Daniel Silbaugh

Dan Silbaugh does manual labor, defaults to systems-level thinking, always has a few entrepreneurial projects going and writes science fiction. He is passionately disappointed in modern built environments. Much like a Vulcan, Dan thinks the only rational, logical way to live one's life is to try your best to be a good person. As a curious generalist, he's always going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Dan enjoys vacationing in Hawaii, tête-à-têtes, literary realism, and reality baking competitions.

He is the creator of The Book Modernizer, a project that produces modern-language editions of classic literature and related reading tools.

This site collects his projects, notes, experiments, fiction writing, musings, and other public work. You can email him at dan@danielsilbaugh.com. Thanks for stopping by.

ALSO! Forgot to mention. I'm keeping a "Work Diary", that tracks, in minute second-to-second detail, most of what I'm working on. To read it, sign up in the box below. You can peruse 10 public entries at the bottom of this page. I also plan on sending out more good stuff, and probably keeping 60-75% of it exclusive to the email list.

Projects

Scripter — A television comedy, read line-by-line into a database — then run in reverse to write new episodes.
Delivery Route Calculator — A python/LLM/google pipeline for turning months of handwritten delivery logs into accurate, auditable mileage totals — saving roughly te…
Obsidian AI Chat Notes — An automated pipeline that turns years of raw LLM chat exports into searchable, indexed notes (this website is built on this tool).
Real Estate & Housing — An ongoing interest I keep approaching from different angles — hands-on construction, civic data analysis, zoning policy, and housing tec…
Kant for Kids — An end-to-end AI pipeline for transforming dense philosophical texts into illustrated, child-friendly books — with custom tooling at ever…
The Anti-Prince — A book-length, tactic-by-tactic counter to Machiavelli's The Prince — every manipulation answered with a psychologically-grounded defense.
1906 Diary — A literary project that turns real travel and work experiences into a semi-fictional diary set in early 1900s San Francisco.
The Book Modernizer — An automated publishing pipeline - from raw files to retail-ready ebooks, audiobooks, and marketing assets.

Fiction

Dr. Gronk — A caveman physician navigates Victorian London — consulting patients, inscribing records on stone tablets, and hunting his lunch in the p…
Dr. Gronk Goes to the Beach — Dr. Gronk and Miss Lucas journey to the seaside village of Quardnay for a medical conference.
Abel — A solitary man scratches out a living on the headlands above a distant city, keeping watch for the mysterious blue orb that visits him.
The Model Makers — At a corporation that conjures scale models of the real world, a jaded craftswoman is pulled aside by her boss for an unusual assignment.
Time Travel Tourist Trap — The weary proprietor of a gas station that sits alongside an ancient, derilect highway tries to revive his fortunes with a time turret.
Multiverse Consultants, Inc. — A sharp-elbowed consultant who advises clients across parallel realities takes a dreaded call from a washed-up former customer.
The Dream Machine — A noir heist plays out inside an Ace Products dream machine, where the line between the dream and the dreamer begins to blur.
Pops! — The Snowman — A boy, his father, and a negotiation over beer, carrots, and the proper way to build a New York snowman.
The Zoo — Part 1 — Frank the chimpanzee has strong opinions about bats, disease, and the aerodynamic potential of primates.
The Zoo — Part 2 — Frank spends a pandemic year in strict self-improvement, then learns that chimps have already been to space.
Mornings, with Jesus and the Apostles — Matthew sees a commercial opportunity in the Sermon on the Mount. The crowd wants the lamps.

Essays

Class Fears — Reading our collective fantasies — Player Piano, Brave New World, Wall-E, Dune — for clues about where technology and class are heading.
Car-People — On dehumanization as a dial we turn all day — the car-person, the uniform-person, the screen-name — and how a book turns it the other way.
We Already Know — If AI makes goods nearly free, what will life mean? We already know — a few people have lived in post-scarcity for centuries: the upper c…
The Going Rate — Prices aren’t set by the market so much as by talk — the phone calls, forum threads, and hushed confessions behind every going rate.
Goskomtsen and Star Trek Communes — What if the computer the 1960s communes needed had arrived on time? A counterfactual running from Soviet central planning to the hippie f…
A Chessboard of Feedback Loops — On why knowledge work turned out to be real work after all — and what happens as AI absorbs the office’s endless loops of documents and d…
Intellectual Lineages — A series of documentary-style essays tracing how ideas about nonviolence and civil disobedience traveled between Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi…
The Most Expensive Apartment in America Is a Hospital Bed — We have already decided, as a country, that we owe the desperate a hospital bed and a jail cell. The one door we have never bothered to t…

Work Diary

August 12, 2026 — Simplified the whole system · Skipped the meetup, no regrets · Domain transfer started
August 8, 2026 — Debriefing Thursday's meetup · Running out of steam
August 6, 2026 — Sorted out where the domain really lives, chose a clean transfer path, picked a form service, and built the one-file landing page.
August 5, 2026 — Where online communities actually help, ranking my contact methods around arriving with a role or an artifact, and fixing a promise the l…
August 4, 2026 — A lost event, the gating problem with a structural fix, and publishing the screenplay analyzer to GitHub without the copyrighted corpus.
August 2, 2026 — An import pipeline for essays, four essays published, and the work diary itself goes public.
August 1, 2026 — Building in public: founding-post results, a pivot to paid ads for Dum Phones, offer math, and a rebuilt job search.
July 30, 2026 — Researching one-person AI-leveraged businesses, posting the founding phone photo despite the nerves, and a long push on the Book Moderniz…
July 29, 2026 — Wired the small-business research project into the plan, drafted the Dum Phones pitch and founding post, and standardized the 78-book Boo…
July 27, 2026 — Built a master to-do list across every project, cut the first two weeks down to size, and corrected the record on what Dum Phones actuall…