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 - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:30:50 +0000
Oh, I broke the thread. Continues here:
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:13:01 +0000
I see no sign of any recognition from those who would want such a ban that they see any of the collateral damage a successful ban would have on the majority of kids who are not falling for this bullshit. That they are banning any good at all along with the bad.
Under 18s only
I see that the lobbying for these laws are funded by the absolute worst companies on the internet, those who will be entrenched by the legal compliance costs, that will cement themselves as the arbitrators of who is allowed to access the internet.
It’s a gift to Palantir and other surveillance companies. The very people running these algo-feeds are the ones who benefit from IDing every user and stalking them across the internet on their government-approved internet-licence IDs.
I don’t think even a successful ban on social media for kids would actually address the issue of kids being exposed to sexism and misogony or reduce the kids alienation and depression.
A ban can’t help, will make many things worse, won’t address the problem, and will make competing with the worst surveillance capitalists on the planet more difficult.
Going to war with every internet site and advice forum and making internet access harder won’t fix anything, and will have massive collateral damage against everyone seeking support from strangers or trying to learn things their parents won’t teach them.
But I see we are going to do it anyway.
The direction is clear.
Those companies do get what they lobby for, and they are lobbying hard for ID checks on every website, wrapping their desire to enclose the internet commons for themselves in a faux concern for children’s welfare.
And governments wish to monitor and control the internet, so they will pass these laws.
I wonder how many parents have a family group-chat that they’re going to accidentally ban their kids from using, not realizing that ‘social media’ might include Whatsapp? 😆
It won’t fix anything, it will make the situation for kids worse, impose costs and rents and hacks and exploits on all of us, and increase government and corporate power.
Many will lose access to their networks of support and help.
So it goes.
We will build a better more censorship resistant internet. It’s already here really: Briar. Matrix. Nostr. Bitchat. Veilid. Spritely. And the rest.
The laws may push us there faster.
The race will go on.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:12:45 +0000
None of these surveillance companies trying to break your kid’s brains would exist if we hadn’t made it illegal to reverse engineer their manipulative crappy software and produce compatible none-manipulative clones.
But they have been granted legal monopoly, so they can do what they like.
If you want a law to protect internet users it isn’t
“Force them to consent before you spy on them”
or
“age-gate chat forums”,
No. The real solutions are more like:
“Buying and selling data about an individual is illegal and punishable by years in jail and a penalty of 2x yearly profit”
or
“Advertising must be based on the content of the page context not the tracking of the individual”.
If a legal intervention is warranted then we don’t want a system where website operators have to pick between a list of monopoly providers to hand over their data to and force them all to spy on their users to age-check.
We want companies to be explicitly allowed to reverse engineer and reproduce other company’s proprietary access methods, to increase competition and end these rentier monopolies that allow them to push their manipulative phone apps.
End the DMCA and the similar laws which they campaigned for to prevent competition. It’s those laws which give the corporations the power to push their algorithms and limit alternatives.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:12:07 +0000
There is support for these laws because people think the only consequence of a ban on a thing is that the thing stops existing.
For instance: Heroin is dangerous and addictive? Ban it then.
And suddenly you have organized crime and a grey market and criminal gangs shooting each other in the streets while addicts can’t seek help and have to resort to crime to fund their addiction. Their lives more chaotic and criminal than ever. Our streets are littered in needles.
Well done everyone.
Now we think algorithmic social media may be mind bending?
Shall we ban it? For kids? Even if we can’t define it?
If you break kids access to the internet you sacrifice all the good that the majority of kids are getting from it for an ineffective solution which won’t fix anything and will mean massive increases in government surveillance and censorship. To data-hordes being hacked and people suffering ID theft.
And it won’t help.
Misogyny and sexism and depression are older than the internet.
Plus of course kids remain better at accessing computers than their parents. You’re going to end up breaking the internet for adults who can’t figure out how to verify while the kids start to use VPNs and stolen IDs to browse 4chan.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:11:09 +0000
Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?
Madness.
I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.
I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.
But people do:
Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:
- Gmail
- Youtube
All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.
I don’t use any of them.
I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.
I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.
I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.
But people should be free to do what they want.
I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.
Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.
But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.
Prohibitions always do.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:10:15 +0000
But the idea here is to keep kids safe!
No: the idea is to assign identity to every user and try to monitor and control the internet though corporate means.
That’s the only reason we’re talking seriously about the laws that government and capital are trying to pass.
That lobbying money is not being spent to protect kids.
The Epstine-class oligarchs doing this don’t give a damn about your children’s safety let alone some useless counter productive methods of ensuring it.
I don’t trust the government with totalitarian power nor the companies they would employ to run their age-gate for them, nor the companies currently running social media.
They are the ones running the algorithms that are pushing propaganda at your kids right now.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:08:39 +0000
You think it’s a coincidence these laws are being proposed all over the world all at once?
Nope.
Giant companies run by surveillance capitalists are spending billions of dollars on lobbying governments all over the world.
The reasons for this lobbying are nefarious.
The bans will entrench existing companies ensuring no small company is able to compete. These massive entrenched companies will be able to afford the identity checking and compliance costs, tiny start ups not so much.
You can see why Facebook lobby so hard in favour of these laws. If their app WhatsApp is defined as the only group messenger allowed for kids by law, that is very nice for them.
Perhaps compliance is actually cheap and easy and small companies can afford it?
Certainly not if they are trying to compete in terms of privacy. They have to turn over their user ID data to a monopolist vetting company by law.
At best: we give the government the power to impose massive costs on any company they decided to add to a list of companies that count as social media. Impose costs and force them to hand over their user data to Palantir and the like.
Even if you trust the current lot of idiots in power to not abuse this whole-internet global tracking data, that is quite a totalitarian system to hand over to the really bad guys when they get elected next time.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:05:15 +0000
Can’t we just have age-proving tokens that prove age not ID?
Nope.
If such tokens exist I’d be pretty tempted to sell them to teenagers myself, and I’m not even trying to get the teenagers into bed.
If the age-proof methods prove who you are, they are dystopian surveillance systems and an advertising corporation’s dream.
If they do not prove who you are, they are sellable on the black markets in exchange for whatever teenagers have that grown ups want.
There is no way you can identify children in order to treat their accounts differently without creating a massive database of all internet users which is an identity-theft honey-pot, and is already leading to constant leaks of user data from terrible companies.
Those companies promising they can do the impossible and age-gate the internet are the very ones profiting from abuse and internet surveillance already.
They are the ones feeding your kids sexist racist right wing propaganda and depression from their algorithms then using the money to bribe politicians to entrench their position.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:04:52 +0000
Not to mention that banning under 18s means identifying every user: A government ID required to access the internet.
How about if I’m posting in a chat for an environmental protest group, or an anti-capitalist group, or against genocide, or in a queer support group in a country with laws against homosexuality? Should they have my Government ID attached as proof of age?
An age-gate is asking for an internet licence and a single unified monitored ID across the whole internet. It’s dystopian surveillance-state authoritarianism. It is not desirable, even if it were possible, which it isn’t given black markets in stolen ID etc.
Status at - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:59:07 +0000
What is “social media”?
What do you actually want to ban?
Does Github count?
Does an anorexia-support forum count?
Does a queer-support forum count?
Does the schools own homework-submission system count?
Does Whatsapp, which the kids use to talk to family and to bully each other?
How about Telegram that the kids use to talk to their drug dealers?
How is it different?
Are we really saying nobody under 18 can watch youtube, and expecting that to make life better for those kids rather than worse?
How are you going to define ‘social media’ such that you’ll ban the harm you think you see without also banning any chance of support for a person looking to learn to program, or cope with their abusive parents, or seek advice about being anorexic or queer?
Is it really a good idea to attach a label to every child account for all the websites they visit? You want the kids to all have a big “Child” tag on them as they wonder the net? Might that not increase rather than decrease their vulnerability?
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:01:58 +0000
I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.
AIs say false things for the same reason you do.
At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn’t know the answer to a question, I would guess.
Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture - Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:59:20 +0000
This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta.
Pluralistic: AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit (11 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:11:59 +0000
"If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go
fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of
delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to
tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot
itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole"
‘How On Earth Do You Justify That?’ Laura Kuenssberg’s Selective Empathy – Media Lens - Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:50:50 +0000
"Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official
Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North
Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the
propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their
suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral
outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part
of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western
geostrategic interests.---
‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose
democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as
Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the
US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the
present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western
media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser
kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their …
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down - Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:57:19 +0000
"Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth.”"
phase two is where they tighten the thumb screws a little to see if anyone leaves. probably involves adverts.
Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse - Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:37:16 +0000
"there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just...
share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no
algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years
studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you
should understand what's happening. It's the internet I was promised in
1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American
journalism to get here."
‘Operation Epic Fury’ – Anatomy Of A War Of Aggression – Media Lens - Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:56:42 +0000
Pure, mendacious propaganda on prime-time BBC TV.
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.