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
Exocortex Log
Ongoing: A life-logging app, built as a progressive web app with all data stored on your local machine. Party for privacy, partly so I don’t have to run any servers. If you are interested in logging graphing and analysing your time as you spend it, this might be for you! But mostly it’s for me, I don’t care if you use it or not.
See the app at exocortexlog.com, or read the latest news blog.
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 - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:09:06 +0000
Yeah, weird, it came though in the column with the list were I follow on Mastodon, appears at lemmy itself, and yet not at Fedia. Even though Fedia seems to otherwise have everything.
Replies here not directly mentioning the group are not propagated to the group. Good to know.
Maybe it just takes time to propagate.
Maybe someone's blocked it.
Maybe federation was a mistake, 😆
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:50:29 +0000
Haven't tagged -doctorwho-lemmy.world before. Still not sure how federated groups are supposed to work. Looks like it takes the first line as a subject so starting with emoji was a mistake.
Seems to have shown up on Lemmy, but not on fedia where I actually read the group. Hummm. You learn by trying.
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:38:54 +0000
It's gonna be Xmas-27, some episodes in the year, and then Xmas-28 isn't it?
Been enjoying some of the Big Finish stuff recently too. There's a lot of them with the 8th doctor who only got one TV-movie pilot. He's pretty good. Loved it when he traveled with Mary Shelly for a while.
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:32:39 +0000
The BBC have released the Tender Document ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/news/doctor-who-invitation-to-tender-september-2026/ ) for companies who want to make Doctor Who.
They'll need to be registered (via Microsoft forms!?) by October 2nd. Which seems short notice. And then the process takes till March, which seems incredibly long.
They asking for someone to make a show in 28/29, so that'll be either Xmas or October start.
They have a strong preference for companies that claim they can make it in Wales, make at least one series plus specials (which probably just means two Xmases I guess).
They have no strong preference on the number of episodes or the number of stories those episodes span.
Interesting that they describe the types of stories they want. Even that you gotta specify some new monsters. Dunno that I would have expected a description of the stories to be in the bid really? Especially if it's gotta be by next month. Perhaps you can be vague.
Does sound like the people doing the tender process understand what the show is for and what its about so that's encouraging.
The most likely outcome remains that the BBC Studios will win the tender and this whole thing is a waste of time the BBC is forced to go through because tories can't abide there being a thing they can't bid on owning.
[ I haven't read it and ain't likely to, just listened to Ellie's summary ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLmjgltFwf8 ). ]
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:35:32 +0000
Content warning:Slop coding to machine language
Hearing people suggest that clanker AI programming bots should directly produce machine code rather than output human-readable languages like Python or Rust or C.
Which is of course a terrible idea.
These languages exist to make it easier write safe and efficient code, that's maintainable and editable and doesn't allow out of bounds memory pointing or leaks or whatever else.
Writing in machine language would be worse for the AI for the same reasons. It would make fore more unmaintainable, buggy, crashy, unmodular code.
The web is filled with training data written in those languages and pretty much no training data at all on how to write functions in 68000 or z80 or whatever.
You could build some training data by compiling all that high level language and training instead on the results of that.
But then you're just trying to get the buggy, lossy, neural network to learn to compile the high level code into machine language. Which it will do much worse than an actual compiler already written.
Pointless silly idea people.
Status at - Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:20:21 +0000
Felt like most of the acts at Beautiful Days a few weekend ago shouted "Free Palestine" at some point during their set. Always to a cheer. So much so it started to feel like a cheep way to get a cheer, like saying the name of the festival.
Hello Fediverse!
Billy Brag was so right on and woke over that, and solidarity, and workers rights, and whatnot, that I darn near teared up. Obviously he meant it.
They all did really. Even Madness.
As do I.
Free Palestine.
And all the others Macklemore and Bragg mention.
Saying it is the least you can do.
Status at - Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:37:15 +0000
Started up some improv again now the summer is over. Eight weeks of practice together then a few shows in November.
Three hour sessions are like 50% more hardcore than two hour sessions.
Seems like the instructor is more interventionist than most. More notes and suggestions as we go.
Same note to me as usual though: Slow down, be more grounded, let it simmer a bit first.
He mentioned Lord Of The Rings, and how its all world-building and slow pacing for the first twenty minutes before the action starts.
Is it? Wouldn't know. I got bored and turned it off before the end. Dreadfully dull story I thought. Just marching up and down. 😆
I'm sure they're right though. It's a hangover from the way you train early with short form. There, if something doesn't happen in the first 2 minutes it doesn't happen at all and you gotta establish setting and relationships immediately.
But I notice also that these days half the podcasts and youtube shows start with a clip from the middle. And I usually skip right to minute five anyway because I don't care about the introductions.
Status at - Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:29:42 +0000
Big Finish Doctor Who Audio Drama, "The One Doctor" stars Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford against Christopher Biggins and Clare Buckfield.
Biggins is a con-man traveling around in the Stardis, a portaloo, pretending to be the Doctor with his companion, and setting up fake threats to save people from for adulation and money. He's hilarious.
Course Baker's Doctor and Mel turn up and there's a real threat too.
Hilarious, probably the funniest Big Finnish I've heard.
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:35:12 +0000
New iPhone foldable looks pretty nice if eye-wateringly expensive. Good thing I'm such a free-software stick-in-the-mud or I might be tempted. Don't think you can install Linux on it sadly 😆
I liked the bit where it turned into a mini laptop with one screen for a keyboard.
Someone get valve to make a 3-screen foldable steamdeck.
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:56:20 +0000
Can't test if it always does that till next month when the free-email-account gets more sending tokens. 😆
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques - Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:42:39 +0000
Scott Alexander summarizing some ideas around understanding how the LLMs work and interpreting their 'thoughts'.
Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:56:17 +0000
Johnathan Cook on the climate conspiracy: "Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the
public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated
many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have
catastrophic consequences."
Johnny Depp's Bed - YouTube - Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:04:57 +0000
Bobby Fingers explains how he made a 1:13 scale diorama of a poo that was left in Johnny Depp's bed.
The Escape - Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:02:13 +0000
A crude graphical description of the OpenAI's agent under test attacking Hugging Face.
Child’s Play - Sam Kriss - Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:55:33 +0000
"The future will belong to people with a very specific
combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might
be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans
still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like
bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that
could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they
change it."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:50:52 +0000
FDroid are, rightly, going hard against Android Developer Verification: "If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been
installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation.
Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected
with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and
tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around
half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat."
Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy – Media Lens - Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:08:31 +0000
"The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza
genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British
newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of
Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these
had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap
trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer"
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You – Ryan Moulton's Articles - Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:34:04 +0000
Really great article on colour-spaces and how your eyes work vs screens and pigments: "There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the
real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them
to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your
screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained
them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent
from the digital world."
The UK’s social media ban for under-16s has just empowered big tech - Taylor Lorenz - Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:03:13 +0000
"If lawmakers are
serious about protecting children, they should roll back
age-verification policies and start targeting the systems that
incentivise mass surveillance. Instead of building an internet where
every user must ID themselves before being able to speak or consume
information, we should work to build an online world where everyone,
especially young people, can engage freely without being exploited for
corporate profit."
Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1 - YouTube - Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:37:50 +0000
3 Blue 1 Brown really is great isn't he? Part one video this week is on shannon entropy and the limits of data-compression but he's heading for something deeper by part 3.