Daniel Markham

Science Fiction/Fantasy Author, Programmer, Consultant, Artist. Writing as My opinions are not my own.

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Didn't have that one on my 2026 bingo card.

"Super Pigs Spreading Rapidly Near Fukushima"

[Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 @MikeBales]

Navy Rules for Gunfighting
1. Go to sea
2. Drink coffee
3. Buy some candy at the gedunk
4. Send the Marines

Army Rules for Gunfighting
1. Select a new beret to wear
2. Sew combat patch on right shoulder
3. Reconsider the color of beret you decided to wear
4. Send the Marines

Air Force Rules for Gunfighting
1. Have a cocktail
2. Adjust temperature on air conditioner
3. Determine “what is a gunfight”
4. Send the Marines

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Golly, these folks are having such a hard time. When will their suffering end? Shocked I am. Shocked and surprised. Surprised and shocked.

"Tucker Carlson apologizes for 'misleading' people"

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

@ericweinstein Yeah. Progress has never been simply going through all current knowledge. It helps a hella much, but that's not how it works.

[M.A. Franklin @FoundationDads]

Sir John Glubb, a British Lieutenant General, spent 36 years commanding armies in the Middle East.

He studied every major empire in recorded history and found something he didn't expect.

Every single empire (Assyria, Persia, Rome, the Arabs, the Ottomans, Spain, Britain) lasted about the same length of time.

250 years.

And they all died the same way. (thread) 🧵

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Science works best when it's like: I see this? Do you see this? Can we physically model how that happens in a reproducible way? We can! Wonder why it does that? Being humans, we tend to skip around quite a bit. It's extremely easy to end up backwards. Hey, I've got the perfect model and explanation. People love it. Why do we need any of the rest of that junk?

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

@ericweinstein @elonmusk @claudeai @grok Do not confuse the words that the machine is giving you with the actual meaning

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Yes. It is worse. Saying my phone listens to me all the time doesn't begin to describe it.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Let me explain exactly why your phone seems to read your thoughts, because the real answer is more invasive than telepathy.

Every time you open a website or app, a real-time bidding auction fires in under 100 milliseconds. Your GPS coordinates, browsing history, device fingerprint, age, gender, income bracket, and hundreds of inferred interest categories get packaged into a “bid request” and broadcast to hundreds of companies simultaneously. One company wins the ad slot. All of them keep the data.

This happens thousands of times per day per person. A 2018 New York Times investigation found 75 companies pulling precise location data from apps, with some users tracked up to 14,000 times in 24 hours.

In 2012, a Target statistician identified 25 products that, purchased in combination, could predict a customer was pregnant and estimate her due date. A teenager’s father discovered she was pregnant because Target sent baby coupons to the house before she told anyone. That was one retailer. Store receipts only. Fourteen years ago.

Now scale that. Your phone pings GPS while you sleep. Data brokers link your phone, laptop, and tablet through probabilistic matching of IP addresses, WiFi networks, and behavioral patterns without you ever logging in. The FTC caught two brokers in 2024 categorizing people by visits to reproductive health clinics, political protests, and religious services, then selling those profiles to law enforcement.

The algorithm doesn’t hear your thoughts. It compares your behavioral fingerprint against millions of similar profiles and predicts your next interest before you’re consciously aware of it. It makes hundreds of predictions per day. You ignore the misses. The five hits feel like telepathy.

You paid for the phone. You pay for the data plan. You generate the signal. And every time a page loads, your identity gets auctioned to the highest bidder before the content even renders.

They called it “personalized advertising” because “real-time mass surveillance funded by the people being surveilled” doesn’t fit on a consent banner.

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

I just recommended it to my friend @tottinge a couple of months ago..

[Matthew Sitman @MatthewSitman]

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

or

How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians

or

Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest

or

Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

How do you know that you've lost contact with reality? Asking for a friend.

"Some Birds Seem to Be Developing a Cigarette Habit"

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

It's never too late to start a new career. I have one I'm learning: LLM Police. You laugh but my money says this or something like this will be a very important occupation in the near future

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

@unclebobmartin Hallucination is the wrong word here. We have to stop the anthropomorphizing. Being clever might work better.

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

Who the heck was making Neanderthals back then? "They Dug Into a German Hill and Found a Neanderthal Factory That Predates Henry Ford by 125,000 Years"

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

It occurs to me that the way we consume information directly drives the way we can present and/or use it. If you only know bits and blurbs and such from social medias or videos? You're only going to be able to recall it use it that way. If we shift the context a little bit to the side or need to go farther in-depth, you got nothing. Interesting.

[Daniel Markham @danielbmarkham]

@skdh Well dag. There went my entire "Mood Rings as Predictors of Squirrel Happiness" idea.