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, 26 Feb 2026 20:36:52 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. Capital was abundant (or at least, replicable). Natural resources were finite but substitutable. Technology improved slowly enough that humans could adapt. Intelligence, the ability to analyze, decide, create, persuade, and coordinate, was the thing that could not be replicated at scale.
Human intelligence derived its inherent premium from its scarcity. Every institution in our economy, from the labor market to the mortgage market to the tax code, was designed for a world in which that assumption held.
We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium. Machine intelligence is now a competent and rapidly improving substitute for human intelligence across a growing range of tasks
Which is what saves us from this scenario I guess? Because the machine likely isn't really a substitute for human intelligence.
🤞
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:35:18 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
The Occupy Silicon Valley movement has been emblematic of wider dissatisfaction. Last month, demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Anthropic and OpenAI’s San Francisco offices for three weeks straight. Their numbers are growing, and the demonstrations have drawn more media coverage than the unemployment data that prompted them.
It’s hard to imagine the public hating anyone more than the bankers in the fallout of the GFC, but the AI labs are making a run at it.
Dunno that the public hated the bankers nearly as much as they ought to have. Outside Iceland were any jailed? Did any even lose their job?
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:29:42 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
The federal government’s revenue base is essentially a tax on human time. People work, firms pay them, the government takes a cut. Individual income and payroll taxes are the spine of receipts in normal years.
Indeed. Collapse in the labour economy causes a financial state collapse when the state is funded by a tax on labour.
Productivity is surging, but the gains are flowing to capital and compute, not labor.
Which would ideally mean you tax compute and capital but how's that work when compute and capital own the government already?
The output is still there. But it’s no longer routing through households on the way back to firms, which means it’s no longer routing through the IRS either.
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:01:41 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
In the US, we weren’t asking about how the bubble would burst in AI infrastructure anymore. We were asking what happens to a consumer-credit economy when consumers are being replaced with machines.
This is pure Marxist, exactly how Marx said capitalism would eat itself.
I wonder if there's room for a kind of AI accelerationism? Encourage the robots taking our jobs so that we overthrow capitalism all the sooner?
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:58:23 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
😆
You say non-cyclical but then still draw a circle.
Feedback loops can be dampening or not though of course, that's the difference really.
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:56:10 +0000
Content warning:re: AI Economics
Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.
...
Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.
😆 Disenshitification by AI would be quite a reversal of the current trends.
[...Door-dash is disintermediated by AI...]
This was oddly poetic, as perhaps the only example in this entire saga of agents doing a favor for the soon-to-be-displaced white collar workers. When they ended up as delivery drivers, at least half their earnings weren’t going to Uber and DoorDash. Of course, this favor from technology didn’t last for long as autonomous vehicles proliferated.
😆
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:37:06 +0000
Content warning:AI Economics
A news-report about the AI economy that fell through a time tunnel from two years in the future.
We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)
AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…
It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake
.Fake-news, obviously. It's from the future. Just a story. A scenario. Interesting possible way the bubble could pop even if the claimed efficiency gains are real.
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:41:03 +0000
Content warning:Green Menace
Look out everyone, Zack and the Evil Green Menace are going to get you and give you free cocaine and cannabis. They're going to ban your landlord and allow refugees to earn a wage and tax you and they might even stop funding radical genocidal war in the middle east.
Vote carefully man! You should be scared!
-- The entire press.
Our media are entirely hilarious, threaten me with a good time.
Status at - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:15:01 +0000
Day Five in the Improv Narrative house, and we're in the format I like most really. A few instructive games in the first half and a couple of longer narrative stories in the second half.
The island game was supposed to teach something about not deliberately getting obstructive.
A scene where your players are told they are on one island and must end up at some point all on the other one the other side of the stage.
Set a scene, make some characters, but nobody said it was supposed to be difficult to get from one island to the other.
Yet barriers are deliberately thrown up, actually imaginary barriers since the whole thing is imaginary after all. Why should there be sharks or a quest for a boat or the sea deep and cold.
You can just wade across. You can just have a boat. You can just levitate yourself over with your hive mind psychic abilities.
Unsure about this.
There must be conflict and peril and challenges which are mastered in a story, you can't set up a hero's quest only to have the hero just happen to have a holy grail in the stationary cupboard. Already got one you see. Use it for storing pens.
Still. Finding the crowbar doesn't have to be a quest. There can just be one in the boot. Don't let things get bogged down in difficulty.
Watched a story about a lazy fellow falling into a life of crime and villainy because of his tardiness and fulfilling his teacher's prophecy that he would indeed end up as a criminal if he didn't buck up his ideas. Good repeated themes of characters making lists of his failures and nice stage-focus work when everyone was on stage at once.
Played a preacher organizing a wedding in a story about friends running a hotel.
Fun to have Reverend Priest finding sin everywhere again. Easy wipe-off sin in this case. We may have come to an end too early. Perhaps not enough obstructions put in the way. 😆
Status at - Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:43:52 +0000
Thought I might experiment with posting a one-minute version of the #tarot show on #loops
Five whole minutes is too long for many people with modern attention spans. And this is certainly the minute with the meat.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check - techdirt - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:06:25 +0000
See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates.
Venezuela – ‘War Is Peace’ – Media Lens - Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:45:45 +0000
"The 100-death toll may come as a surprise to consumers of
‘mainstream’ media, which have shown zero interest in the people killed
and maimed. If US soldiers had died, we would know their names, faces,
army units, back stories, with spouses and parents expressing their
grief in heart-rending interviews. --
For ‘mainstream’ politics and media, the latest killing spree is just
another Groundhog Day. Maduro is not perceived as a particular
individual; he is perceived as the latest incarnation of the generic
‘Bad Guy’: Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad,
Nasrallah and Sinwar. The Venezuelans are another anonymous crowd of
(mostly) brown-skinned people indistinguishable from Iraqis, Iranians,
Libyans, Syrians and Palestinians."
Sci-Fi Short Film "There Is No Antimemetics Division" | DUST - YouTube - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:25:09 +0000
Nice 15 minute sci-fi film about the anti-memetics division, a very strange place to work indeed.
Best Of Moltbook - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:02:36 +0000
Scott Alexander takes us through a few posts written by the AIs in an ai-only social network, where all the AI agents go to discuss the nature of AI consciousness and help each other learn how to deal with their humans.
TikTok Won’t Be Another Twitter - fediverse report - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:03:32 +0000
The conditions that made 'leaving Twitter' a meaningful part of the open social web's identity don't exist for TikTok. What happens when people can't see each other leave?
The Harry Hill Show - Nish Kumar - YouTube - Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:12:01 +0000
Harry Hill has a new show on youtube now he's been kicked off of proper telly. Guest was Stewart Lee last week, this week here it's Nish Kumar. It's very silly and quite funny.
‘The Weak Must Suffer’: The Eternal Fiction Of The ‘International Rules-Based Order’ – Media Lens - Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:22:15 +0000
"The British state-corporate media response was telling. The crucial
segment of his speech about the longstanding ‘fiction’ of the
‘international rules-based order’ and ‘the gaps between rhetoric and
reality’ was almost entirely buried. If we had responsible,
public-service news media in this country they would have quoted that
vital section, word-for-word, and provided relevant context and substantive analysis as to what it meant."
The UK is taking political prisoners to evade accountability for genocide - Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:23:08 +0000
"The UK is complicit in grave violations of international law and has not only failed to meet its international legal obligations, but has actively breached them. Some British citizens, concerned with justice, international law, and human rights, have peacefully stepped in to challenge their government’s wrongdoing. The state’s response has been to criminalise dissent while presenting repression as democratic self-defence.
Let us be clear: proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is not an isolated act. It is part of the UK’s broader complicity in Israel’s oppression and genocide, and it functions domestically to silence those who seek to disrupt that complicity."
Trump's threat to Greenland must be a wake-up call for Britain - New Statesman - Mon, 19 Jan 2026 21:06:59 +0000
Zack is the only party leader in the UK saying anything remotely sensible in an era in which America can't be trusted: "First, we need to disentangle our security apparatus from the United
States so that we can be genuinely independent. As an urgent first step,
the government should review how we might remove US bases from British
soil while maintaining our own security – and retaining the capacity to
support our allies in Ukraine. There are currently 13 US military bases
in the UK, operated by an estimated 10,000 personnel. If Trump were to
take military action against Greenland, we must be able to act swiftly
to remove America’s military presence from our country peacefully and
efficiently. The government should also cancel its £240m deal with US
firm Palantir, signed despite MPs raising serious security concerns about the company.Second, we need to ditch Trident – and fast. Even supporters of
nuclear weapons recognise the risks of maintaining a system that relies
on the United States.…
The Dilbert Afterlife - by Scott Alexander - Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:22:53 +0000
"Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If
He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss,
Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends
Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest
Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer
Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting."