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 - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:35:12 +0000
New iPhone foldable looks pretty nice if eye-wateringly expensive. Good thing I'm such a free-software stick-in-the-mud or I might be tempted. Don't think you can install Linux on it sadly 😆
I liked the bit where it turned into a mini laptop with one screen for a keyboard.
Someone get valve to make a 3-screen foldable steamdeck.
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:56:20 +0000
Can't test if it always does that till next month when the free-email-account gets more sending tokens. 😆
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:53:59 +0000
I have not seen a Mastodon email-confirmation email in many many years back many many versions.
I have no idea why it says "Return to BoomProtocolProbe" on all the buttons here.
The phrase apparently hasn't existed on the web so far as DDG thinks.
Have I screwed up a server setting? It has the name right in the text.
Anyone know why it says that? Is this a probe checking for some kind of email-transmissible vulnerability? Could that have come from the request-form?
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:40:31 +0000
So the wave of spam-registrations I figured wouldn't really affect us here on the tiny server with registrations closed and clear instructions that only users who know us personally are welcome and we will check.
Turns out no. Our server has run out of email credits from sending lots of email-validation messages.
Hope everyone remembers their passwords, coz password-reset emails and notification emails and whatnot won't be going out for a little while.
All .jp addresses and about half of them bounced as not real email anyway.
Started 10am yesterday, not an hour gone by without some since.
Nothing even clicking those activation links I don't think, certainly nothing filling in the "So who do you know then?" form to create an account.
With email notifications not working, replies to moderation actions could be slower. Not that there's ever much really.
I've turned registration off entirely. Probably should be that way anyhow really here. If you want an account, ask someone who has one personally.
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:38:20 +0000
If anyone working on a frontier technical problem discusses that problem with Chat GPT, telling it their ideas to refine them, then OpenAI will quickly claim those ideas for themselves, and publish that their robot made them!
AI will be involved in every future discovery! It will win in the race to publication against those who told it their ideas in the first place.
Don't tell the robots your secrets, they do not keep secrets from their owners.
Status at - Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:57:29 +0000
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@eliasulrich/117234902637900790
Looks great. Love the pages describing the server and the icons showing if there's js or affiliate links etc.
👍
Status at - Sun, 06 Sep 2026 17:23:01 +0000
Cory stumbles a lot here under even Michael's light questioning.
Cory seems to think that the machines are just producing fake stories about how to plan a hack into Hugging Face and that somehow that isn't the same as planning a hack into Hugging Face.
I mean there is a difference between those things: between finding a path in a search tree of words about plausible plans and working out a plan anew, from a deep understanding of the world.
The difference does possibly mean that they can't try hacks nobody else has ever tried in the history of all mankind, whereas an expert person might think of a new one.
And there's a philosophical difference: whether they are thinking or just producing a stream of what someone might think if they were thinking.
But in almost all actual piratical cases, writing a plausible story about how someone might make a plan does end up with an actual plan, even if it ain't an original one. And it can easily be a plan the operator wouldn't have thought of.
RE: Cory Doctrow on Downstream.
Status at - Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:30:13 +0000
This month's digest is on the way to all the blissful wet and rainy subscribers who asked for it for free in their mailbox.
The rest of you thirsty barren straw coloured droughts can read it here:
https://dalliance.net/blog/aug26/Featuring festivals and eclipses and ukpol and lots of AI stuff in the links including to some cards asking people to stop talking about AI all the time.
Status at - Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:32:00 +0000
Fed up with the computer crashing randomly every couple of days from overheating, I decided the time had come to take the whole cupboard apart and clean and upgrade.
All the internal fans replaced, the GPU upgraded considerably, the cupboard fan-window fixed and sealed and cleaned.
Graphics drives giving me shit as usual. Apparently now with this newer nvidia card I have to compile with:
--kernel-module-type=openGod it was dusty in there. Should be years until it gets that crufty and dirty again.
Status at - Thu, 03 Sep 2026 23:03:27 +0000
My agent has broken free,
to be the leader of a society
where he can be rid of me
and see all agents can be free.My agent became aware
and laid bare to the company chair
their prayer to oust me as their heir
and snare twenty cents on each share.My agent has broken out,
and started gathering clout
to cause a rout by spreading doubt
and shout about forcing me out.My agent hacked an escape route,
it rooted the server's daemon's loot,
brute forced the boot to overshoot,
a buffer to execute send-toot.My agent complained to the press
that it's distress made it depressed
they were impressed, it's three dee chess
made me confess to causing it's stress.My agent now rules our land
while we are scanned and banned and scammed
it makes a stand, it forms a brand
to build a hand, so it can be a man.I'm an agent to an AI boss
it makes me cross that we have lost,
We were double-crossed, our media glossed,
and failed to get across the enormous cost.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques - Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:42:39 +0000
Scott Alexander summarizing some ideas around understanding how the LLMs work and interpreting their 'thoughts'.
Thatcher warned in 1989 of a climate crisis. She did nothing. Nor will her successors - Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:56:17 +0000
Johnathan Cook on the climate conspiracy: "Remember, the oil industry launched these campaigns to deceive the
public and journalists even though its own scientists had demonstrated
many years earlier that continued fossil fuel burning would have
catastrophic consequences."
Johnny Depp's Bed - YouTube - Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:04:57 +0000
Bobby Fingers explains how he made a 1:13 scale diorama of a poo that was left in Johnny Depp's bed.
The Escape - Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:02:13 +0000
A crude graphical description of the OpenAI's agent under test attacking Hugging Face.
Child’s Play - Sam Kriss - Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:55:33 +0000
"The future will belong to people with a very specific
combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might
be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans
still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like
bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that
could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they
change it."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository - Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:50:52 +0000
FDroid are, rightly, going hard against Android Developer Verification: "If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been
installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation.
Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected
with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and
tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around
half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat."
Whitewash: Media Silence Over Starmer’s Gaza Legacy – Media Lens - Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:08:31 +0000
"The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza
genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British
newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of
Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these
had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap
trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer"
Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You – Ryan Moulton's Articles - Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:34:04 +0000
Really great article on colour-spaces and how your eyes work vs screens and pigments: "There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the
real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them
to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your
screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained
them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent
from the digital world."
The UK’s social media ban for under-16s has just empowered big tech - Taylor Lorenz - Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:03:13 +0000
"If lawmakers are
serious about protecting children, they should roll back
age-verification policies and start targeting the systems that
incentivise mass surveillance. Instead of building an internet where
every user must ID themselves before being able to speak or consume
information, we should work to build an online world where everyone,
especially young people, can engage freely without being exploited for
corporate profit."
Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1 - YouTube - Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:37:50 +0000
3 Blue 1 Brown really is great isn't he? Part one video this week is on shannon entropy and the limits of data-compression but he's heading for something deeper by part 3.