houndswillneverlie

[houndswillneverlie]

Oh and I want to fight all the Gen Z kids who are like ‘teehee, we’ll just do lavender marriages instead!’ Some of us are adults who want equal rights and protections under the law of our land.

[houndswillneverlie]

Reading Harrow the Ninth be like

Harrow, in the prologue: "You see, I am insane." Me, then: haha, yeah, I know Me, 220 or so pages later: oh. ohhhhhh. I s e e. That may have, ah, understated it a bit

[houndswillneverlie]

Personality hire

Working Cats

[houndswillneverlie]

2 PM Lap time nap time for smeemy.

[houndswillneverlie]

I constantly manipulate everyone around me by calculating what would be the nicest thing to do in any given situation, making a point of doing it when it matters the most. This is supported by subtly, casually tailoring what I talk about to the person I'm speaking to, and saying what I think they may find funny or interesting. the really sick thing is I look just like a normal person and there's no way you can tell me apart from anyone. If I weren't such a monster I would be afraid knowing people like this are out there, but I know I'm on top and have nothing to fear.

[houndswillneverlie]

According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.

[houndswillneverlie]

ortus and harrow my beloveds their duo is so underrated harrow hate memorizing the noniad and experiencing emotional and physical pain whenever ortus takes his stupid little preparatory recitation breath, the solemnity and chill as they walk into the room as the reverend daughter and cavalier of drearburgh, the most disgustingly stereotypical examples of their house the nine houses have ever seen.the facade crumpling immediately as the giant bone hefting cavalier begins reciting poetry in the most disgustingly stereotypical and clunky metre you’ve ever heard, the reverend daughter throwing her head back in a long suffering groan of petulant disdain - immediately revealing this ridiculous pair to simply be a 17 year old girl eternally embarrassed by her uncle brother’s lameness. It appears to be a calligraphic S milady. How are we meant to understand potato? As your closest living relative. Pent is a marvel. I will write songs for pent - oh shut up and MOVE . Harrow I have come to the conclusion you were never mad. I should have offered you help I should have died for you I was and am a grown man and you both were neglected children . KILL ME

[houndswillneverlie]

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

[houndswillneverlie]

Harrow the ninth dares to ask the question, what if your found family just fucking suuuucked. What if they sucked soooo bad omg omg. Space alexa how do i unfind these people

[houndswillneverlie]

omfg i went snooping and yalll. im.

i think that caitvi kinktober thing shifted to a new blog name. calling it nsfw month now

and im looking at the rules and this change and im CACKLING

THEY LITERALLY TOOK THE KINK OUT OF KINKTOBER AKFKFGKGKHK

moved it to november. this is so fuckin funny to me

[houndswillneverlie]

not putting my whole pussy into it today lads. you're getting my left labia at best

[houndswillneverlie]

Why the fuck are you 30+ on tumblr

this is my house?

[houndswillneverlie]

the thing about Spike is he flat out rejects the angst of vampirism and fully embraces the hedonistic creature aesthetic of it, all while still indulging in humanity for funsies to enjoy what he likes (music, food, cigarettes, soap operas etc.) and I love that for him. there’s no “woe is me” about immortality or technically being dead or avoiding sunlight or even surviving off of whatever blood he can find. he doesn’t even make a big deal about being in love with a human - his freak out is Buffy specific. he is the weirdest vampire alive and it is working.

[houndswillneverlie]

LLMs are slot-machines

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.

Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of users: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine – in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work) and "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into being an assistant to a machine – here, people whose bosses have fired their colleagues and ordered the survivors to oversee an LLM that badly approximates the work of those departed workers):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

But yesterday, I read "The Futzing Fraction," an essay by Glyph, that advances a compatible, but very different hypothesis that I find extremely compelling:

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html

Glyph proposes that many LLM-assisted programmers who speak highly of the reliability and value of AI tools are falling prey to two cognitive biases:

The "availability heuristic" (striking things are easier to remember, which is why we remember the very rare instances of kids being kidnapped and killed, but rarely think about the relatively common phenomenon of kids dying in boring car-crashes); and

The "salience heuristic" (big things are easier to remember, which is why we double-check that the oven is turned off and the smoke alarms are working after our neighbor's house burns down).

In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.

Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.

Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).

Glyph poses a hypothetical: if you have a coding project that you ask a chatbot to write, and the resulting code initially doesn't work, but does work after ten minutes of futzing, that feels amazing and you will remember it forever as the time you saved 3:50 by using a chatbot. But it's possible that you repeated the "well, I'll just futz with this for ten minutes" step to get to that final success so many times that the whole affair took six hours, two hours longer than it would have taken had you just written the program from scratch. It's like winning a $1000 jackpot after "just putting a dollar in," except that that was the one-thousand-and-first dollar that you fed to the machine.

Glyph says that in other business activities, the "let's just try this for 10 minutes more" strategy usually pays off, but that LLMs produce an "an emotionally variable, intermittent reward schedule" that subverts your ability to wisely deploy that tactic.

But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes:

When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/115033262770049100

Jpeck likens the use of an LLM coding assistant to "a dense intern" who has to be walked through each step and then have their work double-checked:

https://universeodon.com/@boscoandpeck/115033787721848290

But there's an important difference between an intern and an LLM. For a senior coder, helping an intern is an investment in nurturing a new generation of talented colleagues. For a reverse-centaur, refining an LLM is either an investment in fixing bugs in a product designed to put you on the breadline (if you believe AI companies' claims that their products will continue to improve until they don't need close supervision), or it's a wasted investment in a "dense intern" who is incapable of improving.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Frank Schwichtenberg (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_%E2%80%93_CeBIT_2016_00.jpg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

[houndswillneverlie]

I think I may never be sad ever again. There is a statue entitled "Farewell to Orpheus" on my college campus. It's been there since 1968, created by a Prof. Frederic Littman that use to work at the university. It sits in the middle of a fountain, and the fountain is often full of litter. I have taken it upon myself to clean the litter out when I see it (the skimmers only come by once a week at max). But because of my style of dress, this means that bystanders see a twenty-something on their hands and knees at the edge of the fountain, sleeves rolled up, trying not to splash dirty water on their slacks while their briefcase and suit coat sit nearby. This is fine, usually. But today was Saturday Market, which means the twenty or so people in the area suddenly became hundreds. So, obviously, somebody stopped to ask what I was doing. "This," I gestured at the statue, "is Eurydice. She was the wife of Orpheus, the greatest storyteller in Greece. And this litter is disrespectful." Then, on a whim, I squinted up at them. "Do you know the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?" "No," they replied, shifting slightly to sit.

"Would you like to?"

"Sure!"

So I told them. I told them the story as I know it- and I've had a bit of practice. Orpheus, child of a wishing star, favorite of the messenger god, who had a hard-working, wonderful wife, Eurydice; his harp that could lull beasts to passivity, coax song from nymphs, and move mountains before him; and the men who, while he dreamed and composed, came to steal Eurydice away. I told of how she ran, and the water splashed up on my clothes. But I didn't care. I told of how the adder in the field bit her heel, and she died. I told of the Underworld- how Orpheus charmed the riverman, pacified Cerberus with a lullaby, and melted the hearts of the wise judges. I laughed as I remarked how lucky he was that it was winter- for Persephone was moved by his song where Hades was not. She convinced Hades to let Orpheus prove he was worthy of taking Eurydice. I tugged my coat back on, and said how Orpheus had to play and sing all the way out of the Underworld, without ever looking back to see if his beloved wife followed. And I told how, when he stopped for breath, he thought he heard her stumble and fall, and turned to help her up- but it was too late. I told the story four times after that, to four different groups, each larger than the last. And I must have cast a glance at the statue, something that said "I'm sorry, I miss you--" because when I finished my second to last retelling, a young boy piped up, perhaps seven or eight, and asked me a question that has made my day, and potentially my life: "Are you Orpheus?" I told the tale of the grieving bard so well, so convincingly, that in the eyes of a child I was telling not a story, but a memory. And while I laughed in the moment, with everyone else, I wept with gratitude and joy when I came home. This is more than I deserve, and I think I may never be sad again.

Here is the aforementioned statue, by the way.

[houndswillneverlie]

yo what