DB Markham Home
Recent Journal Entries
What’s this?
New Site
This is my new combination blog and PIM. It’s serverless. I run it using Obsidian, Quartz, S3, Omarchy, Hermes, If that doesn’t mean anything to you, yay! It’s nerd stuff.
It’s All AI
Except for the content, of course. That’s still me. My eventual goal is to get completely away from the terminal everyday. If I can manage that, it’ll be the first time in 30+ years! I’m making surprising progress. Productivity has gotten so high, though, that I’ll want things one way, like having a verbal conversation with the AI. I have the need, there it is. I spend a week trying that out only to realize that no, I don’t want a verbal conversation with the AI, at least not for everything. So now I’m in the process of sorting out which of my own “magical bullets” that I had wanted in the past are good ideas and which aren’t.
I Blog Here Very Infrequently
This is like my fifth or sixth blog. Dude, I’m old. I have no desire to create regular content, I have no desire to self-promote, but I do like tech and I like writing. If I make it I’m probably going to talk about it. You should have hung out with me after I wrote each of my sci-fi books. I believe I didn’t talk about anything else.
I have some of my classic blog entries around here somewhere, mostly predicting today’s conversation and problems 10-20 years ago. I’ll make a link to them one day from this home page.
It’s got a newspaper
I liked the old daily newspaper I got and read when I was a kid and teenager, so I had AI make me one everyday. I also had it write up an editorial that it guessed I would write if I were the editor, along with a reply op-ed synthesized from the writings of a famous person who would disagree with me. Dang, Robot Daniel is constantly arguing with other Robot people! Todays-Paper.pdf
What kind of stuff are you going to talk about?
- Offline life while still being deep into tech
- Programming as a career
- Philosophy
- The future
- Science and the social/philosophical basis of how science is actually done
- Smart people stuff. I read a lot. I will talk about people like Tolstoy, Hayek, Seneca, St. Augustine, Charles Schultz, Dave Barry, Mel Brooks, Sun Tzu, Boyd and OODA, and so on
- I blather for a long time. It’s how I learn. I throw every idea I’m consuming around in a mess and then over time start to organize it
- Robot Grandpa. I’m making a digital twin of me for the grandkids and great-grandkids to be annoyed by
Books I’ve Written
Science-Fiction/Fantasy
The Door To Nowhere
Debian Newbury is an oddball flight instructor from a small town in rural Virginia. Samuel Featherstone is an outstanding student finishing his post-grad work in cyber security and Large-Language Models. Together they fight their way through secrets that their family, job, and society have kept from them to touch the reality behind the world we experience.
Fans of Greg Egan, Clive Barker, and M. Night Shymalan will love this mind-bending adventure! Buy The Door To Nowhere
First Light
The worst part of Tuesday wasn’t writhing in pain, having flames shoot from her head, voiding her bowels and dying in screaming agony in front of a crowd of cheering onlookers. No, the worst part of Tuesday for Beverly Castler was finding out that the afterlife began in Newark, New Jersey. What a dump…
For Lem, his day ended in being abducted by drug runners in a magic truck full of corncobs and cocaine. It didn’t seem right to Lemuel Rickenbacker that it started with desperately wanting to boil the children in hot oil, but it did. Perhaps that was the punishment. There was also the matter of why anyone would want 24,000 pounds of chicken beaks and an assortment of items including a pile of rusty tricycles and three pairs of brand-new Canadian Sauna Pants…
And so begins an epic tale of life, death, faith, doubt, good, evil, serial kills, sauna pants, corncobs, meaning and redemption in a world both part of our everyday lives and far beyond them. Buy First Light
My Imaginary Team
I had the idea of an ideal programming solutions team back in the 2010s, so I already had a ton of work done on it before it became a popular topic around 2026 or so.
I’ll update as we go along, but since it involves LLMs, I feel like I must include some sort of fancy diagram. This diagram means nothing but I like it. It could use more cowbell.
