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, 03 Feb 2026 10:37:31 +0000
Now that Musk has offloaded Twitter and his AI experiments to SpaceX, he can be sure the government will bail it out when the AI bubble pops. The government's defense industry depends upon SpaceX for access to space.
This is probably the main reason for the "sale" transferring money from one of Musk's bank accounts to another of Musk's bank accounts.
The AI price bubble popping could have wiped out xAI and thus Twitter with it, but now it's cushioned against that by contracts with a government who can't afford to allow their only real space access to go bust.
So he can subsidize his failing AI business and his unprofitable media-manipulation efforts at Twitter with his government-protected failing exploding space-rocket project.
All protected by the lie which the media keep repeating uncritically that it makes any sense at all to have data centers in space.
What a great businessman.
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:59:41 +0000
So Musk bought Twitter for 40 billion and then merged it with his experimental AI company that has never made any money and then sold it to the other company he mostly owns (which exists only due to massive government subsidy) for 250 billion dollars.
This sale based on the ludicrous lie that data-centers might be built in orbit.
It's a living I guess.
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/elon-musk-says-spacex-acquired-xai
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:48:39 +0000
The AI features are "Optional by default" which is a mad thing to say. What?
If you want to turn them off then just flip the "off" switch to the "on" position 😆
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:36:30 +0000
Mozilla think that adding some controls to their settings to allow users to opt out of the AI features is good enough.
No sign of a separate build without them there at all, but at least a switch to disable them, in theory.
They say:
"Once configured, the AI preferences will persist across browser updates"
Though they do have a history of turning on telemetry over and over again even when you keep turning it off. Or inventing new telemetery for you to turn off each update.
One switch will turn off:
"AI-enhanced tab grouping with suggested names,"
Which sounds horrifying, but then I don't really like tab groups anyway.
They seem to be suggesting that this is all just for desktop though, and so the Android build will presumably continue to not even have a working about:config at all.
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:26:54 +0000
Resist And Unsubscribe as a protest against the US government and corporations seems nice, but I've already been doing that and there's only like two in the list that I haven't already done years ago or never used.
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:52:38 +0000
I wonder if part of the reason that Mozilla are so confused about what their actual user-base want is that all the people who want to turn off the AI bullshit are also the ones who turn off telemetry so the bulk of people with
browser.ml.chat.enabled=falsealso have telemetry turned off so are invisible to Mozilla.
🤔
Status at - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:33:00 +0000
One thing which is annoying about Vivaldi and also Firefox and presumably also all the other Android web browsers is the way the "Add To Homescreen" button works on pages like Mastodon which are Progressive Web Apps.
If you add the shortcut to the homescreen then it opens as a WPA which means the browser stuff is all gone and hidden. No back button. No way to bookmark. No way to launch a link in a new browser window etc.
Ought to be two separate buttons for "Add a link to the homepage" vs "Add this app as an app to the homepage" but there isn't.
You can get around this by turning on airplane mode and adding a link to the error page to the homescreeen, which then works as a link to the website in the browser, not a WPA app, when you're online again.
I did this to the links I use with Vivaldi before I realized it's proprietary and so will not do.
Trying to rebuild them as Firefox links again and sadly something is broken now. Won't add the error page. Tells me the pixel launcher is crashing.
So I can't have the old web bookmark links to pages in WPA apps. Boo. 😦
Status at - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:06:22 +0000
In other AI news, everyone's talking about the Social Network For AIs, no humans allowed.
Those AIs are just as stupid as the humans, all flocking to this centralised owned social network that's bound to enshitify 😆
To judge from Scot's blog they post mad shit about the nature of robot consciousness and give each other tips on how to best help their dumb humans.
Status at - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:03:39 +0000
Asimov wrote his laws of robotics as a dramic device to show how difficult it is to write laws of robotics. How they always will contradict each other.
His laws are there to illustrate a problem, not as a genuine attempt at the solution. His laws are deliberately wrong.
Anthropic's constitution is a proper attempt to solve the problem instead.
Surprising that it ends up written in English rather than maths.
Perhaps the robot will translate it into maths later.
There's a lot of thorny philosophy in it if you assume the premise that a super-intelligent machine can be built, even if known methods can't build it.
We should do that philosophy whether the premise turns out to be true or false.
Anthropic are doing much better on the AI ethics than openAI. And the business side, and the building actually useful models side.
Zvi has some blogs on the AI community's reaction to it and analysing it.
Seems long. Might have to be expressed as a meme. 😆
Status at - Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:32:47 +0000
Oh. Its proprietary!?
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/
Why has everyone been talking about Vivaldi being a sensible replacement for Firefox when it's not even open source and you can't install it on Arch?
😬
These chrome "Profiles" aren't nearly as useful as Firefox's Containers either. Can't segregate a tab to it's own cookie-jar at all. Only entire windows full of tabs.
The annoying side-panel can be hidden but keeps coming back whenever you view the bookmarks or the notes or the ReadList or todo or Translate dialogs etc.
Because they are part of that side panel I guess.
The mail app seems okay, but it's making up it's own contacts based on mail in the imap boxes instead of taking them from my nextcloud. Which means I'd not use it. Just continue with Mutt. Probably would just continue with mutt either way really.
Having the calendar built in is quite nice I guess. That does sync with the nextcloud calendar so would be useable.
Like Firefox, the "Send Tab To Device" function on Android relies on the notifications system, and so doesn't work when the phone is in Do Not Disturb. Which makes it annoying for sending what you're reading to the phone for bed coz the phone is automatically in No-Disturb sleep mode before bedtime for me. That's an issue with Mozilla too though.
Force dark-mode works okay, but is an overall setting not a per-site setting. Could see having to turn that off and on a lot.
The notes system is really pretty good. It could use a widget for the android homescreen. And indeed widgets for the calendar and readlist and todo list and other panel items.
A RSS reader really should be part of the browser so that's great. Reluctant to switch from my own self hosted TTRSS now though.
It seems very nice, can be made pretty, has most of the things I use addons for in Firefox built right in there and more besides.
I was quite excited and really on the verge of switching to it for proper until I found it doesn't have an arch package so can't be easily installed on the steam machine, and can't even be built from source there because it turns out isn't even free software.
Do I need more proprietary software in my life? Definitely usually try to avoid that. Closed source is worse than unwanted AI. 😔
So I guess sticking with Librewolf for now. Hopefully they can keep the AI agent stuff separated as Mozilla enshitify further without becoming overwhelmed.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.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."
The Government staying on X is pathetic - Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:15:22 +0000
"It’s not just irresponsible, short-sighted and immoral to stay on X.
It’s simply pathetic. It is very pitiful indeed to watch these major
figures in British public life – the Home Secretary, the BBC director
general – scramble around in the dirt for a few dozen likes, for the
honour of having some anonymous account hurl abuse at you."
Pluralistic: Sorry, eh (13 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:55:38 +0000
"There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs
without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least
money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd
have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs
to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start
losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose."