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 - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:14:18 +0000
This month's digest/newsletter is on the way to the mailbox of all those rich lovely insider traders who know how to play the newsletter markets.
The rest of you poor bag-holding index investor scum being ripped off can get it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/may26/Featuring rants and card-readings about SpaceX and AI stock offerings, commentary on Labour's collapse and Burnham's offer, descriptions of gigs and the building of a table, plus a new Observers cartoon.
Status at - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:15:53 +0000
The fact that we are having our political conversations on shitposting troll sites is a strange quirk of the modern age.
Some kind of online house-of-people's state-owned state-forum seems like a more sensible place if you were designing from scratch.
Status at - Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:11:25 +0000
James O'Brien is on the radio asking if the government ought to leave Twitter.
He seems to have finally understood that there is no level playing field there, that the algorithm can't be used for good. That if it started to do good, the owners would just change it.
He left when he understood that the place is overrun with trolls and moderated only to keep the woke in check.
James blocked me ages ago, and I'd not ring in, but the key thing he's missing is this:
Elon musk has his own shitposting troll site that he owns.
Trump has his own shtposting troll site that he owns.
Mark Zuckerberg has his own shitposting troll site that he owns. He's got like four.
The blockchain people have their own shitposting troll site that they own (that's the one O'Brian uses).
If the government wants to use a shitposting troll site, they should also use one that they own.
Likewise LBC radio presenters really. If they want to use a shitposting troll site, they should probably use one that they own and moderate themselves.
And then, consensually, with no obligation, if they want, each of the shitposting troll sites can federate together with the others in a mesh, so that they can talk to each other and the conversation can flow between them but ownership and control is distributed to individual organisations.
Then we could decentralize ownership of the means of communication and avoid this argument about whether the government should be on twitter so we can instead argue whether UK Social should block or federate with Musk's Nazi Troll site or not.
And this system exists of course. LBC could have their own shitposting troll site by the end of next week and moderate it as they see fit.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:49:41 +0000
Shame we can't all go back to running ICQ really. It literally never got better than that. But ICQ would let you do things big corporations didn't like (for example send large copyrighted files directly) and was peer-to-peer and so unsurveillable.
So they did what they always do. Bought it and shut it down.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:35:48 +0000
Whatsapp users. Instagram users. Facebook users. Threads users. Even us Oculous users. Everyone trusts Zuck.
Status at - Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:24:06 +0000
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mattburgess/116693207149186541
“Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”
Hard to know why people think this company is okay, and that everyone should be their cattle. Rather than thinking everyone on the executive team should be banned from any business activity on ethical grounds.
Status at - Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:49:19 +0000
RE: https://loops.video/v/g0QkUlZbIv
Not sure how many people are really aware of what SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic are planning over the next few months.
Everyone knows there's an AI stock market bubble, and that alone is a reason why the holders of the companies might want to offload some risk onto the rest of the stock market investors.
But these three companies are coming in valued so highly at the peak of this bubble here that they will between them become a significant fraction of the total stock markets.
Which means all the automatic-funds which buy companies in proportion to how much they make up of the total markets will have to buy a lot of all of them quite quickly.
So you'll have hundreds of billions of dollars going from pension funds into the hands of the private investors offloading their AI stocks, right at the top of the AI bubble here.
Elon and Sam are gonna take 200 billion dollars of the world's pension money just before the whole thing collapses. They are treating the stock markets as his bag-holders. Which is quite a common move, they didn't invent it or anything. But the accountants this round seem to have optimized the process. Swifter and faster and on a smaller fraction of the companies than was previously possible.
There will be a name for the economic catastrophe produced by these three big IPOs taking automatic-investor money at the top of a bubble, leaving all the pension funds unable to meet their liabilities and pensioners going bankrupt.
The way the media works it won't be called a fraud though, they'll label it like it was an unavoidable natural disaster which just co-incidentally transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from the pension funds to the richest dozen families on earth.
"The 2027 AI Revaluation" or something maybe. "The 2028 Pensions Crisis". Something like that.
Anyway, hard to fit all that into the one minute tarot reading.
Status at - Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:59:46 +0000
Been watching Genndy Tartakovsky's "Primal", which is three seasons of an Adult Swim cartoon, each twenty minutes long, about a caveman and his dinosaur friend who meet in tragedy in Episode one.
No dialogue really, all just incredible animal roars and screams and shrieks and hollering. So all the story is visual, told in the expressions and the movement and the reaction shots, and very beautifully drawn and animated to boot.
Dinosaur is not a pet, she is an equal. Occasionally ridden, but that's the parts I like least. Seems out of character.
No aiming for realism here. One of my favorite early ones they spent most of the time running from a zombie stegosaurus.
Most interesting new TV I've seen in a while. All three seasons are great, though they are in order first was best and each subsequently not quite as good.
Status at - Sat, 30 May 2026 22:36:18 +0000
Went to Small World Spring Festival in Hedcorn Kent last weekend.
It was very hot.
It's been hot since. Barely done anything other than sleep on the sofa all week.
Spent most of it lolling in the shade with a battery fan barely able to pay attention to the musicians somehow managing to jump about in the heat.
The campervan wallpaper I put up did as I predicted and fell down quite a lot. Had the gorilla glue ready to try and patch it as it fell. The vinyl wallpaper is probably a mistake. The heat swings are too intense. It swells and the glue fails.
Stands more chance of staying up in future, but is way more creased and shoddy looking.
Still, it's form and function other than that are now as good as it's gonna get in a van that size. The mini-fridge isn't worth it. Coolbox just fine.
Love small world though. Proper hippy festival. Mostly solar powered and punk and ska and folk and jazz and that whole stage just for jamming.
Will likely be back there for the end of summer one. Nice that they open and close the summer.
Status at - Thu, 28 May 2026 21:57:01 +0000
I think there should be a strong social norm against quoting robots. Doing so ought to be embarrassing.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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."
Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge - Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:24:15 +0000
Sam Kriss writing on the coming illiteracy might affect politics. It's long so you know only people who read a bit will get to the end, and they prone to agree: "This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics
assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in
abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without
that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for
state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy.
For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic,
we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute
domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up
voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of
literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be
unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating
each other in the streets."
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier - Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:47:46 +0000
Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your
car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the
morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and
reorganized your dashboard while you slept.