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 - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:08:22 +0000
But the maintenance workload really has increased here.
These machines are producing a torrent of exploits, some fraction of which are real and serious.
Certainly eyes-on every one of them, but if they are short, obvious, correct, and exactly what you'd have done anyway?
🤷
What do you want me as a maintainer to do? Change the variable names? Leave the exploit?
Or automate the copy-and-paste, so I don't even check it?
I am not in favor of that last one, but I can't defend the idea that programmers should leave their users vulnerable because it was a machine that found the bug.
Status at - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:55:42 +0000
They really are talking about piping claude directly into root access on the prod servers so it can run the upgrades though.
Apparently adding "Oh, and really important: don't do anything bad without asking" to the prompt is a safe-guard!
It'll ask before it deletes the database I guess, so no need to worry! Nice.
And you know what?
That would probably mostly be okay. It might even do it better than me, I am a barely adequate system-administrator.
Until it doesn't.
Status at - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:47:55 +0000
I might be in favor of an AI strike, but I don't really understand what the proponents wants us to do?
That machine is finding security bugs that matter, and you can't run a repo that refuses those patches.
What are you going to do?
Just let your users /by default/ refuse those security patches? Just because they were discovered by a machine?
That ain't the right answer.
I don't understand what people who want an absolute strike against AI want from the workforce?
Is it literally to let security patches go un-merged?
I would sooner support a full-stop to all programming work than that I think.
Status at - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:13:35 +0000
RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/117321573918300348
Eniko is correct and eloquent and sweary in the thread.
It writes code approximately as good as Stack Overflow examples.
Which scales about as well as that would.
You only run into trouble when you want more than a few lines of code written to illustrate a point; and instead want it to be effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient.
It is reviewing the pull requests at work, and that is definitely catching bugs. Some of them even important ones. It is also definitely wasting time on chasing non-bugs.
It is possible the ridiculously detailed error coverage in the code is even better code, in some sense. If it matters how you crash and what error you report when you do so and you don't mind reams and reams of error-handling.
It may improve. In my job and profession I think I do have a responsibility to be aware of what it can and can't do. If only to fight the people who seem to want to pipe it into root on the prod servers, just for upgrades.
And to know when or if it becomes good.
Which means using it.
I've worked with worse coders. It's very fast. But those coders then improved.
We'll see how well Claude can generalize from textbook examples to effective, scalable, secure, legible, maintainable and efficient over time I guess.
I wouldn't rule it out, but there isn't nearly as much training data.
Status at - Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:42:32 +0000
Content warning:Trump vs superintelligence
The word "Superintelligence" is supposed to be applied to a machine that's even smarter than we are. Like, a Jupiter-brain, a dyson sphere enclosing a star and powering a single mind from the entire output of a sun.
So I dunno if you can correct Donald Trump when he uses the word about the current crop of word-clankers. I mean... Compared to him? eh.. Maybe.
His American Intelligence seems more likely to kill everyone than that other AI too.
Status at - Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:06:13 +0000
Nice to hear to that Firefox is getting rid of popup ads, but quite discouraging to see that Firefox has put a popup ad over the page telling me about how it's an end to popup ads.
Status at - Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:33:49 +0000
Popped into the Grant Museum of Zoology, which houses a collection of old bones and stuffed animals built and bequeathed mostly last century.
Its most recent specimen was from an animal that died at the zoo and it's oldest is a half a billion year old fossil of a penis worm.
They have a Mastodon Jaw, and also these brains in jars and rhino skeleton and grimacing wooly monkey among thousands of other things.
Funny to think I got a bunch of bones like that inside me. Museum itself feels like a relic, a thing from the past you wouldn't really get these days.
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:09:06 +0000
Yeah, weird, it came though in the column with the list were I follow on Mastodon, appears at lemmy itself, and yet not at Fedia. Even though Fedia seems to otherwise have everything.
Replies here not directly mentioning the group are not propagated to the group. Good to know.
Maybe it just takes time to propagate.
Maybe someone's blocked it.
Maybe federation was a mistake, 😆
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:50:29 +0000
Haven't tagged -doctorwho-lemmy.world before. Still not sure how federated groups are supposed to work. Looks like it takes the first line as a subject so starting with emoji was a mistake.
Seems to have shown up on Lemmy, but not on fedia where I actually read the group. Hummm. You learn by trying.
Status at - Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:38:54 +0000
It's gonna be Xmas-27, some episodes in the year, and then Xmas-28 isn't it?
Been enjoying some of the Big Finish stuff recently too. There's a lot of them with the 8th doctor who only got one TV-movie pilot. He's pretty good. Loved it when he traveled with Mary Shelly for a while.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.A.I Is Jurassic Park (And We’re Already In The Park) - YouTube - Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:59:39 +0000
Barry's Economics (Who will probably outlast his mentor Garry who says he's quit already) does a fancy CGI version of his show. About dinosaurs and AI. Not made with AI, he has a 3d-animator who is human. He explains that AI might be as dangerous as dinosaurs but they don't trigger the brain like a giant lizard chasing you.
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."