About
Dalliance.net is Pre’s homepage, index of his projects, updates on his blog. That sort of thing. You can subscribe in various ways.
Projects
Blog
My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.
Visit at dalliance.net/blog
Or check out the categories index
Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny
Ongoing: An Interactive Sci-Fi story for Virtual Reality about the adventures of the crew of a flying saucer.
Visit at starshipsd.com
Wordcloud Tarot
Ongoing: My tarot decks have the meanings of the cards written on the card in a world-cloud. There’s also a video show with a reading about politics most weeks.
Visit at wordcloudtarot.com
Tentacles, After The End
A 30 minute animated movie about the last woman alive on a planet ravaged by tentacle monsters from outer space.
Tentacles is complete, visit the archive at tentacles.org.uk
Book: Do Dream Sheep Bleat?
A short story book about magic and memes and reality.
Dreamsheep is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/dreamsheep
Book: Yes, The Conspiracy Really Exists, And Furthermore It’s All Your Fault.
A long rant about how stupid humans screw up humanity.
The book is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/yes
Loopy
After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.
Bookshelf
An album of songs inspired by some of the best books on my bookshelf.
The album is complete, you can listen to the songs at dalliance.net/bookshelf
Handsome Jack’s Showband
My punk cover’s band.
Despite some online-only gigs, the band didn’t make it though the pandemic, you can watch some old gig videos online at handsomejacks.co.uk
Joust Adventure
A little web-game I made back in 2011 with the hope people might pay me to make level 2.
I don’t think anyone ever finished level 1. Too hard.
Can you do it?
The project is abandoned, you can still play level one at dalliance.net/joustadventure. So far as I know, I’m the only person to ever complete the level. Let me know if you do!
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Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Mon, 12 May 2025 10:28:35 +0000
I see Starmer is once again taking to the national stage to tell everyone that Reform are correct, that Reform have accurately described the source of the problems of British people.
Telling everyone that migrants are a problem, that migrants are causing trouble, that migrants need to be cracked down upon.
And then he somehow thinks this will make people more likely to vote Labour?
It's basically a massive country wide national advertising campaign for Reform.
Well done Labour. When you lose it will be your own fault.
Status at - Sun, 11 May 2025 16:13:09 +0000
Make that 2nd in the entire world at Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell. 🤘
Was looking at my other favourite level "Boomtown". It seems to have only ever even been completed once in Hard Reckless Hell at all ever.
It's certainly very challenging. Barely get through the first minute. Hales and hales of bullets.
Status at - Sat, 10 May 2025 22:29:22 +0000
Content warning:re: Doctor Who - The Story And The Engine
Nice gimmick with the shop window animating the stories as they're told, and it liking the simple story of Belinda saving a single life.
Not really clear if the Barber here is a story writer or a story collector. He seems to want credit as though he wrote them but also to not have a name to credit them to, and to have weaved some kinda story collecting machine. He surely can't take credit for all human stories? It was a beautiful machine: a story tree that's also a brain with a heart in it.
I find myself sympathetic with the aims of this barber anyway. Yes, do kill all the gods. Great plan! Lets do it.
I play this song from Julian Cope, Psychedelic Odin, in which he swears to undertake a holy task set by a group of River Nixes: Kill all the gods for us, oh do it well.
So I like a story teller killing gods, I don't really want his plans thwarted! Join him Doctor! Kill al
l the gods!Beautiful big space spider, weaving all the stories into it's web. Not sure why it's there though. Seems like just outer-space with no spider would have done,
Always like the callbacks with all the prior doctor's faces too. His story is truely one of the most epic. Only Coronation Street has him beat for length 😆
This whole season is great.
Status at - Sat, 10 May 2025 19:15:09 +0000
Been playing Pistol Whip again. Such a great game. The Black Magic "hard" level, with Reckless and Hell options is ridiculously hard. Finishing at all is a feat.
Was wondering how the hell the top players managed to score so highly. I was in like 4th place thinking I was playing a practically perfect game.
But it turns out only with 188 hits. The top three, I noticed, has 189 hits! There's a secret dude!?
Found him, flying around in the sky mid level on the right.
Nice. That's me 3rd in the global leaderboard for Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell now then.
Maybe I shouldn't be giving the game away. If someone learns of the secret dude from this post and then beats me into 4th place I'll be miffed.
Status at - Sat, 10 May 2025 11:39:45 +0000
The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.
In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
Status at - Thu, 08 May 2025 17:30:50 +0000
Carla has said she's not standing, so there's no incumbent team to beat.
Adrian could stand alone I guess. Assume he won't.
Wonder who will stand against Zack then?
Is it too late for Corbyn to join and run? That'd really be something. 😆
Status at - Wed, 07 May 2025 23:28:53 +0000
I wish at least one political party would be like "No, Reform Are WRONG, we are going to get you back your right to freedom of movement that THEY TOOK AWAY"
Under us your kids WILL be able to go study in Europe, you WILL be able to go winter in Spain , you WILL be allowed to take a fruit picking holiday.
But no. They're all pathetic chasers, all wanting the same racist bigots to vote for them. All meekly weakly saying people have "legitimate concerns" and promising to punish anyone who ain't from around here.
Depressing is what it is.
Get me my freedom of movement back you weak losers!
STAND UP
Status at - Tue, 06 May 2025 22:37:13 +0000
Content warning:re: Black Mirror S7
Having watched 'em all in S7 gotta say that "Plaything" with Capaldi in it was also great. He was brilliant.
And the final one "USS Callister Into Infinity" was amazing. Should have probably re-watched the S4 episode first. Barely remember what happened in that.
Follow up like half a decade later. Stand no chance with my memory.
Lovely story though. Exciting space adventures. Makes me wanna play No Mans Sky again.
Status at - Tue, 06 May 2025 14:46:22 +0000
This month's digest is on it's way to all the lovely people who asked for it for only 10% tariffs.
The rest of you exploitative traders get 150% tariffs when you read it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/apr25/
Featuring a diary of making an Observers episode, lots of rants about tariffs, and Home Star Runner getting back to a website in the links section.
Status at - Mon, 05 May 2025 23:05:33 +0000
Zack seems to have a pretty good message and to be keen and energetic to be Green Party leader.
Carla and Adrian have been pretty good, but they haven't succeeded in getting the Green Party messages all over the press.
Think the UK public and press might not really be sophisticated enough to understand a job share. Probably better to have one person full time.
Dunno if the incumbents will even stand again. Four years is a long time for Green Party leaders. Usually supposed to be every two years.
Zack seems likely to get my vote unless someone better turns up. Would be really great to get the country fired up about the party somehow. God knows the other parties are all absolutely awful.
Here he is answering Owen Jone's questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfdfeTXvi6I
And he was talking to Novara this evening too:
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI - YouTube - Sun, 11 May 2025 10:54:59 +0000
Some interesting visualizations and good explanation in this video about why training a neural network by gradient descent doesn't get stuck in local minima as you train. We tend to find it hard to visualize a higher dimensional landscape, let alone one with billions of dimensions. What loos like a local minima when mapped into a 3d visualization of a 2d landscape has all sorts of escape routes in the higher dimensions. It has a good visual on the way the landscape mapping can change as a result of changes to the other parameters, creating new "wormholes" as they change. Great video.
Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast - Wed, 07 May 2025 14:42:02 +0000
NYMag has a good essay on using AI in education: "In
January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey
of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used
the chatbot to help with homework assignments." -- I guess all marks have to be in exam conditions with pen on paper in future?
OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry - Mon, 05 May 2025 11:41:05 +0000
"OpenAI currently requires more money and more compute than is reasonable to acquire. Nobody
has ever raised as much as OpenAI needs to, and based on the sheer
amount of difficulty that SoftBank is having in raising the funds to
meet the lower tranche ($10bn) of its commitment, it may simply not be possible for this company to continue."
Sowing and Reaping in Trump’s America - Thu, 01 May 2025 08:16:54 +0000
The instruments of repression, security theater, and white supremacist ideology Trump is employing to create his own patchwork dictatorship in America were embraced and installed by a largely bipartisan consensus of US political leaders happy to exploit popular reaction to increase their own power and enrich the ruling class via imperialism, extractivism, and objectively racialized exploitation.
AI 2027 - Sat, 26 Apr 2025 19:33:14 +0000
"We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes."
How is the media still getting the Gaza murdered paramedics story so wrong? - Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:21:57 +0000
"The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create
the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to
make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the
world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us
from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns
precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth
depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit."
The Next Terrorist Attack - by Timothy Snyder - Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:48:14 +0000
Snyder posits that Trump's administration have weakened terrorism prevention, and would exploit any resulting attack to consolidate power: "Do not give the present regime the benefit of the doubt after it
allows a terrorist attack to take place on American soil. Be skeptical
about its account of who is to blame. Insist that Musk-Trump take
responsibility. And understand that freedom
is the first condition of security. A terrorist attack is no reason to
concede anything to this regime. On the contrary: such a failure by
Musk-Trump would be one more reason, and a very powerful one, to resist
it."
The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian - Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:25:25 +0000
"An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and
without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate,
profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs
have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s
side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources
and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the
last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they
themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy
anyone who gets in their way."
Fascist Word Games and the Birth of an American Dictatorship - Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:39:47 +0000
the administration can “deport” over two hundred people it swears are “gang members” without due process, which it then summarily proceeds to do while filming its blatantly illegal activities for propaganda purposes. While the planes are in the fucking air, a judge orders the government to turn them around, and the regime first pretends it doesn’t understand the order, then refuses to obey it while claiming that because the planes were out of US airspace, the court has no jurisdiction to order them to return to America.
Born in the wrong generation - by Sam Kriss - Tue, 08 Apr 2025 10:13:16 +0000
Sam Kriss describes a nightmare AI utopia: "It’s a bright cloudless day and you’re meeting your beautiful submissive
girlfriend for a breakfast date. You’re meeting her at the soda
fountain. You’re meeting her at the ice cream parlour. You’re meeting
her at the drugstore to share a malted milk. You’ve been going steady
with your main squeeze and now you’re meeting her at the folksy
chrome-and-cream diner on Main Street in your quiet walkable 98% white
small American town. It’s always a bright cloudless day."