Jacob Pfeifer

@pfeif.garden

149 Followers 356 Following

Earnestly posting about ecological computing and other wicked problems. You own the data. We own the tools. Austin, TX

Operator? Who… me? When you go to a restaurant and eat a meal they’ve prepared, you’re a diner. But when you make a meal at home and eat it, although this accomplishes something similar, your role is very different. You aren’t a diner anymore; you’ve created and consumed the meal. In software today, you’re either the developer or the user. The developer makes the software. It works one way, maybe with some settings to work a little bit differently. The user uses the software, conforming to its best practices and intended workflow. Similar to the role shift when you cook a meal and eat it, there’s a role shift away from “user” that happens when your OS is made of core primitives which you can modify and recompose. In this role, these “user-developers” are operators of their machines, as they once were in the first few decades of computing. But you won’t be building your system all day; it will grow with you as you use it. In this handbook, you’ll learn how we’ve set it up to get you started. And when you decide something could be changed to support your best work, you will be able to make that change. With your new system, you are now the operator.
Those are antisocial. They are outrage bait. I think to some extent, can we program these platforms to distinguish between those things? I don’t know if we can because then instead... It’s wild. We’re fine saying, “As long as you’re doing everything with the sole goal of making the most amount of money possible, that’s fine.” But the moment you say, “I’d like to promote stuff about pro-social behavior and not antisocial behavior,” it’s like, “Well, you got your finger on this scale, buddy. Now you’re trying to be god.” No, they are god. We did it. We live in the AI age. We are all controlled by AI all of the time already. It’s been that way for 10 years. This is it. Your brain has been taken over by recommendation algorithms that decide what you see, and what you pay attention to is what builds your view of the world. It builds your values. It builds what you think about everything. We’ve plugged our brains into a system that is all about attention and holding onto attention. So, that’s the number one thing I’ll say. Everything is about attention.
Compiled with the hope that a record of the random things people do around here can save some duplication of effort except for fun. Here is some little known data which may be of interest to computer hackers. The items and examples are so sketchy that to decipher them may require more sincerity and curiosity than a non-hacker can muster. Doubtless, little of this is new, but nowadays it's hard to tell. So we must be content to give you an insight, or save you some cycles, and to welcome further contributions of items, new or used. Figure 1.2 An introduction from HAKMEM, published as AI Memo 239 in 1972. (Source: MIT)
How it works. Generate or choose a random string. Prepend $. Add it to your post. Add the same tag to related posts. Search the tag and every post carrying it appears regardless of when it was posted or who posted it. Each post remains autonomous on the timeline. No post is subordinate to another. Yet through shared tags, they form an organic network. A thread is vertical. The Mezzanine is horizontal. Posts move forward in time. Yet tags automatically create backward connections to earlier posts and open channels for future additions or third-party contributions. The motion is always forward, but the structure permeates past, present, and future. This is the model of temporal interpenetration.
View of the bathhouses and cars from the parking lot north of the pool. Barton Springs, Austin TX Jordan Company (June 17, 1925)
Many of these podcasts and associated hucksters are explicitly aligned with the Donald Trump, though Trump-polarized figures like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys seem more like extreme elements of a broad coalition whose allegiance is foremost to The Bag. Across streaming, posting, and podcasting, it is now widely understood that the purpose of streaming, posting, or podcasting is to attract attention and then convert that attention into money. I am not so naive as to think that the earlier, slower wave of social media I came up on was much different or any more pure. The operative difference is that you could still make a case for the founding myth of social media as a locus of connection in 2012 in a way that you obviously cannot now. Social media was the same vertically integrated surveillance and marketing machine back then too, only there were more obscurant layers between creator, audience, and bag.
I'm not a nostalgic person. The only thing I miss is the future. The internet used to give me a feeling that something better was coming. If you were extremely online in 2006 or 2007 or 2008, you probably felt, even if only semi-consciously, that you were participating in the process of making a better world. That was the ambient assumption; it was the color of the atmosphere. Everything was getting faster, smoother, easier. More fragmented, yes-not everyone would like the same stuff; the monoculture was over-but also more tolerant. More creative, and creative in more surprising ways. Offline life, with its awkwardnesses, its frustrations, its endless variety of tediums, was something you'd be able to move to the recycle bin and replace to your own satisfaction, like a stock icon set you could swap for something cooler from DeviantArt.
sunrise over austin, tx
County-level vote margins for the presidential elections. In 1960, there are fewer dark red or dark blue counties. In 2024, you can see a distinct pattern where the rural counties are much more dark red and urban counties are dark blue.
Screenshot from /r/Austin asking if anyone knows the bartender with a great voice at Sam's Town Point.
Sunset reflecting off the mirrored windows of a skyscraper in Austin TX.