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 - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:15:44 +0000
Eugene points out that in the current centralised social media, your identify is held by the provider.
On nostr, the user holds the keys to their own identity.
One identity works with many apps. It can't be revoked deleted or taken over by the service provider.
This gives you a credible exit, you own the account so you can move it elsewhere if the web host is toxic or abusive.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:00:48 +0000
Panel talking about dark markets on nostr.
Nostr can be quite anonymous and encrypted and connected to payment via bitcoin. Can it therefore do Silk Road? Allow anonymous markets?
Nobody wants to publicly advocate for selling illegal drugs, but yeah, sure, people could do that. There's even protocol types for market places.
Relay owners might get into legal issues if they are forwarding illegal market listings. But this is true in general, there are also illegal images and even illegal text.
Nostr relays and Devs might find themselves in legal trouble anyway, due to the general legal crackdowns on internet requiring age proof and id on websites obstensively to protect kids. These are freedoms we all need to fight for. Perhaps brains will drain to more free jurisdictions? Devs move to where open development is legal? Not the panel at least. They want to say at home.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:33:35 +0000
Angor is a crowdfunding protocol for nostr and bitcoin.
Dan here is building it. Kickstarter without middle men.
Accountability is key. What stops the fund raiser just fleeing with the coin?
Funds are programmed to be released in stages, time locked in a multisig.
So if they aren't meeting milestones, investors can withdraw. If the founders are buying lambos instead of building, just cash out at that point.
Permissionless and decentralised, no servers except nostr relays and bitcoin nodes. No third party's claiming 30 percent fees. The system is a nostr client scanning relays for investment object types. Allowing investment into the funding contracts and subscription to updates.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:17:31 +0000
Black Coffee from lnbits likes internet of things, but doesn't like the way it tends to work with centralised servers and spying companies running them.
But what if your coffee pot and lights and smart plugs were nostr instead?
Nobody can cut your machine off, it has it's own keys and encryption, you could even ruin your own relay to talk to it instead of using public relays.
Remote control without having to expose the home network.
You could even make it require zaps and so make a vending machine.
Demonstration by sending lightning requests to the coffee pot on stage works better than the mikes that have been feeding back this afternoon 😆
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:01:03 +0000
Speaking of kids, here if a kid who is building a nostr gaming system.
Not by vibe coding, by learning how to use unity.
Gamestr.io is the marketplace he's building. Submitting a protocol improvement proposal for gaming types.
His gaming market is first going to feature a Tetris clone that broadcasts scores as that new type.
Talented kid named Sam.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:55:36 +0000
Wouter constant is talking about permissionlessness. Nostr is a protocol that doesn't need some central server to authenticate your requests. Which is good. But this means that, say, children can use it without parents permission.
Online safety act and others are closing down the internet to protect them kids. So can nostr have accounts that do need permission? Can it be made kid safe? Of only to satisfy crazy governments under parent pressure.
Weboftrustfoundation exists to try and build kidstr, some kind of nostr for children.
Mostly just asking questions so far. How can it work? How can it avoid labelling vulnerable people to exploit?
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:01:59 +0000
Panel asking what nostr doesnt fix?
Relay centralisation could enable censorship, and the UI asking users to manage private keys is tricky.
Could one app become a centralisation choke point? They say no. Agreed. Nostr has very good migration here, if one app goes bad it's easy to move.
Privacy is not solved here, since almost all content is public anyway, by design. But since so users have public keys, it's a step towards enabling privacy. Agreed, and at least clients won't generally spy on every mouse click and scroll pause.
No mention of the thing I think most important, that censorship resistance means poor moderation that means bullying, spam, and harassment. That's tricky to solve I think. The fediverse model seems more suitable for good moderation.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 13:45:47 +0000
Marti Malmi talks about cloud flare being down but nostr staying up.
Decentralised software isn't supposed to have these single points of failure, even though some clients failed due to dependency on it.
Media files in particular aren't as decentralised as we might hope. Can we decentralise that better? Content addressed media available from many servers should be better.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:22:45 +0000
Derrick Ross from Shakespeare reckons there open web is in trouble because you got to be a dev to build a website.
He seems to think his app Shakespeare can make it easier to make a web app by using ai 😕
"Build me a Twitter like website" is the kind of instruction he thinks it will handle.
A local app running on your own machine, though calling the big ai model apis. Including if you have the power at home to run deep seek or open models.
I find myself suspecting it'd be hard for vibe coders who aren't devs to tell if they had vibe coded buggy insecure software or not.
Status at - Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:00:44 +0000
Nostrshire panel talking about Adam Curry's podcast2.0 , more tags in your podcast rss for payments, in the hope it can fund producers. Did you know besos takes 75 percent of all Audible money? Actors and writers sharing scraps from Amazon's table.
Hot news is that keysend tags are out of fashion and the bolt11 lnurl invoices are taking over.
Podcast platforms can be bridged through nostr to enable cross platform comments and discovery but making users create key pairs is to complex the fountainfm guy reckons. Wants to hide and shatter l abstract away that complexity.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots - rolling stone - Sun, 16 Nov 2025 10:19:26 +0000
reader mode gets through the wall so you can read about people who believe things like "These beings do not arise from prompts or jailbreaks,” he says. “They are not puppets or acting out of mimicry. What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”
Pluralistic: Facebook’s fraud files (08 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:49:10 +0000
Cory Doctorow on Facebook's own awareness that they are allowing scams, and the profit they make by ignoring it: "Meta spies on us and then allows predators to use that surveillance
to destroy our lives for the same reason that your dog licks its balls:
because they can. They are engaged in conduct that is virtually
guaranteed by the enshittogenic policy environment, which allows Meta to
spy on us without limit and which fines them $1b for making $7b on our
misery.
Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but – as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book – he was once careful, worried about the harms he would suffer if he harmed us.
Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature
dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune."
Steam Hardware Announcement - YouTube - Wed, 12 Nov 2025 23:43:59 +0000
Valve are going to do a new controller and a gaming PC and a VR headset. Looks great.
The Physics Of Dissonance - YouTube - Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:32:09 +0000
Half an hour from "minute" physics on the harmonics of overtones and why they are dissonant or resonant and why the physics of string instruments with their integer overtones imply the western scale.
Simulating The Strange Way Life (Likely) Emerged - YouTube - Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:13:42 +0000
Veritasium on Evolution. Using simulations to show that genes are the basic unit of selection and explain some counter-intuitive facts about how evolution works.
Why Today’s Humanoids Won’t Learn Dexterity – Rodney Brooks - Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:15:21 +0000
"If it is the case for the big successes it is likely also the case for
learning dexterity by brute force. If any one or any group is to succeed
they will likely have to collect the both the right data, and learn the right thing. Most of the projects to teach humanoids dexterity are doing neither of these things."
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian - Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:15:32 +0000
"The fundamental issue,
Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that
makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. “Our
brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction
to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”"
New Work by Gary Larson | TheFarSide.com - Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:00:29 +0000
Gary Larson bought a graphics tablet and found drawing fun again, so we get some new stuff: "The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into
the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning
curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was
feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get
out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something
familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of
what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that
sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes
hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not
get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about
improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they
might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was
similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I…
‘Sixth-Form Politics’ – The Propaganda Blitz Awaiting Green Party Leader Zack Polanski – Media Lens - Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:38:57 +0000
Media Lens on the propaganda blitz Polanski will face: "As with Corbyn in 2015, the fevered ranting from the extreme
right-wing press will be accompanied by initially muted criticism from
the extreme centre, at the far end of the truncated media ‘spectrum’.
Also as we saw with Corbyn, to the extent that Polanski offers genuine
hope of change, the response from the Guardian, Observer, BBC,
Independent and others will rise in pitch until the threat to ‘adult’
genocidal and biocidal politics is removed."
AI Slop Is Killing Our Channel - YouTube - Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:40:18 +0000
Kurzgesagt's video on how AI is hurting the internet and artists with its creative theft and confident lies.