Do you think a majority of your time with friends is wasted time?

Not the case at all. It's time I value immensely. But it's also time that, as the trends in the article mention (being increasingly obsessive and single-minded about my projects, etc.), it becomes more and more difficult to make such time. Which may sound bizarre: I get out of the house (sometimes), or have folks over (sometimes), or I go out and do things, with people, no less.

What's changed/changing is that it's rare now that I seek such things without external prompting. Given any significant amount of free time I have, I find myself cozily nestled/chained into projects, and even in breaking away from these projects they're often about all I can think about. It's only in things that are highly regimented, strictly scheduled, and arbitrarily controlled that I actively (as opposed to passively) participate in a social setting (see: Ultimate Frisbee, Weekly Movie Night, idkfa, etc.).

My apology you quoted above to friends, dates, and barfolk isn't because I feel that I am wasting my time in interacting with them. My apology is for what I described in the article: my inability to understand a series of key concepts with regards to dealing with other people. People trying to interact in regards to these concepts are met with confusion, pessimism, derision, or just plain rudeness. And that's not something that should be excused.

And as for omitting other redeeming qualities: In describing this misunderstanding, I may have made myself sound like a robot, but not to the degree that I'm misrepresenting myself (I'm a programmer, after all). And yes, my objective was to describe this trend, and to tell a story, and show people what code looked like, and as so, skipped the parts where I describe my other properties that aren't relevant to my misunderstanding. I was trying to keep it below 5000 words.