iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jacob Pfeifer

@pfeif.garden

166 followers 365 following 154 posts

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

Posts Replies Media

Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 26/07/2026

I've been working on converting this old boombox into a floppy disc playing cyberdeck. Lots more to do but we're making progress :)

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 05/07/2026

all 3 like to spend money

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 04/04/2026

@tessa.germnetwork.com & @chrisshank.com I've been thinking about this metaphor too, but from a local-first perspective!

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 11/03/2026

I'm having trouble with this showing up in my leaflet bluesky feed. Other blogs I'm subscribed to seem to work fine. Any ideas?

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 05/03/2026

I'm a fan of Alexander Obenauer's "operator".

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.

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 26/02/2026

Love what Hank is saying here about algorithmic social media. We are already living in a world where people trust AI output without rigorous fact checking. We have been for a while now.

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.

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 24/02/2026

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)

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 24/02/2026

$cT7aZ Cool!

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.

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 15/12/2025

They are a design research agency that works with open source developers. Typical process: - Work for 3 months to develop and test a prototype - One month documenting their successes and failures in a research paper - Publish everything open source, allowing anyone to piggyback off of their work

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 09/09/2025

This pigeon could have used an up call.

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Jacob Pfeifer @pfeif.garden · 08/09/2025

Barton Springs photos from 1925! It's fascinating to see it under construction. Most of that concrete is exactly the same a century later. texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q=ba...