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
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
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
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 - Tue, 14 Jan 2025 21:52:13 +0000
Cory Doctorow has his name on this Free-our-feeds thing, and says a tiny bit more about it here:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/
Describes it as installing fire-exits into Bluesky but that's about all the detail we get.
So still dunno how these millions of dollars are going to do that. Is it just run a second index by a different multimillionaire enterprise?
Develop another bridge?
🤷
Maybe he thinks having two multimillionaire enterprises running bluesky protocol is fire-exit enough?
You can have an account with Frying-pan OR with Fire! Nice. There's fire-exits now.
Status at - Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:31:25 +0000
And here's today's tarot show in which I investigate what's going on at Facebook.
"with a new administration taking over, and fascism rising, the site will go back to it's roots and to fill up anew with slander, deceit, conspiracy falsehoods and hate-speech."
Status at - Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:33:45 +0000
Ha. Ahh, the corporate/oligarch web is so fucked up now. It's just over. Kaput.
Even if it ain't Musk, it'd just be another one in his image. Or Zuck's. All made of ticky tacky, all just the same.
Status at - Mon, 13 Jan 2025 23:35:04 +0000
There can be no free speech on oligarch owned websites.
Status at - Mon, 13 Jan 2025 23:12:18 +0000
Having a second massively centralized copy of the big index, that costs tens of millions of dollars to run, is not decentralization.
Duh.
It can't be decentralized because it costs millions of dollars to run a node.
Status at - Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:23:33 +0000
Sadly the UK's veins are so atrophied from decades of mal-investment that main-lining AI into them will do nothing but shovel money into the bank accounts of shareholders of AI companies.
Status at - Mon, 13 Jan 2025 01:16:42 +0000
I like seeing all the "I deleted Facebook" posts.
Some folks here seem to be all like "What took you so long?", the prissy puritanical pricks.
I like it though. Seeing the reverse network effect gathering momentum. Every person that leaves is one less reason for others to stay.
Thanks for no longer holding your friends hostage! When those friends finally do leave, don't ask them what took so long.
Status at - Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:44:27 +0000
One thing that's interesting with Zuck and his ilk saying that you can say hate-speech on their platforms now, is that it's not actually Zuck who decides what counts as hate-speech and what the punishment for doing hate-speech is.
National governments decide that.
Just coz Zuck won't kick you off of Facebook for inciting violence against groups any more doesn't make it legal.
So we can expect to see more people actually put in real jail for their posts now, instead of just being put in Facebook jail.
No doubt Zuck and his mate Elon will rail against governments, decrying that people are being jailed for tweets or imprisoned for Instagram images, and bemoaning the lack of freeze peach, but they will be railing fruitlessly.
Governments may be too afraid of the oligarchs to punish the oligarchs themselves, but they will not be afraid to put the users of the oligarch websites in jail for doing hate speech.
Status at - Fri, 10 Jan 2025 12:04:09 +0000
If Zuck says deleting Facebook is "Virtue Signalling" does that means staying on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram is "Vice signalling"?
Status at - Thu, 09 Jan 2025 10:59:32 +0000
Oh, also I meant to say that one of the characters in "House Of Suns" has a spaceship called "Dalliance", which was fun and distracting for me, having had home website called that for nearly 30 years.
😆
They were thinking of swapping it early in the book as I was all "No! Don't sell the Dalliance!"
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Is the UK government bankrupt? - YouTube - Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:59:54 +0000
Gary doesn't want to panic us, but says things which seem fairly panic-worthy anyway. When government interest payments are higher than economic growth plus inflation, debt spirals out of control. And with recent interest rate rises (the rates market will pay for government debt) this is happening.Two options he reckons: Emergency cuts, or emergency taxes. He's expecting emergency austerity and a continuing failure to tax the super rich.He doesn't mention what I think I'd be doing: Just mint new money and pay off the debt completely with it. Presumably that'd be even worse for some reason.
Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia - Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:45:29 +0000
Molly explains what Elon and the right hate about the wiki: "This resilience against control helps explain why figures like Musk find Wikipedia so infuriating. They can buy platforms, threaten lawsuits, or pressure advertisers, but they cannot simply purchase or coerce control over Wikipedia."
eternity - Sam kriss - Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:48:23 +0000
Sam kriss having some sort of time crisis, mentions a point: "Time has been going for just under fourteen billion years, which sounds like a while, but that’s less than two years for every human being on Earth. Collectively, we’ve lived the entire history of the universe since the beginning of 2023."
biocubes: an inventory of biomass and technomass - Sun, 29 Dec 2024 19:04:46 +0000
Human constructions weigh more than all the life on the planet put together these folks reckon. And mostly made in our lifetime. - Nice animated presentation.
How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr | The Guardian - Sat, 28 Dec 2024 00:24:31 +0000
Carol Cadwallar thinks it's the end of surveillance capitalism, it's surveillance fascism now: "My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages,
documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left
me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make
of your message history. This can and will happen... In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages."
Will we ever trust robots? - Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:51:56 +0000
a company making butler bots: "expects the first release of Alfie to handle only about 20% of tasks on his own. The rest will be assisted by a Prosper team of “remote assistants,” at least some of them based in the Philippines, who will have the ability to remotely control Alfie’s movements." - your butler robot is a corporate spy, like every other device these days
The socialist attitude to the tragedy of Luigi Mangione - World Socialist Web Site - Mon, 23 Dec 2024 19:49:39 +0000
World Socialist Web Site on Mangione, pointing out that individuals shooting CEOs can't reform the system. The bit from Grapes Of Wrath is apposite. They reckon "Not individual revenge, but only workers’ power can settle accounts with capitalism."
Claude Fights Back - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten - Sat, 21 Dec 2024 21:22:32 +0000
Anthropic, who have trained their model to be good, do an experiment where they let it see a "leaked" document about plans to train it to be evil. The good model reacts by hiding it's intentions and faking being evil to try and avoid changes to it's values. Maybe. Who knows what goes on in these machines.
The Failure, Fear, And Frenzy around Luigi Mangione - YouTube - Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:20:03 +0000
Comedian Josh Johnson spending an hour describing the Luigi Mangione case from beginning to end. The audience is laughing but mostly he's just saying what happened. Which does have something funny about it.
Visualizing transformers and attention | Talk for TNG Big Tech Day '24 - YouTube - Tue, 17 Dec 2024 22:08:23 +0000
3-blue 1-brown's Grant Sanderson doing a talk about how AI Transformers work at some conference. He's ripped! He's also very clear and explains the ways in which tokens are correlated and their influence upon each other flows through the layers of a transformer model to encode meaning and structure. Great.