Est. 1981 Memphis TN Local AI Deacon

JD Desmarais  /  Memphis TN  /  Est. 1981

AI is a Tool. Use it like one.

Twenty-four years in datacenters, storage and virtualization. I run models on hardware I own, teach people to use them, and write down what actually worked.

Ask the site Roll for a post

Portrait

Drop the headshot here

The position

The wheel beat rolling things on logs. A hammer beats a rock. That is the entire claim. Not a companion, a coach, a doctor or a friend — and every time somebody dresses it up as one, the useful thing gets harder to teach.

24Years in infrastructure
26Years in Memphis
10+Years teaching students
5+Systems merged into one

Ask the
site

A tool. Not a friend. Watch it be one.

Ask anything about the work, the stack, the church, the car. It answers from what's on this page — nothing more. That's the whole point.

What I
cover

Five things · roughly one post a month

01 · The moat

Local AI

MLX and LM Studio on Apple silicon. Qwen 3.6 and 3.8. A Jetson Orin on the shelf doing inference at the edge. Models I own, on hardware I can unplug — and honest numbers on what they can and cannot do.

Hands on the metal

02

The Work OS

Five siloed systems at work, merged into one operating picture. The long build series — what broke, what held, what I'd do differently.

Series

03

AI is a tool

The column. Where the position gets argued instead of asserted.

Opinion

04

Teaching with AI

SOPs. Handbooks turned into real training modules. Teaching, automated.

Method

05

Worth reading

Things I found around the web that were actually worth the click. The habit from the old blog, kept.

Links

Roll the die · get a post

Six posts. One die. No algorithm.

Every face is a real piece of writing. Hit roll, read what comes up. Roll all six and the streak fills.

Writing

Newest first

001

Dice was a car before it was a website

A white 1988 VW Cabriolet on black tires, and why the domain isn't going anywhere.

AI is a tool · 6 min 002

Stop calling it a colleague

The full argument for treating AI as equipment, and what you gain the moment you do.

AI is a tool · 11 min 003

Qwen on a Mac, honestly

MLX and LM Studio on Apple silicon: what runs, what it's good at, where it falls over.

Local AI · 14 min 004

A Jetson Orin on the shelf

Inference at the edge on hardware you can unplug. The build, the numbers, the disappointments.

Local AI · 12 min 005

The copy-paste era

What this work felt like before the models got a terminal, and what changed the day they did.

Teaching with AI · 8 min 006

Five systems, one picture

How a work OS gets built from things that were never meant to talk to each other.

The Work OS · 16 min

About

New Hampshire by birth. Memphis since 2000. Twenty-six years is long enough to stop calling yourself a transplant.

The work has been infrastructure the whole way — datacenter, storage, virtualization, capacity planning and forecasting, including seven years at FedEx scale modeling colocation capacity.

The part people don't expect sits in the middle of the résumé. From 2006 to 2011 I ran the network at Bellevue Baptist Church: 250 machines, an ESX migration, a helpdesk built from nothing, a training center designed from the floor up. I've been a member since 2000. Today I serve as a deacon and lead a Life Group, and my wife Amanda and I have taught students for over ten years and led mission trips to Kenya.

Which is the actual through-line: every job I've had, church or corporate, has been taking something complicated and handing it to someone who needs to use it. AI just made that cheaper.

The ledger

2002 — 06Support tech, service engineer
2006 — 11Network Manager, Bellevue Baptist
2011 — 18Sr. Systems Engineer, ProTech
2018 — 25Architect, then IT Manager, FedEx
2025 — nowDirector of Pre-Sales, ProTech

Reach me

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