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!
-
Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 22:20:48 +0000
Content warning:ukpol
In my ward the greens seem to have got about a third of the vote vs Labour with the rest. 2:1
Which is a big improvement. 300 or so neighbors to turn.
In the borough we've gone from unanimous Labor to about a third Green. Which is oddly proportional to my ward. Not really sure I understand the actual counting system with the three votes I had or if it's PR or not.
Nationally its awful for Labour but also worse for the country since outside London they lost mostly to the Reform (nee Brexit) party/private-company.
Conservatives seem irrelevant, even Lib Dems more important.
I've been casting doubt upon the idea of an imminent Reform government, saying it'd be unprecedented for Reform to go from one ever elected MP to 400 MPs in a single election. But these elections feel pretty close to that kind of swing.
Starmer says he'll stay on. He has no concept of what government should do other than give tax breaks to businesses to try to get economic growth, and crack down in authoritarian ways with increased surveillance and ID checks and prosecuting protestors.
He doesn't seem to realize that government can just do things, especially after Brexit. It can just pay people to build infrastructure owned by and giving profit to the state. It does not need private investment. Isn't that supposed to be the point of a Labour party?
So things will continue to get worse and Labour will continue to chase Reform policies (and so validate them). So Reform may well win.
There is one hope. Burnham could resign as mayor, a safe-seat MP could resign, and Burnham stands there. Assuming he wins he could then stand for leadership. And then if he wins and then actually does something despite the protest of the right wing of his own party, maybe things could get better.
That's a lot of conditionals. You'd want good odds to place a bet on that.
Or the greens of course. These elections have seen hundreds of new green councilors. The momentum is good. Probably take the council here next time unless that Burnham things happens.
So good for Greens, but better for Reform, and we could do with a Labour party which wasn't failing.
Oh well. Fingers crossed I guess. Few more years till the national ones.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 15:30:32 +0000
In summary then, it is indeed quite like being at school. Half hour lessons on things that probably won't ever actually be useful to know in your particular job of varying levels of interest. Mostly pretty low interest honestly. Bumping into colleagues between lessons.
Learned the names of a couple of tools I might try. One google search would have gotten me those but I guess it's a question of thinking to look for them.
If you can judge the mood of an industry from a random selection of talks from a single conference then the industry is very optimistic that they can make AI write a lot of software.
It seems to think this is likely to mean fewer programmers rather than there being more software meaning more workers.
It wasn't as AI heavy as I thought when I first glanced at the program. Managed to mostly be not-ai I think.
Nobody talking about the ethical implications or suggesting joining a union and only one talk about the environment issue at all, it not really noting how much power the industry is about to take.
Liked having a few meals in amserdam with colleagues I never usually see (mostly remote workers, including me). The boss is pretty good at picking people really.
Get a day or so of holiday now too.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 12:30:27 +0000
A panel. Is the EU over regulated? Can builders build here? Or will all the rules break industry?
The founders on stage start companies based from the start with compliance to regulation as a USP.
But regulators don't seem to understand the tech they regulate.
In survey 80% of companies chose to not enter the market because the laws are onerous. Government can't regulate industry that refuses to operate in their legal zones.
Companies may be spending 30% of their budget on legal compliance!
For my part I think good regulation is helpful but that much of the regulation here is bad, and some of it even malmotivated. Can encourage monopoly. The law is a mess.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 12:01:39 +0000
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and is a api for agents. Storyblok has made their api into an MCP and Bernhard is here to tell us about that from the context of a psychologist.
Storyblok is a Content management system which can now have agents mess with it for you.
MCP standard connects agents to external systems. An mcp server runs to enable that.
Isn't the agent smart enough to use the api?
Well, they need documentation to figure out how anyway, so MCP rolls that in I guess? Avoid filling the context window with api docs.
Overlay specification from openapi let's you describe the api with a json doc.
The agent can query the server to search for commands, get the spec for the one they want, then call it.
"Skills" are troublesome because they gry loaded to dev machine and never updated. MCP stuff downloaded live on demand.
There exist tools to convert a rest apt to MCP but they apparently fail often because the machine ideally wants something different to a rest api.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 09:55:13 +0000
Rowdy want to automate accessibility testing.
We all love accessibility, except those trying to enclose the web for private capital.
Wcag is the standard. Web content accessibility guidelines.
Playwrite is a node testing system and Axe-core is a Playwrite system to test accessibility.
He does a quick demo. Report seems nice. Axe seems like a good system for a11y checks.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 09:29:51 +0000
A man called Confidence thinks, presumably confidently, that the best interface for a ai agent is not a chat window on a website but... Email!
Chat is synchronous, app specific, dies with a tab close.
But agents tasks can be asynchronous.
Email has identity, a wake event when messages arrive, has a way to reply asynchronously, can attach files, and agents can email each other.
Email is already everywhere.
He has a js library to deal with email to agent messages.
He does a demo including buying a domain and setting up his lib to handle email from it. Interestingly, there's still a web chat to it. Ha.
All of which makes sense but. Email? Really? Surely something more secure and encrypted is better? Something with sender signing so random hackers cant email it? I thought this was surely going to be satire.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 08:24:34 +0000
Saravanan talks to us about making greener tech.
Everyone else is burning fuel for ai like mad but Saravan wants to make things greener instead.
3% or so of greenhouse emissions are from IT. More than flying.
Cloud providers claim to be carbon neutral but this is changing with ai centers and often software written for them aren't used most of the time.
Green Software Foundation thinks software can be greener and offers courses and a profiler to tell you the carbon footprint of your code.
We can write for carbon efficiency. Electricity and hardware manufacturing included.
Power usage effectiveness can be calculated. How much is wasted on cooling vs compute, say.
Do your compute when solar is in excess instead of during times the power network is burning oil. Or do it in countries with greener grids.
Support older user hardware. Extend the life of end user devices.
Can't help feeling like these efforts are going to be drowned out by everyone else here burning tokens like there's no tomorrow. Which maybe will ensure there is indeed no tomorrow.
Status at - Fri, 08 May 2026 07:58:05 +0000
Day two, and a much earlier start. Now Kevin Lewis from apify is here to tell us about how http 402, payment required, has been pointless till now but now maybe AI agents will pay when people couldn't.
Giving ai a wallet.
Dollar payments too slow and expensive for agents paying a penny for a page. Days for payment clearance. Kyc means every payer has to be human even.
X402 then instead. Stable coins on blockchain. Programmable , fast settlement. Pay in millionths of a dollar.
Or l402 to pay with bitcoin lightning.
Server sends bill and specifies payment details in 402 reply. Agent making request settles on chain then retries request with payment reciept.
Agents will want to evaluate if its worth the money within budget and etc. Give agents only limited wallet with disposable funds.
There's a mech for paying unpredictable prices. Over pay and refund whatever the excess .
He shows a demo. On how to pay a web scraper to scrape Instagram for you. For a dollar his service will give you 400 scraped profiles.
Paying for questionable services eh?
Not clear why an agent would pay another agent to scrape a website instead of just doing it itself.
No indication of how the agent can be prevented from leaking its private keys to injection attacks.
Status at - Thu, 07 May 2026 15:46:54 +0000
Oh, apparently I broke the thread into two, more here
Status at - Thu, 07 May 2026 15:33:25 +0000
All the talks in sync at 30 minute intervals. This is too short really. They either have to dive in with jargon I don't get to explain in depth, or barely manage to summarize before the time runs out. No time for Q&A at all which leaves you wondering why not just watch it on youtube?
There's a hall full of stands from corporations of varying evilness giving out useless tat with trademarks on it. People go mad for the loot. Seems to make people quite excited to get a pair of socks or a fidget toy. I leave them to it. Don't like talking to salespeople even if you get free socks with trademarks on them. I don't wear logos in general anyway.
The AI bootsterism is strong, but not omnipresent. Plenty of talks on team management or deployment or progress in non-amazon cloud systems or whatever. Even if they can only be quite surface-detail and lacking depth due to shortness.
It's like being in school really. Flowing from lesson to lesson. Mostly being taught things that will be irrelevent or are boring or are unlikely to ever really come up.
Short break before street party now.
-
Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze | The Verge - Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:02:17 +0000
Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.
Nuclear Genocide – The Threat And The Ceasefire – Media Lens - Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:27:59 +0000
"Despite all the madness, horror and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat
provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied
decades of propaganda demonising the Iranian people as ‘animals’,
‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to
tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it
sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is
something to celebrate."
Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge - Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:24:15 +0000
Sam Kriss writing on the coming illiteracy might affect politics. It's long so you know only people who read a bit will get to the end, and they prone to agree: "This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics
assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in
abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without
that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for
state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies
behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy.
For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic,
we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute
domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up
voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of
literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be
unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating
each other in the streets."
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier - Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:47:46 +0000
Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your
car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the
morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and
reorganized your dashboard while you slept.
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.