three years, and that if I left RapidSilicon before that, I would either have to return it or pay a fair market value. They told me that I could spend up to $2000 (USD). They told me that they personally spent more than $2000 on their laptop, and that they intended to keep their laptop no matter what. They suggested that I do the same thing.

Working at RapidSilicon

My first task at RapidSilicon was going to be to modify the placement and routing engine that is part of VPR so that it could interface with OpenSTA, rather than using the built-in timing analyzer that is part of VPR. This was an interesting task, though it took some time to understand the OpenSTA source code. It was similar to the code that I had worked on at Intel in many ways, however it also differed significantly due to the fact that OpenSTA was designed to analyze the timing of ASICs, rather than FPGAs like the Intel code had been. It seemed like it might be possible to use the fact that the timing analyzer was designed to analyze the timing of ASICs in order to add features that the Intel software did not have. I liked the idea of doing the investigation to determine if it was possible.

However, not long after I started working at RapidSilicon, I started to feel uncomfortable with the job. The company seemed to be planning to release everything as open source. Even the hardware itself was going to be open source and based on OpenFPGA. I started to become concerned that the company might not really have a way to make money. I started to feel guilty about the idea of releasing code as open source which could replace closed source code that had been written by people I knew at Intel, and cause people to get laid off. I started to become worried that I was doing something that was going to cause more people to dislike me. In addition to that, if the company did not have a way to make money, then it was possible that I would write the code, cause people to dislike me, and then get laid off anyway. This made me reluctant to write a lot of code.

In addition to this, I felt suspicious of the people at RapidSilicon. I noticed that they seemed extremely reluctant to send me the agreement that would describe in detail the equity that I owned in the company. I repeatedly asked for this agreement, and they kept delaying. In the end, they never actually provided this agreement. This also made me reluctant to write code for them.

I tried to attend meetings and get to know people, however it was difficult. It was a fully remote job at first, though later one other person joined who also lived in Toronto. Everyone else I only knew over video chat or using the instant messenger. Many of the employees were in Pakistan, which meant that they were in a time zone that was very far away from mine. This caused many of the meetings to be scheduled at times when I was not able to attend. I felt very disconnected from everyone else.

I started to suspect that maybe everyone else had some kind of subtle plan that they were not discussing openly which was the solution to the problem I was concerned about with regards to making money. Maybe the company actually had a subtle goal of intentionally doing the work slowly without saying they were doing so, in order to give the company time to hire people and increase in perceived value, and receive more money from investors. It seemed possible to me that maybe after the company had grown large enough in perceived value, and hired a bunch of people, that one of the other FPGA companies might acquire it simply because it was now a plausible threat to the other FPGA company. If that was the plan, it seemed like it could be considered anticompetitive, which might explain why nobody was discussing it. Thinking about things this way, it seemed like if that was the plan, it would also make sense to release code as open source slowly, because it was actually the threat of being able to release code as open source which made the company valuable, rather than actually releasing it.

I decided that I would do my work on the laptop that I had bought for RapidSilicon, however I would be extremely careful about actually transferring any of the code that I wrote back to RapidSilicon. I figured that maybe what I could do was to do the work more quickly on my laptop, and then transfer the results to RapidSilicon over time at a slower pace. In order to do my work on the laptop, however, I needed timing models from TSMC, which were required in order to use OpenSTA. RapidSilicon had a copy of the timing models on an Amazon cloud server, and had provided instructions that implied that they wanted us to actually do our work on the Amazon cloud server. However, I specifically did not want to do that, because I did not want RapidSilicon to be able to observe my work in progress. RapidSilicon only implied that they wanted us to do the work on the cloud server, and did not state that it was required to do the work there, so I decided to copy the TSMC timing models from the Amazon cloud server to my work laptop. After this, because I found it amusing, and because I symbolically wanted to make sure RapidSilicon would not get any of my work in progress if they laid me off, I modified the .bash_history file on the Amazon cloud server so that the home directory was completely fresh as if I had never even logged in.

RapidSilicon laid me off after 10 months. They told me that I had been writing code too slowly. I have now deleted the TSMC timing models from the work laptop, which is now my personal laptop.

Camping Trip

Even though I had quit my job at Groq, after it was done and I started at RapidSilicon, I still had a feeling like I wanted to interact with my former coworkers from the DLA team. The regular video chats that we had started doing during the pandemic had continued after some of the team had quit their jobs at Intel and gotten jobs at other AI companies. I felt that I did not have very many friends in general, and the social connections seemed like they might be useful for finding jobs in the future, so I kept attending the video chats. In addition to that, I had started to realize that I felt uncomfortable working at RapidSilicon. I did not know the people very well, and I did not trust them. I felt like I wanted to maintain contact with my former coworkers to make it easier to get a job somewhere else, if I wanted to leave RapidSilicon.

When the summer came in 2022, it seemed like a good idea to try to do as many outdoors activities as possible. I hoped that this would reduce my stress related to work. One of the things that I did was to organize a camping trip with people that I knew from the DLA team. This was something that I had been doing with the team every summer for few years. I like camping and it is difficult to find groups of people that are willing to go. Since I was still having the regular video chats with the DLA team, it seemed like it made sense to organize another camping trip.

The camping trip that I organized with the DLA team in 2022 was a canoe camping trip. This meant that we would be parking our cars next to a lake, putting our gear into canoes, and then using the canoes to travel to another spot on the lake where there would be a campsite next to the water. I had done this type of camping a bunch of times before and so I was pretty comfortable with it. We set up our campsite, which required setting up the tents as well as finding a spot near the campsite to throw a rope over a tree branch to hang our food at night.

Once the evening came, it was time to relax. I had brought a bunch of boxed wine with me, which was my method of bringing alcohol on camping trips without using a glass or aluminum container. I started drinking wine while we chatted around the campfire. I remember that we talked about various things related to the technology industry. I remember talking about transistors, and wondering if it was possible to somehow use one transistor to implement multiple logical switches by using multiple voltage levels. I am not sure if it made sense but it was an idea I had while drinking wine.

Unfortunately, this particular evening ended up being an evening that I drank a lot of wine, to the point where I was fairly hungover the next day. I woke up in my tent and realized that I had not fully prepared for bed when I went to sleep, as I was still wearing my clothes. It made me uncomfortable that I could not remember exactly how the evening ended. When I thought about it, I could remember a brief moment from the night before from when I had apparently been travelling back to my tent after putting my food in the bear hang at the end of the night. I remembered lying on the ground, and I was not sure how I got there, however I remembered that I was intoxicated enough that I found it difficult to stand up again. I remembered crying, and saying "I want to go back", while another DLA team member was nearby. I could not remember exactly why I was saying the phrase. For some reason, I feel like it was most likely that I was saying that I wanted to go back to Groq, as this was actually something that I had been thinking at the time and was trying not to say out loud. However, the memory bothered me a bit because it seemed like I might have been saying I wanted to go back to the campsite. I decided not to think about it.

Rock Climbing

Later in the summer, after a few more camping trips and other outdoors activities, one of the things that I ended up doing was going rock climbing. One of the people that I was having regular video chats with invited me to go with him, his girlfriend, and his other friend. I had never been rock climbing before, and it was not something that I was enthusiastic about doing, however I felt like it was worthwhile to try it at least once.

When I showed up, I at first felt a little bit uncomfortable because I noticed that the specific rock climbing gym that we were visiting was displaying a pride flag. My feeling about the pride flag is that I agree with the message of being inclusive, however personally I feel more comfortable being around them if I am sure that people know that I personally am heterosexual. In this case, I figured it was fine, as I was with my friend and his girlfriend, and I was sure that anyone who knew me knew that I was heterosexual, because I generally tried to make it obvious. In the video chats with my former coworkers, I would regularly describe how I was going on dates and was trying to find a girlfriend, and so at least they definitely knew for sure that I was heterosexual.

When it came time to put on the rock climbing gear, I realized that there was no easy way to store my phone in my pockets while I was climbing. My friend offered to store it in his backpack and put it in his locker while we were climbing, and I agreed. At first, I felt this was fine, however once I got my phone back I started to feel uncomfortable. I had been very paranoid about computer security after seeing the YouTube videos, and this was the first time my phone had left my possession since that had occurred. It did not seem likely that anyone would have done something to it, however I regretted doing it. I decided to try harder to remember to say no if anyone asked me for any of my computers again in the future.

Camino

A few weeks after going rock climbing, I had a trip planned with my dad to hike a portion of the Camino de Santiago, which is a series of hiking trails located in Spain, France, and Portugal. The trails are historically associated with Christian pilgrims hiking the trail for the purpose of having a religious experience, however I am not religious. I just wanted to do it for the hiking experience.

I enjoyed the trip in a lot of ways, though I also found myself often becoming distracted and sad thinking about my work situation and thinking about being single. On one of the evenings, however, my dad and I ended up sitting in a restaurant with some other hikers, and I found the socialization distracting, which made me feel a bit better. One of the other hikers was female and was from Germany, and I chatted with her for a bit. I remember that I enjoyed having someone female to chat with, even though it was a stranger.

After I came back from the trip, I ended up meeting some of my former coworkers from the DLA team in a restaurant. I mentioned to one of them that I had met someone from Germany while I was on my trip to Spain. For some reason, one of my coworkers responded by suggesting that they were surprised that I had mentioned that I had met someone from Germany. I wondered what they meant by that comment.

Visiting Newfoundland

Once the fall came, it became time to travel back to Newfoundland for Christmas. This visit to Newfoundland was stressful. I did not yet know what I was going to do for a job, which was something I was worried about. I tried to relax and hang out with my friends, however it seemed like my friends were acting strange. It seemed like they were being sarcastic in various ways and it seemed like they disliked me. I had the impression that they felt like I had done something wrong to deserve being treated badly, however I did not understand what I had done. One of the interactions made me suspect that there might be some reason that they did not like me that was related to dating and finding a girlfriend. Another time, one of my friends acted in a way that made it seem like they thought I was not heterosexual, which made me extremely uncomfortable.

When I was alone, I would spend a lot of time thinking about how I wanted a girlfriend. I started thinking about a woman I had dated previously in Toronto. It was someone who I had not been sure about when I was dating her, and so I had not been enthusiastic. We had only been on a few dates and then she had ended it. However, after some time had passed I had started to think I might have made a mistake. I had already tried to message her at her phone number again and not gotten a response, so I Googled her name. Unfortunately, when I did this I found out she had died in a car crash. I was sad about this.

I spent a lot of time when I was in Newfoundland worrying about the security of my computer. I still believed that it was possible that there might be a criminal gang of business executives that secretly ran the world, which was the explanation for why I had seen the mysterious YouTube videos and then had been brought to the psychiatric facility. I suspected that business executives at Intel might have some kind of ability to surveil all computers, and I was afraid that they were angry at me for copying files from my Intel laptop. I was afraid that the short conversation with my manager that I had copied from the work laptop might be some kind of evidence that Intel wanted to delete.

I ended up getting into the habit of taking my backpack with my laptop with me everywhere I went. I felt uncomfortable leaving it in a room by itself. It was partially because I was afraid people were going to interfere with it, but also because to me, using my laptop is comforting in a way that is kind of like socializing with a person, and so I did not want anything to happen to my laptop. It seemed like my friends and a lot of other people did not like me, however I knew that my computer did not have any negative feelings about me. Therefore, when I was using my computer, I was able to spend time engaged in an activity where I did not have to worry about being judged. I felt protective of my laptop.

At one point, an incident occurred when I was sitting across from my dad at the kitchen table with my laptop in front of me and I had to briefly leave the room. Up until that point I had been bringing the laptop everywhere. However, this time I decided that it was probably fine to leave the laptop with my dad for a few minutes. After I came back, I could see that my laptop had obviously been moved. My dad had decided to reach over the table and move it while I was gone. Maybe he was cleaning the table or something, however I suspected that he was trying to mess with me and make me feel anxious on purpose.

When I returned to Toronto, I felt relieved to be back in my apartment by myself again. Even though I did not want to be stuck staying there all of the time, at least when I was in my apartment by myself I could control everything around me and there was nobody there to judge me or mess with my stuff.

Alone in My Apartment

At this point, it would have made sense to start applying for another job after being laid off from RapidSilicon. However, I felt like I had a bunch of unanswered questions. I still did not really understand what had happened when my computer appeared to have been hacked the previous year, which made me want to spend some time trying to improve the security of my computer. In addition to that, when I thought about the conversation over video chat that I had had with RapidSilicon when I was being laid off, it seemed to me like there might have been an additional reason that they wanted to lay me off that they were not saying. It is possible that they were genuinely frustrated with me because they legitimately wanted me to work more quickly, however it seemed to me like there might have been something else. I started to become worried that someone might have said something to the people at RapidSilicon to harm my reputation, which had caused them to want to lay me off.

I found this possibility concerning. I pictured starting a new job and then being laid off again after a short amount of time. I did not want that to happen again. I wanted to find a job where it seemed like people were going to tell me what they actually thought about me, and were going to check with me directly to confirm anything they heard about me before assuming it was true. I decided to wait until I felt I had a social group which would fully include me into their group. Maybe what I needed was to find a girlfriend first, before finding a job. If I found a girlfriend who liked doing engineering work, maybe we would be able to work together, which would help solve my work problem at the same time.

Brain Hemisphere Language

Given that I did not have a job, I had a lot of time to think. Ever since I saw the mysterious YouTube videos in 2021 and was brought to the psychiatric facility, I had been increasingly thinking about a theory that I had related to language and the brain hemispheres. I felt that I had started to notice patterns in language that made it seem like certain words and symbols might have alternate meanings that people are only aware of in one of their brain hemispheres. This YouTube video is particularly good for explaining why it seems like this could be possible. As a thought about it further, I realized that if this language existed, it would be an extremely important aspect of understanding how society functioned.

One of the reasons I had started to suspect the language existed was because it started to seem like other people were intentionally sending me messages in the language, in order to teach me the language. This was particularly the case when it came to numbers. Sometimes it seemed like people were sending me text messages that were timed to arrive at times with certain number patterns. I started to learn what seemed to be alternative meanings for the number patterns. It seemed like 2 was used for something that was bad or undesirable, while 3 was used for something that was good or desirable. The pattern 23, therefore, seemed like it might to be used to indicate forgiveness, or some other situation where something had gone from bad to good. Sometimes the numbers were represented by having a number of physical objects in a group. This made it seem like 2 and 3 made mathematical sense as numbers to contain secret messages, in order to reduce the number of physical objects required to convey the message.

Even though I suspected people were sending me these number patterns intentionally, I was afraid to overtly discuss them with anyone. It seemed like everyone else who appeared to know about the language was putting a lot of effort into keeping the language secret. It seemed like it was better, in the short term, to avoid bringing it up and instead to continue to observe the patterns without saying anything.

One of the places where it seemed like the number patterns might be important was when communicating with women on dating apps. Maybe there were people who were using the language to secretly indicate their dating intent. I had already noticed that it seemed like I appeared to sometimes be correctly using the number patterns in my own messages, without realizing I was doing so. Maybe one of the reasons the language existed was for evolutionary purposes, so that mating preferences could be signalled secretly without a person being aware they were sending a signal.

In February 2023, I went on a date. I tried to pay close attention to determine if there were any hidden patterns in the text messages that I was sending and receiving with the woman I went on the date with. It did sometimes seem like there were patterns, however it was difficult to tell for sure. The date went pretty well, or so I thought. After the date, we texted for a while, however, at one point she stopped replying suddenly with no explanation. Based on the way the conversation had been going, I had this feeling like she had done it on purpose, in a way that was intended to be sudden and confusing. I stopped using dating apps for a while.

I had a lot of time to myself in my apartment, and so I tried to do experiments. I started to have the impression that when I looked at the clock at random times, I was finding that certain number patterns were starting to seem more likely to appear. In particular, I would very often look at the clock and see the number patterns 23, 33, or 11:11. The number 1111 was noteworthy because it had appeared mysteriously in the thumbnails of some of the YouTube videos that caused me to believe my computer was being remotely controlled. I started to wonder if what was happening was that one of my brain hemispheres was trying to communicate messages to the other brain hemisphere by keeping track of the time using some method that I was not aware of, and was causing me to look at the clock at just the right moment to see those numbers. I experimented with this by hiding all of my clocks for long periods and then pushing a key on my computer keyboard while running a script that recorded the exact time I pushed the key. I did not notice any patterns with this experiment.

I started reading the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, which is about the origins of the Internet. When I read the book carefully, it started to seem like the descriptions in the book of the early Internet and how it was developed could also possibly be referring to the brain hemisphere language, by analogy. If there is a subconscious language that can be used to send and receive messages only understood by one of the brain hemispheres in each person, then it seems possible for those brain hemispheres to create a network to send messages over long distances. This would work similarly to how the Internet works, except that the messages are transferred subconsciously between people, rather than between computers. I wondered if the book was intentionally written to possibly refer to this subconscious network, or if it only seemed that way because I was looking for it.

Another part of my theory related to thoughts. I wondered if there was some way for my other brain hemisphere to insert a thought into my brain hemisphere. I wondered if perhaps my other brain hemisphere might be able to influence my dreams. Maybe my other brain hemisphere could influence the things that occur in dreams. For this reason, I tried to pay attention to my dreams. I also tried to pay attention to the internal narration of my thoughts in my head, and determine if it seemed like the word choices indicated that my other brain hemisphere might be influencing the words that were chosen. At one point I remember I had some internal narration where I was thinking about something, and as part of the internal narration I used the phrase "stay upstairs if you want a girlfriend". After some time passed, I could remember that part of the thought and then forgot the rest. The experience reminded me somewhat of what it is like when you are listening to music and stop, and then later on you find yourself playing back parts of the song in your mind. I wondered if my other brain hemisphere had somehow done this on purpose, and I was supposed to remember this phrase.

As time went on, I increasingly started to think about the fact that if there were a lot of people who already knew about the subconscious language, and were keeping it secret, there must be some reason they were motivated to keep it secret. I started to become worried that I might be harmed if I brought the topic up with anyone. I also started to distrust my other brain hemisphere, and became suspicious of what messages it might be secretly inserting into the things that I said. I started to avoid leaving my apartment as much as possible, and tried to avoid talking to anyone at all. I felt like I could not straightforwardly explain what I was concerned about. I did not know anyone that I trusted enough to discuss the issue.

Later in the day after writing the first version of this description, on 2026-04-08, I turned on my television to watch YouTube on my NVIDIA Shield. By chance, the recommended video had 11K views, and had been posted online 11 hours before I took the screenshot. It seems so unlikely, especially given that I had just written this description where I mentioned the number pattern 11:11. I took a photo. Maybe it is a sign we are actually living in a computer simulation. I did not alter this photo in any way aside from resizing it after taking the photo with my phone camera.

Self-Isolation

One of the things that concerned me about the brain hemisphere language was that it seemed likely that others already knew about it. I felt like I could not have been the first person to discover it, because it seemed like it was fundamentally part of human biology and seemed so important, if it was real. I started to think that perhaps human society itself might be divided between people who were aware of the language, and people who were not. Maybe within the language itself, concepts that referred to the two brain hemispheres might also be concepts that could be used to refer to the two groups of people in society, and their differing awareness of the language. Maybe the people who knew about the language were coordinating and secretly ran the world. Maybe the business executives were the people who knew about the language. Maybe they intentionally used the language in their advertisements on television and purposefully inserted it into movies and music.

I eventually started to feel frustrated. When I had been back in Newfoundland for Christmas, it had seemed like others already knew about the language. I had been confused why people were being subtle about it, however I had been expecting that eventually someone was going to explain to me what was going on. Now I was in my apartment by myself and nobody was explaining anything.

At this point, I was still continuing to sometimes have video chats with people that I had worked with previously on the DLA team. The video chats had continued while I was working at RapidSilicon. I also had up until recently been regularly hanging out with a small social group that included the person who I had helped get a job at Intel when they moved from Newfoundland to Toronto. However, I started to feel frustrated with everyone, both people I knew from work and people I knew from Newfoundland. A lot of people seemed like they did not like me and I could tell. I also started to think about the fact that everyone I interacted with regularly was male. I was still single, and I started to think that spending my time with anyone who was male was just going to be something that was going to prevent me from finding a girlfriend.

I started to have a feeling that something drastic needed to be done. I wanted to force people to explain the brain hemisphere language to me and to help me find a girlfriend. I felt frustrated at everyone I knew for making things difficult, and I started wanting to make them feel frustrated. I started to think that maybe if I made a bunch of other people frustrated, it would force them to discuss my situation and help me solve my problems.

I decided to suddenly stop answering messages from people without any explanation. RapidSilicon had laid me off in a suspicious way, and people were acting like it was not a big deal. I started to realize that my family did not care about my career, at all. It seemed to me like they were pleased that I was in a difficult situation. I also felt that the fact that the woman I had dated had died in a car crash was a big deal, and when I told my family about it they did not seem as upset as I felt they should be. I was angry at them and it felt good to ignore them.

I did feel like I was being unfair when I suddenly ignored people, because I would not want someone to do that to me. However, I felt that I had an excuse. The brain hemisphere language was specifically one of the things that I was concerned about, which made me not want to use any words at all out of concern that they might have alternate meanings. This seemed like a very unusual situation which would allow me to justify doing something unusual. I decided that this one time, it was acceptable to do something I would not otherwise do. I also ignored everyone equally, and so I was being fair in that sense, rather than just picking one person and ignoring them.

My family very obviously did not like that I was ignoring them. They flew to Toronto from Newfoundland and knocked loudly on my apartment door, which I would not open. When they were at the door, I did not want them to come into the apartment because I did not trust them, and I did not want to talk to them because I did not understand the brain hemisphere language. They would ask what I wanted, and I would just say "you know what I want," and nothing else. I figured that this simultaneously implied that I wanted a girlfriend, which I figured was the obvious thing that they probably thought I wanted if they did not know about the brain hemisphere language, while also implying that I wanted someone to explain how the brain hemisphere language worked, which at that point I was reluctant to start describing out loud.

I felt really, really bad for ignoring them when they were at my apartment door. I definitely do not plan to do the same thing again, as I have now decided to communicate normally as if the brain hemisphere language did not exist and not think about it when I am speaking. However, at the time, I felt trapped by the situation. The brain hemisphere language seemed like a real thing, and it seemed like a big deal that nobody had explained it to me before. When my family was knocking at the door, I was not sure if they were innocent people, or if they knew about the brain hemisphere language and were keeping it secret from me.

Buying Stuff

After this, I started trying to make my computers more secure. I started by trying to limit the number of computers that were directly connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that most of my computers have a built-in wireless radio which cannot really be trusted. Technically, even if you turn off WiFi in the settings on your phone, your phone could theoretically be lying to you and be using the WiFi anyway. Unfortunately, even the motherboard on my desktop computer had built-in WiFi. I had to go on Amazon and buy new computers that did not have built-in WiFi. I was surprised to find that this was actually not that easy.

I started to wonder if it was possible that computers that did not list a wireless radio as a feature might still have a one anyway, placed there in secret. I thought about how I would detect such a radio if one was present. I started doing research on radio. I bought some books on electronics, radio, and physics. I started to suspect that maybe computers that did not have WiFi might be able to communicate with other computers by sending signals over the AC power line. I bought an EMF meter and used it in various places in my apartment to see how far away from the AC power line it was possible to detect the electromagnetic field. It seemed like the signal could be transmitted pretty far.

I thought about it and tried to build the most secure computer I could imagine. First, I decided that the best way to isolate the computer from the power line in the wall was to make it a battery-powered computer, and to avoid using the batteries to power the computer at the same time as the batteries were being recharged from the wall. I bought nine large rechargeable batteries from Canadian Tire as well as some chargers. In addition to this, I also bought some solar panels that I could put into my window and use to charge the batteries. This seemed like it could be useful in case the power went out at some point. I also just think solar panels are cool.

At first, I felt bad spending money buying stuff while I was unemployed. However, due to a combination of being worried about the war in Ukraine and being worried about the brain hemisphere language, I started to have this feeling like something bad could happen and I did not want to be unprepared. I kept having this feeling like it was possible that at some point, I was not going to be able to rely on things being physically shipped to me from far away. I remember looking around my apartment and thinking that if society collapsed and I only had the stuff in my apartment, I would not have very many valuable things. I decided that it was okay to spend a somewhat large amount of money on physical objects that I was going to keep.

I ended up buying a lot of computer parts, textbooks, and radio-related electronic components. I also started buying a lot of DVDs, Blu-rays, as well as Xbox 360 games. The Xbox 360 was the last Xbox that did not have built-in WiFi, and can also run Linux. I went on Ebay and bought multiple Xbox 360 consoles. I also started stockpiling food.

War on Gaza

In addition to YouTube videos, I found that another way to cope with spending a lot of time without any social interaction was to watch the news. I use TekSavvy for television service, and I am able to watch CBC, CTV, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC/MS NOW, BBC, and Al Jazeera. I would often leave the news on in the background while I did other work.

I remember watching the news when Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7. A bunch of young people had been killed at a music festival. Apparently a different group of young people inside Gaza had been trained to fly hang gliders in order to land inside Israel and kill random people. The news interviewed someone who had been hiding in a bomb shelter in Israel while Hamas members threw grenades into the shelter in order to kill them. I also remember the news interviewing a woman who described how she had been hiding in the bushes and a Hamas member saw her, and then described how she looked directly at him and he eventually just walked away and decided not to kill her. I have more recently tried to Google this story about the woman being spared by Hamas and not found a reference online, however I do feel like I remember seeing it.

Not long after Hamas had finished their attack and returned to Gaza, Israel began attacking Hamas in Gaza. This was something that Hamas had clearly been expecting, and they had apparently been spending years and years digging tunnels. Before these events I had already felt sympathetic towards the Palestinians for a long time, after I read about Israel and Palestine when I was younger. I imagined what it would be like to grow up in Gaza, and to dig tunnels as your job. It seemed like it would be interesting as an engineering project, if it were not linked to a military use. I hoped that many of the tunnels would survive the war, as I felt it might be interesting to explore them as a tourist.

After Israel attacked the obvious targets in Gaza, they expanded their bombing to targets that seemed more civilian. They would describe how Hamas had command centers under the hospitals, and they created an elaborate 3D rendering showing the complex tunnel network they envisioned existed under one of the hospitals. Even if the information were accurate and the tunnels did exist under the hospitals, it did not seem justified to attack them, and yet Israel would do so anyway. Early in the war, less significant attacks, like cutting power to the hospitals, were portrayed as a big deal in the media, however over time everyone adjusted to a new reality in which those types of attacks were no longer seen as significant.

Israel started killing Al Jazeera journalists. They killed Hind Rajab and some of her family as well as the two ambulance workers that came to save Hind after her cousin Layan called an ambulance service to tell them that an Israeli army tank had shot their car and killed everyone else in the car. Al Jazeera played the audio that was recorded when Layan cried and begged for help, and then died screaming as she was killed by machine gun fire.

Watching Murder on Television

I was outraged. How could I be watching people clearly being murdered on the news by a government that was being supported by my society and my government, and people around me were not outraged as well? I started to have this feeling like I might be observing a historical event similar to the genocide of Jewish people that occurred during World War Two, except that this time, the Palestinians were the victims, and my country was on the side of the people that were causing the genocide to occur. I started to feel this uneasy tension with the world around me, as if interacting with the society around me might cause me to somehow be legally liable for what it was involved with doing. If I was in a situation like that of World War Two, it seemed probable that after the war was over there would probably be something similar to the Nuremberg trials. I decided that it was probably a good idea to make it really, really obvious that I was opposed to the genocide, and that I had done everything I could to avoid being liable for murder.

I started posting on LinkedIn about what was happening. However, to me this felt like it was not sufficient. To avoid liability, it seemed like it had to be the case that I had done everything possible to prevent future murders. Of course, that was very difficult to define. I also still felt reluctant to leave my apartment after previously being concerned that I might be harmed for discovering the brain hemisphere language. I therefore settled on the idea of trying to do something to notify my neighbours in my building about what was happening.

Notes in the Hallway

I ordered some flags online, including a Palestinian flag and a Canadian flag. I wanted to do something that would get the attention of my neighbours without being overly annoying. I decided I would leave my apartment door open with the Palestinian and Canadian flags hanging just inside my apartment, and I put a few notes in the hallway on the floor outside my door describing that innocent people were being bombed and suggesting that something should be done about it. I would also sometimes play the Al Jazeera news cast at a reasonable volume during the parts where the news anchor would describe people being killed.

At first, I just kind of felt strange with my apartment door open, with the notes in the hallway. Occasionally a person would walk past the open door. It seemed like they were just trying to get to their apartments, and did not want to engage with a strange person who had invaded their personal space by leaving notes all over floor with strange messages, and were apparently sitting in their apartment watching them walk by.

Eventually, the concierge came up in the elevator and walked up to the door of my apartment. They asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was leaving notes in the hallway for political reasons. They asked me if I was planning to continue. I told them that I was. The concierge then left and returned to the front desk of the building.

After this, the police showed up. They explained that someone had been concerned that I was leaving notes in the hallway and leaving my apartment door open, and that they had been called to ask me to stop doing it. I explained the situation and that I was doing it for political reasons. It seemed like the police officer that I was speaking with was actually somewhat aware of what had been happening in the news. They told me that they felt that there was not much Canada could do, and that it was up to Joe Biden to solve the problem. I told them that I felt that was not true. I told them that we could help by bringing the Palestinians to Canada.

The officer then reiterated that they had come to ask me to close the door, and that I needed to close the apartment door before they could leave. I wanted to do what the officer said, in particular because they had listened to my arguments about Palestine. I told the officer that I would close the door for now, however I could not guarantee that I would not do something similar again. The way I felt was that I was trying to convince people to stop a genocide, and I felt that it was technically not against the law for me to have my apartment door open, and so if the decision to open the door was the option that decreased the chance of a genocide, it seemed like I had some kind of obligation to do it. I felt a bit conflicted. Thankfully, the police seemed fine with the fact that I was at least closing the door temporarily until they were gone, and they left.

I decided to resume my protest the next day, and leave the apartment door open again. I was not sure how much further I was going to push the issue, however it seemed like a genocide was a really important and significant issue. In other historical genocides, it was probably the case that the dominant political opinion in society at the time of the genocide was probably some kind of opinion that was causing the genocide to occur. So I expected people to disagree with me and that I might need to be annoying. However, eventually my landlord came and told me to stop. I decided that my landlord had enough leverage that I should do what they say, and so I stopped.

The building employees sent me and my landlord an email about the incident. The email described my behaviour as erratic and frightening, and it had an attached letter. The attached letter was addressed to my landlord and was written by the property management company. It gave more details. It stated that I had left notes and other items in the hallway and elevator lobby of my floor, and that the building employees considered the notes to be threatening in nature. It stated that in the early morning, I had two flags hanging on the outside of the apartment door, with the apartment door open, while blasting loud noises and causing a frightening environment. The letter stated that this behaviour violated the rules of the condo corporation. It stated that the police had been notified.

I made other attempts to try to convince people that something should be done about Gaza. I tried to bring it up in every conversation I had with every person, at all times. I tried to convince a random person in the grocery store. It is, however, not an easy problem to solve. I hope I have done everything reasonably possible. It is very hard to define.

The Form 2

A few weeks after I started posting on social media about Palestine, and after the police had already visited me once to ask me to close my apartment door, the police showed up at my apartment again. This time, they told me that they had been sent to take me to a psychiatric facility. Apparently my family and friends had gone to a judge with a document that indicated that they felt that I had a mental illness that meant I was not able to take care of myself, and that they wanted to force me to go to a psychiatric facility and speak to a psychiatrist.

My first thought was that my family had done this because I had started ignoring their messages suddenly partway through 2023. I had technically not resumed communicating with them normally by the time that I had started posting on social media about Palestine. Apparently they had read my posts on social media and had decided that they would fill out this form to force me to communicate with them.

I felt frustrated. I could see how it made sense that my family might have thought that something had happened to me because of how I had stopped communicating suddenly, however I felt like it was unlikely that they actually thought that I had a mental illness. I felt that it was more likely that they were simply frustrated that I had not been answering. I imagined them reading my posts on social media, and I figured that they had gotten frustrated when they read them because I was posting on social media while I was not answering their messages. I felt a bit uncomfortable with the situation because I felt that on some level, I actually had done something wrong by ignoring them.

In any case, now that the police were here, I had to decide what to do. The police had an official document from a judge, and it looked like they intended to follow through and force me to go with them. It seemed like some of the officers were trying to arrange themselves to my side so that they could grab me if I resisted. I spoke to the officer that had the document and tried to convince them to allow me to instead make a voluntary appointment with a psychiatrist at some other time. They told me that this was not possible and that I had to go with them. I decided I would not resist physically, and so I followed them to their car and went with them to the psychiatric facility.

While I was in the car on the way to psychiatric facility, I thought about my situation a bit more. Even though I thought that it was most likely the case that my family wanted me to visit the psychiatric facility because I had been ignoring their messages, it bothered me that they had done so in response to posts about Palestine. It seemed like the posts should have caused them to agree with me that something needed to be done about what was happening in Gaza. Instead it caused them to respond as if I had a mental illness. I found this surprising, because I had generally expected others to agree with my opinions on Palestine.

We then arrived at the psychiatric facility, and I sat with a group of police officers in the waiting area. It seemed like this was another opportunity to try to convince people to care about what was happening in Gaza. I tried to think of things I could say that might make the officers sympathize with the Palestinians. I told them that Gaza was a densely populated area with a few million people living there, so it was similar to Toronto in many ways. I told them that Israel was preventing food from entering Gaza, and so food prices were rising. I told them that the people in Gaza were becoming poor very quickly because they had to buy food. I told them that it was possible the war could spread to the west, and that I felt it was a good idea for people in Toronto to stockpile food just in case. They did not give their opinion on the topic so I am not sure what they thought about what I was saying.

After some time passed, the doctors came and brought me to another part of the psychiatric facility in which the doors all only opened from the outside, so that people could not escape. At this point, the police officers left. I then spent a long time waiting in this new waiting area. At one point while I was waiting, a nurse came and took a sample of blood from my arm using a needle.

Eventually, I was able to speak to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was an attractive Asian woman as far as I can recall, though I really only saw her eyes as she wearing a mask. One of the first things she asked was if I knew why I was in the psychiatric facility. I told her that I did not. She made some vague comments about my family being concerned. I tried to give her some background on my life situation, and I explained to her that I had been trying to find a girlfriend. I told her that I felt we should bring Palestinians to Canada, and that one reason we should do that was so that I could find a Palestinian girlfriend. I am not sure what she thought about this. She offered to prescribe me medication, and I am not sure why. I think it was anxiety medication however I cannot remember for sure. I told her that I did not want medication.

Shortly after finishing my conversation with the psychiatrist, my dad arrived. I was extremely frustrated with him. I questioned his motives and told him that I suspected that he was doing what he was doing for financial reasons, in order to access my savings. I made sure to debate the issue with him in front of the doctors, so that they could see that I was strongly disagreeing with my dad. As we were walking away from the doctors, my dad made a comment that to me made it sound like he was bragging that as an older, more frail person that he would be better at convincing people than I was. After that, my dad and I went back to my apartment, where we spoke briefly before he left and returned to Newfoundland.

Socially Isolated

At this point, I was even more sure that I wanted to avoid leaving my apartment. I felt frustrated about the visit to the psychiatric facility, and I felt anxious about the fact that my family seemed to so easily be able to force me to go there. While I was at the facility, I figured that it would be easy to convince people that I was sane and that I should be immediately released. That did not turn out to be the case.

I started to realize that it was possible for there to be other important situations where I could be trying to convince people of things and they might not believe me. Even though I felt that my family did have legitimate reasons to be worried about me because I had been ignoring their messages, I still felt like they were abusing the system by forcing me to visit the psychiatric facility. I started to become worried that my family or others who did not like me might try to abuse the system in other ways, and manipulate other people into not believing me when I told them things.

I tried to contact various people who I used to have friendly relationships with and repair the relationships. I was surprised to find that people seemed a lot more hostile and less forgiving than I expected. It seemed like people did not want to chat with me in general. Even though I knew that I had frustrated people by ignoring their messages before, I had thought that if I gave an understandable justification for why I had done it, that they would be able to forgive me. That did not seem to be the case.

I contacted one of my friends who had filled out the form to bring me to a psychiatric facility. It was the same friend that I knew from Newfoundland who I had previously helped get a job at Intel when they were moving to Toronto. They told me that they felt I was extremely unwell. They told me that they already told most people about my visit to the psychiatric facility, and told me that everyone who was close to me was aware of my mental illness. They told me that I could try to find a new social group but that it seemed unlikely. I asked them why they felt I had a mental illness. They told me that the reason they felt I had an illness was because I had stopped answering messages, had not been leaving my apartment, and because I had a theory that there was a brain hemisphere language, which they said did not exist. They told me that due to my mental illness, they were afraid that I would become homeless. They told me that for their own mental health, they no longer planned to respond to any of my messages.

Israel-Palestine Peace Plan

I made more social media posts about Palestine and Gaza. If I could not repair my relationships with my friends and family from before, maybe I could make new friends with people who agreed with my political opinions. I also still wanted to try help the Palestinians if there was some way I was able to do so. After a few more social media posts, I had this idea that maybe what I could do was to write my own Israel-Palestine Peace Plan. The feeling I had was that the outcome of the war seemed like it was somewhat predictable. To me it seemed possible that some of the politicians involved might be intentionally addressing the problem slowly in order to increase the number of people killed. If I could write my own peace plan which correctly predicted the outcome of the war, I would be able to embarrass those politicians by showing them that I had the solution early. If the politicians involved were able to correctly predict that I would be able to do this, it seemed like it might motivate them to solve the problem quickly to avoid being embarrassed.

Once I had the idea, I created a page on my website with some ideas, and called it my Israel-Palestine Peace Plan. I tried to write the description in such a way that the words would make sense and would be likely to accurately describe the situation at the end of the war, regardless of which side won. I started sending the address for this website to a lot of people over the Internet, particularly news agencies and representatives of governments.

Package Delivery

I started to think that it might be a good idea if I tried to maintain regular contact with the employees that work in my building in some way. If they knew me well and knew that I lived in the building, then even if the computers were hacked and my information deleted, they would probably override whatever the computer said and allow me back into my apartment if I were locked out. I sent some emails to the building employees to try to explain my situation, and I also sent them the website address for my peace plan. The building employees did not seem to enjoy my attempts at communicating with them. They sent an email to my landlord complaining that I was trying to communicate with them, and asked my landlord to deal with me. My landlord did not want to communicate with me either. The building employees quickly got into the habit of completely ignoring all of the emails I sent them, regardless of the topic, even if I was contacting them about legitimate building issues. It seemed like they had some kind of animosity towards me personally, and I did not understand why.

I started to have a conflict with the building employees related to packages. I had been ordering things online and having them delivered, and had been picking up the packages from the pickup area inside the building. At one point, however, there were a handful of packages that I left in the pickup area for an extended period. The building employees emailed me and told me to pick them up. I told them that in order to pick up the packages, I had to be confident that I would be able to return to my apartment after I obtained them. I told them that if the building employees appeared to be intentionally ignoring me, it made it seem possible that they might ignore me if I had a legitimate problem getting back into my apartment and needed their help to get back in. They did not reply.

I then noticed that in their email they were saying that I had packages waiting for me in two of the package compartments in the pickup area. According to the automated emails I had received from the computer, there should have been four compartments holding my packages. I sent the building employees an email asking where the missing packages were. They did not reply to that email either.

Around two months after that, I received an email from the building employees telling me that they had noticed fire safety concerns in my apartment when an employee had entered recently in order to do maintenance. They told me that my apartment would need to be inspected and that my landlord would be charged a fee. My apartment was first inspected by the building employees, who came into my apartment and inspected various things at random without talking to me and without explaining what they were looking for. After that, the building employees sent an email claiming that there was an issue that would require an inspection by the Toronto fire department. The fire department employee looked around my apartment and told me that I should move some cardboard that had accumulated. They also had a problem with my solar panel-powered computer and told me that I had to disconnect my batteries from my solar panels.

After the visit by the fire department was over, I finally was able to chat with my landlord in person. I asked them about the missing packages. My landlord told me that they actually had my packages the entire time. Apparently, the building employees had taken the packages out of the package storage area, mailed them to my landlord, and then had ignored the emails I had sent asking where the packages were. After my landlord admitted that they had the packages, they returned them to me.

Some time later I re-read my emails and realized that the building employees had in fact originally sent me an email telling me that they were going to send the packages to my landlord if I did not pick them up. At the time, I had replied to that email and specifically told them not to send the packages to my landlord. I had sent them a website with information about mail theft and had quoted section 430 of the Criminal Code, saying that if they gave my packages to anyone other than me, it would be the crime of mischief. After that, I stopped thinking about it and had forgotten that they had mentioned that they were going to send the packages to my landlord.

Sign In The Window

Even though I had obtained the missing packages, I was still uncomfortable with the fact that the building employees were not communicating with me and appeared to dislike me. I tried to think of a way I could put some pressure on them to communicate with me, without breaking any rules, and in a way that could be easily reversed. I decided to put a sign in my window, using once piece of paper per letter, with this message:

HELP
TRAPPED
PLEASE ASK
CONCIERGE
TO REPLY

My thinking when I wrote this message was that it would cause the people outside my apartment to be concerned that I might be trapped in my apartment, and speak to the concierge at the front desk to let them know that I needed assistance. I felt that it was correct to say that I was effectively trapped as a consequence of the unusual circumstances of my situation. I sent the building employees an email shortly after putting the sign up explaining what I had done, so that they would understand what was happening if people showed up at the concierge desk asking about the sign.

My landlord replied to the email and asked me to move out. I replied and told them that this would be an extremely inconvenient time for me to move out. I told them that I did not have any social contacts, and my family had just recently filled out a form to forcibly bring me to a psychiatric facility. I told them that my plan was to find employment income again and then move out when I was able to afford my own condo or house in Toronto. I told them that I had enough money saved up to pay rent for a long time.

My landlord replied and again asked me to move out. I told them that I felt that I was in an emergency situation that the building employees were contributing to by ignoring my legitimate messages. I told them that it was necessary for me to communicate with the employees in the building in order to live in the apartment, and the apartment was my legal residence. Therefore, it was necessary for the building employees to communicate with me.

My landlord then forwarded me an email they had received from the building employees, in which the building employees were telling my landlord that the sign must be removed, and that they were going to contact the lawyers for the condo corporation. The building employees told my landlord that my landlord would be responsible for paying any lawyer fees that might result. My landlord then told me that the issue was going to be escalated to the board of directors. My landlord told me that I would be responsible for paying any lawyer fees. I replied and told my landlord that I looked forward to speaking to a representative from the board. I told them that I did not intend to pay their lawyer fees.

Three days after this email exchange, a police officer showed up at my apartment. They told me that my landlord had called the police and asked them to come check on my mental health. I tried to give the officer some context. I told them that my parents had filled out a form to force me to visit a psychiatric facility, and that I felt they were doing it because of my LinkedIn posts about Palestine. I showed them some of the posts on my phone. I told them that I was having a disagreement with the building employees that started when I put a Palestinian flag on the outside of the door of the apartment. I told them that I was having a problem with the building employees interfering with my packages. The officer did not seem convinced that I had a legitimate reason to be concerned.

The officer knew about the sign and asked me to remove it from the window. I told the officer that I felt I was in an emergency situation and that the sign was one of my only methods of communicating with people who might be able to help. I told the officer that I would remove it as soon as the building employees were communicating with me normally. The officer told me they would speak to the building employees and ask them to speak to me, and he left.

Legal Fees

A few weeks later, I received an email from a lawyer working for the condo corporation. The email quoted a portion of the rules of the corporation that my landlord agreed to when they purchased the condo. The rules stated that condo owners and their guests were were not allowed to create noise or nuisances which disturb the quiet enjoyment of the other units. The lawyer additionally told me that they felt my signage was likely to cause upset and psychological injury to residents that read it by misleading them into believing that I was trapped. They told me that this meant I was disturbing the comfort and quiet enjoyment of the other units.

The lawyer asked me to remove the sign. They told me that if I did not remove the sign, that they would be seeking compensation for all legal fees and other costs incurred in dealing with this matter pursuant to the governing documents. They told me that the fees typically ranged from $5,000 to $50,000 and up. The lawyer told me that the corporation would be looking to both myself and the unit owner for indemnification of its legal fees.

I replied to the lawyer and thanked them for their message. I explained my point of view. I explained that I felt that the building employees were legally required to communicate with me. I told them that I was concerned that the building employees might partially be responding negatively to the Palestinian flag that I had put on my apartment door. I told the lawyer that I was concerned that the employees might have strong opinions on the issue, and therefore might be punishing me for political reasons.

The lawyer replied and told me they were not aware of the issue related to the Palestinian flag. They told me that political topics are not related to the building, and that none of the employees would communicate with me on the matter. The lawyer told me that I was not trapped, and that I was inciting concern and panic in the community. They told me that if I did not remove the sign that they would initiate legal proceedings.

I replied to the lawyer and told them that I disagreed with their stance about avoiding discussion of political issues. I told them that the problem I was having with the building employees related to predicting their behaviour. I told them that if the building employees have strongly negative feelings about me because they disagree with my political stance, then I would have a reasonable basis to be concerned that they might do something to harm me. I told the lawyer the email address that I had been using to try to contact the building employees, and asked if I was using the correct address.

The lawyer replied and told me that I had been sending emails to the correct address. They told me I had used it frequently. They told me that my concerns that I might get locked out were not valid, because I had not been locked out in the past.

I replied to the lawyer and told them that I felt resolving the issue would require examining the emails themselves.

The lawyer replied and asked for examples of legitimate messages that the building employees had ignored.

I replied to the lawyer and told them that there had been a situation in which the building employees had mailed my packages to my landlord without telling me, and that I had spent months emailing them asking them where the packages were and they had ignored the emails. I told the lawyer that I wanted the building employees to explain why they done this. The lawyer did not reply to my email.

Dispute Resolution

A few weeks later, I received an automated email from the Condominium Authority of Ontario. The email informed me that I was being officially notified that the condo corporation had started a dispute resolution process and that I was listed as a respondent on the case. I created an account and logged into the website for the online dispute resolution process.

When I logged in, I could see that the website had an interface for sending messages to the other participants on the case. The lawyer for the condo corporation had created a message containing a proposed settlement offer. The settlement offer required that my landlord and I agree that the sign on my window broke the rules of the corporation, that I remove the sign within five days, and that my landlord and I agree to pay the legal fees of the lawyer, which were estimated to be $2,000.

I replied to the message, and explained that I felt that my sign was not violating the rules. I told the lawyer that I felt it was necessary for me to put the sign in the window because I had already exhausted every other option that I could think of to communicate with the building employees. I told the lawyer that I felt it was actually the building employees that were indirectly causing the disturbance, by ignoring my messages. I told the lawyer that I did not accept their settlement offer.

The lawyer replied and told me that if I did not accept the offer then we would move to the next stage of the dispute resolution process. They pointed out that the monetary amount of legal costs in the settlement agreement offer would increase as negotiations continue.

I replied to the lawyer and proposed my own settlement agreement. My settlement offer required that the condo corporation acknowledge that the nature of living in a condo building requires that the employees communicate with the residents, that they acknowledge that as the legal resident they are required to provide me access, that they agree that I had previously sent legitimate messages and questions to the building employees that had been ignored, and that the condo corporation agrees to stop ignoring my messages. I proposed that neither party would pay the legal fees of the other. The lawyer for the condo corporation replied and rejected my proposed settlement offer.

We moved to the second stage of the dispute resolution process. The second stage of the process involved another person joining the case in order to act as a mediator. The second stage did not last very long. I repeated my argument that I was in an emergency situation partially caused by the building employees, which justified the sign. After the second stage ended without an agreement, the lawyer for the condo corporation decided not to continue to the third stage, which would have involved a tribunal.

Legal Fee Reimbursement

A month after the dispute resolution process ended without a resolution, my landlord sent me an email saying that the condo board was now trying to charge them $3,013 in legal fees for the work the lawyer did as part of the dispute resolution process. My landlord asked me to reimburse them for the legal fees.

I replied to my landlord and told them that I was pretty sure that they did not have to pay this fee. The lawyer for the condo corporation had suggested that my landlord would pay the legal fees of the lawyer as part of proposed settlement agreement, and we did not accept the settlement agreement. I told my landlord that the condo corporation had sent them an arbitrary invoice which many people could write, and that just because it sounded official did not mean they were required to pay.

A few weeks later, my landlord sent me another email and forwarded me a few invoices that the property management company for the building had sent them. The property management company claimed my landlord owed $3,856.40 in legal fees.

I told my landlord again that I was certain that they did not have to pay these fees. I offered to contact the Condominium Authority of Ontario and ask them to confirm that I was correct, that if my landlord did not accept the settlement offer agreeing to pay the legal fees, then my landlord did not have to pay them. I then contacted the CAO. I received a response from the CAO which avoided taking a stance on our specific issue, however they agreed that in general a condo corporation is only allowed to charge fees in accordance with their governing documents. They suggested that if a unit owner wanted to dispute a fee, then they could file a case with the CAO.

Some time after this, my landlord emailed me again with another invoice. The building employees added another $321.49 to the legal fees. The invoice stated that the fees were for the lawyer reviewing correspondence from their client, and for having a telephone call where they recommended a rule be passed related to signage.

I suggested to my landlord that maybe they could try to contact other unit owners in the building and see what they thought. I pointed out that the condo board is elected by the unit owners. I suggested that perhaps if multiple unit owners disagreed with a decision that they made, the condo board might be more likely to change their mind.

Social Media Posts

During the time that I was trying to resolve my issue with the building employees, I decided to try to find places online where I could communicate with people who live in my neighbourhood. I was hoping that I would be able to make friends with someone who lives in my building, so that we would have a shared interest in resolving the issue with the building employees. I found a few different Toronto Facebook groups and joined them.

One of the first times I tried posting in a Facebook group, I described that I was having difficulty communicating with the employees in my building. I received a lot of replies very quickly, and I started replying to the messages. At one point, someone asked for more details on what had initially happened to cause the building employees to start ignoring me. I explained that I had put a Palestinian flag on my apartment door and left it open and left notes in the hallway. I also included a link to my website with my Israel-Palestine Peace Plan, so they could understand my opinion on the topic. Very shortly after I posted the link to my website, I saw a notification on my phone saying that someone had replied to one of my posts and complained that it was political. After this, I was immediately banned from the Facebook group.

I started posting in other Facebook groups. Now that I had realized that speaking about Palestine was extremely sensitive, I tried to avoid overtly bringing it up. I figured that if I made normal posts that were not asking for help, so that people got to know me and at least somewhat wanted me to be there, then they would not be so quick to ban me if I started describing my situation again and mentioned Palestine.

Eventually I tried creating a Facebook group post about the problem I was having being brought to psychiatric facilities. I described in a general way that I was having a problem with people claiming that I had a mental illness without any evidence. For some reason, many people seemed hostile, and many people seemed to agree that I had a mental illness, without specifying the reason they agreed. Some of them seemed to know who I was. I created a separate page that describes the Facebook group post and my interpretation of the replies.

Social Exclusion

In addition to the Facebook group posts, I also tried creating regular Facebook posts describing both the situation in Palestine and the situation in my apartment with the building employees. A small number of people replied to my posts, and their replies were generally hostile. I noticed that after I made a few posts, my number of Facebook friends decreased slightly. I was extremely confused, and very concerned that there might be false rumours about me.

I noticed that one of my friends posted on Facebook saying that they were planning to run as a Liberal candidate for the provincial Liberal party in Newfoundland. I messaged them about it on LinkedIn, thinking that if they were planning to be a public figure, then they might feel obligated to help one of their friends who was trapped in their apartment. They did not reply to my message, and instead they immediately removed me as a connection and banned me so that I would not be able to read their LinkedIn posts.

Gaza War Continues

The violence in Gaza continued while I was having my disagreement with the building employees. I was able to watch the news all day, every day since the war started. I made more posts about it on social media.

I started thinking about drones. The war in Ukraine had evolved into a situation where drones appeared to be the dominant military technology. It seemed like any military conflict with current technology would quickly evolve into a drone war, and so I expected the same thing to eventually happen in the conflict between Israel and its opponents in the middle east.

It occurred to me that the cost to produce drones was likely to decrease over time. It seemed to me that eventually, due to cost decreases and improvement in 3D printing, there would be a lot of people in the world with the ability to create a military-grade drone swarm. I wondered how society would be stable if such technology existed. It seemed like in the long run, we were going to need a world government with the ability to surveil everyone, so that people could be protected from these and other similar kinds of dangerous technologies.

If in the long run, we were going to need a world government, and such a world government would bring peace because it could surveil everyone, then it seemed like the way to minimize the number of people killed would be to try to cause the world government to exist as soon as possible. If widespread drone use is one of the factors that would cause a world government to be required, then it seemed like encouraging people to use drones would be one way of encouraging a world government to exist more quickly.

I thought about it some more and I came up with an idea that combined this and other ideas into a single plan. It seemed a good approach could be to encourage people to create food delivery drones. I created a LinkedIn post describing my idea.

At one point during the war, Israel and the US attacked Iran directly and bombed nuclear sites in Iran in addition to other targets. I created an Israel-Iran peace plan and posted it on LinkedIn and my website.

Before the Visit

In December 2025, I created a journal entry on my website in which I recounted the experience I had being taken to a psychiatric facility in 2021. The experience was significant for me, and I wanted other people to understand what had happened. I posted this link on social media, and I also sent it to the CBC, to see if they thought something had happened to me that was worth investigating. After I did this, a number of things happened that based on the timing seem like they could possibly be related.

One thing that happened was that 10 days after I created the journal entry and put it online, the news started reporting that Groq, the company I had briefly worked for, had been given 20 billion dollars in some kind of deal that was similar to an acquisition. In my journal entry I had mentioned that I owned Groq stock, and I even had included a photo with the Groq logo. It seemed like it could have been a coincidence, however I wondered if it was related. Maybe somehow the Groq deal had occurred at the time that it did because someone involved in the deal had read my website.

The Visit

The more significant thing that happened later, however, was that in January 2026, the police showed up at my apartment door and told me that I had no choice but to go with them to the psychiatric facility again. I wrote another journal entry about it. This time, I tried to resist going with them by not opening the door of my apartment, and telling them that I felt my rights under section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were being violated. They then used a battering ram to open the door, after which point I went with them without any physical resistance.

I was very concerned that I might have been taken there as a response to the post I had made on my website about my first visit. I talked about my website with the police and tried to determine if they had read it. It was difficult to tell. I also talked about my website with the employees at the psychiatric facility. They did not respond as if they had read it.

I tried to be patient while I was at the psychiatric facility. The doctors did not interact with me very often while I was there, and so I spent the majority of my time waiting. I was not able to have an extended discussion with a psychiatrist until I had already been at the facility for two days. When I did finally speak to the psychiatrist, they told me that my parents had hired a lawyer to write a letter in order to justify why I should be forced to stay at the psychiatric facility, and described some of the things that were written in the letter. I gave my point of view on the things that were written. Fortunately, the psychiatrist told me that I would not be required to stay longer than three days, and so I would be able to leave the next day. I was pleased to hear this, however I personally wanted to leave right away after the meeting, and so I tried to convince the psychiatrist to allow me to leave early.

I tried to give some context about my situation. I told them about my website and explained that the first time I had visited the psychiatric facility, it had just been because I had misinterpreted YouTube videos. I opened my website on my phone and showed them the photos from the journal entry I made describing my first visit. It was difficult to tell how they were interpreting what I was saying. I asked if I could leave the psychiatric facility early and go home. The psychiatrist told me that I could not go home early, and for some reason offered to prescribe anti-psychotic medication, which I declined.

The day after the meeting with the psychiatrist, I received a WhatsApp message from my brother asking what I thought about my diagnosis. I had no idea what he was talking about. I found the psychiatrist and confronted them, and they admitted that they had diagnosed me with "unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder". I asked why they had done this without telling me. They told me that they figured I would know, because they had offered to prescribe anti-psychotic medication in the previous meeting. I told them that this was not the case and I did not know that they were diagnosing me with an illness.

I found the fact that they had decided that I had a mental illness and had apparently avoided telling me frustrating. This meant that I was not being given any opportunity to disagree with the diagnosis. It seemed like it might be important to be able to prove that this was the first moment I was officially told the mental illness I was supposed to have. I asked the social worker that was present to write down the name of the mental illness on a piece of paper, and then I passed the piece of paper to the psychiatrist, and asked them to sign it and write the date. I asked for permission to put the diagnosis on my website, and the psychiatrist agreed.

In my opinion, the fact that the psychiatrist apparently told other people that they thought I had a mental illness, without telling me, was unethical. It seemed like they did not want to tell me that they thought I had a mental illness because they knew that I would disagree with them, and they did not want to give me the opportunity to disagree.

After three days, the people at the psychiatric facility told me I could go home. My parents arrived, and they had the keys to my apartment, which was extremely, extremely frustrating. I had already specifically told the employees that work in my building, multiple times, that I was afraid of my parents and to not allow them into my apartment under any circumstances.

Strange Behaviour

We took an Uber back to my apartment, where my parents dropped me off and left. My mom sent me a WhatsApp message saying that she was sorry, and that she was no longer as worried about me now that the doctor had said they felt I was not a danger to myself or others. She told me that she had been concerned that I would get so upset that I would hurt the building staff or my neighbours, or that I would build the drone swarm that I had described on my website and end up in jail. I did not respond to her message.

After this, my parents stayed in Toronto for a few days before they went back to Newfoundland, and there were a few more strange interactions. On 2026-01-16, the next day after dropping me off, my mom sent me a WhatsApp message where she tried to convince me to meet her in the lobby of the building. I told her that I thought it was strange that she specifically wanted me to meet her in the lobby of the building. There was nothing that we could discuss in the lobby that we could not discuss on the phone. After I told her that I felt her WhatsApp message was suspicious, she deleted it.

The day after that, on 2026-01-17, I received a message from the concierge. They told me that my dad was downstairs and asked if they should allow him to come upstairs. I told the concierge that I did not know why my dad was there, so it depended on the reason. The concierge offered to give the phone to my dad, and I agreed.

My dad told me that he wanted to meet me at the door of my apartment to chat. I asked him multiple times why he wanted to meet in person instead of using WhatsApp, and he refused to give a reason. He started saying things which sounded like he was saying them for the benefit of the concierge, to make it sound like my dad and I had a positive relationship. He told me that he was happy to hear my voice. He told me that he had his chess set and that he wanted to play chess. I kept telling him that I did not understand why he felt he had to physically be there, and asked him to message me on WhatsApp instead. Eventually, as the conversation was ending, he said "I love you too", even though I definitely absolutely did not say the same thing to him. It seemed like he was putting a lot of effort into trying to convince the concierge that he was concerned about me. It was very strange, and very obvious that he was doing it.

War in Iran

A month and a half after I was taken to the psychiatric facility, the US and Israel attacked Iran. Before the war started, I had created a page on my website with a potential peace plan for Israel and Iran. Personally, I think this is an interesting coincidence. My page describes it like a patent, and the page describes how I intended to brag about being correct after the war was over. If I had been forced to stay at the psychiatric facility for an extended period longer than three days, I might have been forced to stay there during the war. I wonder if that was intentional. I know it sounds crazy and unlikely, however it seems like it is worth mentioning. It is an interesting coincidence.