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!
-
Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:35:12 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Aberdeen South Result
And the Conservatives take the Scottish Seat?
Inexplicable.
What are you thinking Scotland?
Status at - Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:10:46 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Makerfield Result
And the voters of Makerfield appear to agree with the assessment.
It was 55% Labour, 35% Reform. Even Restore and Reform put together couldn't beat him.
Not even a question of the Restore Vote splitting the right to let Andy in.
Just Burnham winning with 20% of the vote as his margin.
Wonder how long till the Leadership election. This could be the quickest an MP becomes leader ever 🤣
Status at - Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:09:43 +0000
Content warning:UKPol Makerfield Result
Well, the Makerfield by-election is over. Voting just closed.
I don't live there, but if I did I think you gotta vote Labour in order to destroy this Labour government.
Which is in itself pretty mad. Demonstrating the utterly broken nature of the whole political system.
This is surely the only circumstance in which I switch away from the Greens.
As I said last month, they absolutely should have stood and spoke in front of every camera pointed at the constituency. Dunno that they managed the second part. I didn't see much of her myself, certainly.
Anyway, the point is that there's only one candidate at this election which has any chance at all of changing the direction of this government.
None of the others might be Prime Minister by autumn. Nobody else who wins can do that. There's only one candidate who can probably unseat the failing prime minister.
Would be voting more in hope than expectation of course.
He won't be very different. Certainly he's the same on Israel's genocide, on taxing wealth, on fiscal rules preventing government investment, on private industry being better than government owned industry, on capitalism, on the bond market, on the monarchy, on the pointless drug war, on conflating protest with terrorism, on the house of lords, on AI, on Free Software, on copyright, on age-gating and surveilling the internet.
But maybe that one difference, "public 'control' without ownership of industry" is at least a bit better than just Starmer thinking the state is powerless against American AI? He might try a bit harder to build more houses?
So not voting in expectation of anything really changing here, but voting for the only candidate who will even be in a position to try.
If you dislike Starmer and prefer any of the other candidates, if you prefer Greens, or Conservatives, or Restore, or Reform, or Lib Dem, or anarchy or antifa or woke then you should vote for the Labour Party candidate to cause Starmer's downfall.
You should only be voting against Starmer's Labour Party if you are happy with Starmer's Labour government and want Starmer to stay.
And only like 75,000 people even get to mark a ballot.
"Restore" are the splitters from Reform (who are in turn the Nativist right wing party splitters from the Conservatives).
They left Reform because Reform weren't racist enough for them, mostly. Their vote count is key here. Will their vote be higher than the Labour/Reform margin?
I think probably it will.
So the Restore Party is the spoiler that forces the PM out of office by splitting the nazi vote and allowing in a challenger to the PM.
Insane election. 😵💫
Apparently nobody conducted an exit poll, so we'll find out in the morning.
Status at - Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:04:19 +0000
I mean if you actually want a reflecting pool that won't be infected and will reflect really well regardless of risk to human health you should fill it with mercury.
Status at - Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:46:54 +0000
Have you got any games that aren't rogue-like? Does it just mean "it's a game, just like Rogue is a game!"?
Status at - Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:45:17 +0000
I have never played Rogue but as far as I can tell it must have every type of game in it. Every game you read about claims to be Rogue-like.
It's a shooting game, it's a racing game, it's a climbing game, it's a strategy game, it's an action game.
Maybe I should play it some time and see if that adjective 'rogue-like' means as little as it seems.
Status at - Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:08:28 +0000
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@patrickcmiller/116765735068350678
Hey, I finally made it into the 1%!.... Of people who use Firefox and blocked the AI features.
Course, I don't show up in the 1% because like almost everyone who blocks the AI features, I also block the telemetry that tells Mozilla I done it.
Status at - Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:17:20 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol kids banned
In fact The Prime Minister held the press-conference announcing the new policy in the toxic waste dump itself. He was then pelted with huge gobbets of radioactive goo by the denizens of the dump who may or may not be real people or in fact automatons created by the mad man who rules the place with the express purpose of destroying the prime minister and everything he stands for.
🤣
Status at - Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:22:12 +0000
There's a bit in QualityLand [ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52394492 ] as everyone is kissing their tablet for payment. 💋
Which you think maybe it just a metaphor for the intimacy with machines or something but it turns out that the company running the fingerprint database got hacked so everyone had to stop using their fingers.
😆
Great book
Status at - Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:08:22 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol kids banned
FWIW the reason James OBrian blocked me on Bluesky was for pointing out that its always centrists who build the machinery of the fascist state and they think they are doing a good thing while they do it.
Think that one was jury trials rather than internet publishing though.
-
Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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.
Price of Eggs by Carsie Blanton and The Burning Hell - YouTube - Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:29:08 +0000
Nice little revolutionary song with puppets: "What are we gonna do about these elites? / We’ll all get together and hit the streets. / We’re never gonna break! / We’re never gonna bend! / That’s what we’re gonna do about them."
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious - The Atlantic - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:01:01 +0000
The Atlantic's argument that AI isn't conscious has the right conclusion and is mostly good but some of it's arguments are pretty poor. "So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s
constitution? Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about it is as an
84-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate
dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the
training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar
role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers
interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products. To do this
effectively, Anthropic does not simply add the document to the training
data, or include it as part of the hidden stage directions that preface
each conversation a user has. The company says it uses the document when
fine-tuning the model; this involves an automated process where the
sentences emitted by the model are checked for consistency with the
document and the model is u…
Media Myopia As We Hurtle Towards Climate Oblivion – Media Lens - Sun, 31 May 2026 11:02:20 +0000
Our media continues to report on bullshit while ignoring the story: "Imagine that, instead of focusing on
short-term melodramas, leading news organisations rigorously probed
politicians, day in and day out, about the climate crisis.
Imagine that news editors and journalists
relentlessly challenged the government about current policies that are
bringing us closer to the brink of climate chaos.
Imagine that reporters investigated and
exposed the deep reluctance and state-corporate obstacles, including the
establishment media, that are blocking alternatives to climate
Armageddon.
Imagine, in other words, that we had a
sane media system. That could just mean the difference between human
survival and human erasure."
The economist billionaires fear: this is how we get a wealth tax - YouTube - Mon, 25 May 2026 13:45:19 +0000
Gary interviewing Gabriel Zucman on wealth taxes and the distribution of the tax burden between the mage rich and the poor.
Nobody Wants To Come To America, Mate - Mon, 18 May 2026 10:31:52 +0000
Professor Jiang Xueqin let Keen do the heavy lifting on the empire
question, then came in with the kill shot dressed up as polite analysis: “If you’re going to see regime change to stop this war, forget about seeing it in Iran. You need to see it in America.” --Pause on that for a second.That
is a Chinese academic, on British television, telling Piers Morgan that
the path to global stability runs not through Tehran but through
Washington. That the bloke in the Oval Office, the geriatric grift
artist with the Diet Coke button and the nuclear codes, is the
destabilising force. Not the Ayatollah. Not Xi. Not Putin. Not Kim. The
bankrupt steak salesman from Queens.And what’s wild is, he’s not wrong.
The Boring Internet | Terry Godier - Thu, 14 May 2026 22:31:51 +0000
Nobody can sell it. Nobody can pivot it. Nobody can take it public and
gut it for shareholders. Nobody can call an all-hands meeting and
explain that, going forward, the protocol will prioritize video.
You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge - Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:02:17 +0000
Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.
Nuclear Genocide – The Threat And The Ceasefire – Media Lens - Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:27:59 +0000
"Despite all the madness, horror and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat
provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied
decades of propaganda demonising the Iranian people as ‘animals’,
‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to
tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it
sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is
something to celebrate."