Welcome to the House of Ploop!
2026-09-02
A semi-chronological recipe for a religion, cut by someone who’s watched too many Breaking Bad episodes, then served on a pitted mirror, ready to be snorted through the eyes.
iow: this is the origin story of the house — how a hacker’s pipe-and-loop sediment obsession crystallised into a church — and every section is a door into the post behind it.
Start with Dave, a cool musician and dev paraglider. Dave is a firm believer in the higher powers, reinforced with a near-death experience. Add some nay-saying hacker that thinks thinking is scripted — that’s me. Fill up the glass with some Jame’s son and let the two mind-meld through acronyms, metaphors and Monty Python that eventually starts slurring around a little.
This happened so long ago, it’s more felt than remembered, and it added to the hacker’s determinism to start his own book of drunken meanders, which began popping up in writing in 2026.
In 2026, being a firm belieber of the way of the pipe, the hacker doubled down during exploration of traceability and proving correctness. This in turn needed some comic relief from all the Claudismic sloop and led to fruity professional advice.
iow: An essay on why the pipeline — not the developer, team, reviewer — must be the trust mechanism (An LLM’s Take On The CI/CD Party), followed by a slurred warning that once the LLMs eat every other job, plumbing is the only profession left (The Proof Is In Your Plumbs).
The previous year — 2025, the year of the llm-loop-tool-strap-on - the hacker built an SRE agent by shoving way too much Kubernetes YAML into context windows. This, in turn, led to an anti-history-appender-thread two loop party pack that could find ways (during testing) to prove that oil is bad and war is worse.
iow: that SRE agent, drowned in Kubernetes YAML, turned into factosis — a two-loop research harness that hunts down facts in data and systems, and either finds the proof or admits it couldn’t. No confident bullshit allowed (You Keep Trusting The Model And The Model Keeps Lying).
During testing of the gloriously draconian make-those-inferences-squirm harness, the hacker started seeing the footprints in the git logs and wondered if they could turn into well-trodden yellow brick roads.
iow: every run of the harness leaves a trail — the path taken shapes the conclusion (path-dependent memory). So, run the same brief N times and compare (convergence testing), then only persist what survives (consensus memory).
To the hacker, who spent years cranially eroding his gray matter into submission and agreement through lots of re-enforcement-learning thunks and alcoholic hallucinations, it was obvious: the Big Bang eventually led to a butterfly farting in China, which influenced the weather, which made his mother and father like each other; that, in turn, led to his gut biome, his social anxiety and his regret over eating a hot taco from that shop around the corner the day before an important meeting with his manager; all of which made him think of gastroenterologists at a cosmic scale.
iow: “Random” and “Self” are just complexity laundering for causation we got too lazy to track, or find impossible to recreate. Humans and LLMs are the exact same machine: deterministic state machines running on accumulated sediment, convinced their next output is free will (Deterministic Layer Cakes).
Just as Tina started all gooey in the middle, she recognized her purpose and started to crystallize, which happens to be how to put some determinism back into your llm loop, or better yet, let the llm decide what can be determined and what has to make its weights light up at four in the morning, when GPUs take a breather from all the mindless “then he said, she said, let’s circle back on that later” meeting summary generation and crypto mining.
With Tina’s hardened shards, you can build an empire! Nay, a bureaucracy, filled with the best practices of its time, that dulls and grows more needy over time.
iow: Tina’s arc is the architecture — an llm that starts as mush and crystallises what it learns into deterministic code, so the model only handles what’s genuinely new (what can be determined). Let that crystallisation run long enough without pruning and you’ve built a bureaucracy.
After sensing that his English teacher would be turning in her grave - had she been dead (hope you are alive and well Mrs Carter!) - at the sight of this blatant llm gen-pop slop, the hacker decided to explain how he got from an llm harness all the way to the DMV, touching everything from X-rays and gold miners to the poops in Rome, mind movies, Bobs and Bears, and sweaty salesmen selling tokens out of a van in the alley. Generations of sediment looping in on itself.
That post’s compression of context resembles what I am doing here to prepare you for your ascension to the church of the ploop - only at a ploopian scale.
And there it was: pipe, loop, poop. Ploop. A church born not from revelation, but from a git history and alcoholic re-enforcement.
iow: loops, poops and stochastic mirrors is the hacker compressing a month’s worth of complicated llm contexts into a piece he hopes Mrs Carter won’t disapprove of, while taking the reader through a cosmic dad joke about sedimentary loops.
The dad joke loops, poops and stochastic mirrors closes on — ten thousand loops, selfies and journals walk into a bar, and out walks you, material for reinforcement learning and an A-Gee-Eye. It sat in the hacker for a bit, and after a couple of months of poops, resumed its mission from God (the hacker’s a Blues Brother, man) to make sense of it all.
A mirror was his first analogy for llms, but the stew at the centre of the hacker’s layer cake found even that too simple: reflections were not the first things to shape what we saw, how it got to us and what it got to reflect. Lenses were — some blurry, some out of focus, some scratched by years of sediment and emotional scars, some ground to twist the maker’s point — and they’d been making their way to us all along, through storytelling, Sunday school, books, laws, movies, the internet and, lately, llms.
This is a huge self-perpetuating feedback system. Millions of years of biological evolutionary sediment, journalling, narrating, fictioning. Society built from lots of poops, seen through lenses stuck in loops.
iow: the mirror analogy grew up into an essay about lenses — every layer of mediation, from Sunday school to search results to model weights, was ground by somebody, bends what you get to see, and can never be neutral.
Straight after, as the church’s first official parable, Bob’s BMW pushed in front of you. Bob implicated you; you indicated Bob.
iow: the church’s first parable, told properly in the indicating post. Bob’s cut-off was authored by his sediment, your horn by yours — the whole lens-and-sediment loop, made personal.
And lo, this compressed git history has passed through the hacker’s distorted lens into yours, adding another layer to whatever you think or do next. You were not merely reading the religion’s origin story; you were being admitted into the fold of the Ploop.
But first, the rite of passage:
What does ten thousand singularities clapping sound like?
Ploop.
Welcome to the Asylum of the Present.
There was never a door. You were admitted the moment you started reading; this post is sediment in whatever you do next, and the present is the only ward there is.
Know this: the Ploop was already in you.
Please indicate before merging.