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 - Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:11:58 +0000
Been doing some augmented-reality fighting. Boxing matches against virtual robots in my studio. Getting breathless and working up a sweat.
Seems early in development. If it's not improved somewhat it'll get boring too quickly to actually get fit with.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:58:18 +0000
Look maybe we should just compromise and stay half way between summer time and winter time all the time?
The world has 30 minute timezones. It's not all whole-hours.
This is ridiculous.
Tonight we skip an hour, and there will only be 23 hours tomorrow.
The answer to the question "How many hours between 8pm and 4am" will always need the response "That depends, what country on what day in what year" but we could at least make it standard from now on at least.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:37:25 +0000
RE: https://boing.world/@pre/116308531551670843
I do wonder how screwed up a system would get if you just booted to tty running opencode connected to a local model and asked it to explore the machine and install a desktop.
Don't think we are that far away from trying that and it working.
Not well, but better than when they viciously exploit and trick and bamboozle the users like they do now.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:24:32 +0000
RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116308252323044128
🤨
The year of the Linux laptop agent?
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:00:44 +0000
Battery drain on GrapheneOS here the last couple of days has definitely been worse than stock Google Android.
Battery-monitor says Molly is the main culprit.
Apparently Molly, the Signal client, keeps an open connection to the Signal server.
You can't just have the app check every 10 minutes if it has to ring like a phone upon call request. You need actually persistent connection.
On Google's android, google's play-servers do some kind of kung-fu to keep that modem mostly asleep despite this persistence.
Without Play Services, that don't happen.
But, there is a thing in F-Droid called "Sun up".
That does a similar thing I guess? Called "unified push". It uses Mozilla's servers instead of Google's. And does so anonymously apparently, but who knows for sure really? Not me.
End to end encryption means worst you'd be leaking is timing data really.
So install Sun Up from F-Droid and change Molly's settings / notifications / delivery-method to "Unified Push"
We will need a MollyServer too apparently as a bridge from Signal to Unified-Push at Mozilla.
All the cool kids are using molly.adminforge.de - there's the QR code you need at the site there. Maybe molly.notify.dykes.ca or some other one is better? I dunno. Can always use a different one if yours goes away.
We will find out over the next few days if that actually makes any difference to battery consumption.
Might save more if you have lots of other things also using open connections that can use unifed-push too. Emails and Matrix or whatever. Mux all those connections into one.
I don't do those things on my phone though, so it's just Molly, so we'll see.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:50:14 +0000
The industry is failing people, the companies that should be helping them are deliberately exploiting tricking and bamboozling them.
They can't even switch to a free project which wouldn't do that as much, because they don't know it exists. If they did, they think that they can't understand their current computer so anything new is going to just be even more confusing and worse.
And it might even be that in many cases. Certainly is on phones.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:50:05 +0000
Mum wants to upgrade the phone package, but doesn't realize she had a password or an account to log in with. Doesn't know that logging into the website is how you do that. Does at least know the name of the phone company.
And when we to log in and password reset, the large-font size she has set so she can actually read anything has screwed up every page there.
Half the buttons are hidden. The page can't be pinched to zoom out.
It's trying to trick us into an 18 month contract instead of just more data. She has no idea how much 100Gb is.
The actual accept-and-pay-button is unclickable because its mostly off the screen because the increased actually-readable-for-her font size. We can't really be sure if it's a confirm-what-you-asked-for button or this agree-to-upselling proposal on the top of the screen.
We give up and do it on my phone which I'm old enough to have to squint to see but don't up the font size usually yet.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:49:50 +0000
Signal is on my dads phone but he doesn't know it's on his phone and I can't find it on his phone. I'm stumped and confused. Play store says it's installed, but can't find it anywhere.
Apparently you can hide apps in Samsung's Android? No idea how to do so. Certainly nobody has done so on purpose. On finding the list of hidden apps I find unhiding them didn't even work.
Apparently you have to scroll down to a hidden 'done' button.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:49:41 +0000
One machine decided literally today when booting that it's bit-defender key was invalidated and refused to boot.
I thought bit-defender was a password manager? No idea why the machine has decided secure boot changed and it needed this key which nobody has ever heard of, even me a computer professional.
I think maybe Bit Defender is a boot-disk encryption system not a password manager after all?
It suggests checking with your Microsoft account to get the key. Nobody thinks they have a microsoft account, even though they do. Nobody knows any passwords for them.
Password reset, sure, but nobody knows their email password either. They never use email.
Google once lied to them that their password was wrong, and made them change it. But banned them from changing it to any old one that they actually know. It must be a new one they don't know. They wrote some down, but probably these are old ones and there's several different ones written down.
We get through all that with recovery methods for email address, luckily one phone was still logged in to read a reset email.
This bit defender key is attached to the account and I have to hand-type a 32 digit number from one screen to another.
My god.
If you only have one computer, then fuck you I guess.
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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.