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
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 - Fri, 23 May 2025 13:59:43 +0000
"How to get the most out of tech while freeing ourselves from the lunatics in Silicon Valley"
Says Ian Dunt in his article on a corporate Substack page linked from his block-chain owned Bluesky account.
He does so without using the words "Fedi" "blog", "decentralize" "open source", "free software", or "mastodon", and while calling Facebook and Instagram "seemingly more benign".
There must be a form of moderate tech disinvestment, which allows us the things we benefit from while removing the things which harm us.
He pleads, admitting
I have no answers for this
Yeah, no kidding.
But he has stopped using Amazon so much and buys more DVDs now, and tries to use a tablet more than a phone!?
Well done I guess.
Status at - Wed, 21 May 2025 21:56:46 +0000
Content warning:"Golden Dome" SASS?
😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service
MAD AS you like.
In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything.
The government will own nothing, and be happy.
States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things.
The idea of Reagan's Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government's biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption.
But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing. 🧑🍳 💋
Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during the hour they were launching the missiles, that's just the free market!
Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same.
Rentierism? In this economy?
🤣
Status at - Wed, 21 May 2025 15:14:42 +0000
Content warning:re: Doctor Who - Interstellar Song Contest
And there it is, the full version of the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest finalist from the planet Grimbald: "Dugga Do"
🤣
Status at - Tue, 20 May 2025 17:37:11 +0000
Content warning:Gaza/Israel, UK response
Finally, with a hundred thousand dead, two thirds of the buildings bombed, all the hospitals and infrastructure destroyed, more than a million people on the verge of starvation, and Israel's leadership even more openly bragging about their intent to ethnically cleanse the area, it's gone on "too long".
Well done Lammy and Starmer. You finally noticed eh?
So trade deal talks are off, and weapons export licenses are... Well. We'll see. "Always Under Review" they say.
And the main reason for the slight and tiny change in emphasis? Mostly Trump. They are following Trump. They feel easier criticizing Israel's genocide now Trump looks easier with it.
Status at - Sun, 18 May 2025 09:15:53 +0000
Content warning:re: Doctor Who - Interstellar Song Contest
So, we have a song-contest blighted by a genocidal unethical corporate sponsor, with the remnants of the wiped-out race threatening a revenge genocide of their own.
Unusually political with the allegory there then.
Great looking scene when the roof was blown open, thousands of people all being sucked off! Looked great, but what a body count?! And the Doctor and his Tardis both sucked off too! He's frozen.
"The Mavity Shell is still open." Lol. Still doing that then.
Susan is here! His granddaughter. Just in visions though, not actually really there. She looks older now. Sixty years on. She's like 80 years old now. "Find me" she says. Not this season though I suspect.
I liked him using the Confetti Cannon to fly though space. Peter Davidson used a cricket ball to bounce off a space ship when he was stranded in outer space. And Peter never froze.
Also a great prat-fall after landing, pointing and gasping and then just toppling.
Silly muppets-aliens song was fab.
Anti-gambling fraud laws prevent calling for help. Brilliant.
Expected that hair to be hiding a set of horns, not that she'd have cut them off.
The Doctor has ice in his heart now, more angry than we've seen Nchuti's Doctor. Trillions gonna die, Belinda dead, Tardis lost. Almost genocidal himself. Certainly vengeful. Timelord victorious.
Belinda is scared too: "If he's angry, this whole world is going to shake", but it ain't a world is it? It's a space station. Much easier to shake 😝
Explosion breaking through the Tardis doors near the end is quite a cliff hanger, but not even actually the end.
Because Mrs Flood is the Rani, finally! Every mystery character has had the fans hoping it's the Rani for years. Like it never being Lupus for the other Doctor: Doctor House. Finally it is Lupus, I mean the Rani.
Not sure I like this bi-generation again though. It's supposed to be rare, but now it feels like it's every time. Still, at least it keeps Miss Flood there as Rani's lackey.
Who actually was the Rani again?
She's from the first McCoy episode: she tries to build a time control device by gathering geniuses from time and blowing up a planet. Pretends to be Mel, the Doctor's companion at the time, to fool McCoy into hhelping. So interesting that her new regeneration looks a little like Belinda. 🤨🤔
I figured Mrs Flood was just Missy, the female Master. But then The Rani was always just a female version of The Master before Transsexual Regeneration was a thing anyway.
Well, just the double finale left then. Exciting.
Status at - Sat, 17 May 2025 20:27:04 +0000
Hummm.
Goto social "profile" page doesn't show boosts. Doesn't appear it can even be configured to do so.
Annoying. Was hoping to be able to write devlogs here and boost them from the @starship account and have 'em show up on the website.
Status at - Sat, 17 May 2025 20:20:20 +0000
Done some more work with the VR animation engine today.
Seems to now be working that I can lay in the path that the character will walk, and then puppet their limbs as they walk it.
Done more work to standardize how all the slapdash episode structure is so now there's also a scripts page that actually lists all the scripts from all the episodes.
Including the latest version of the in-progress one. And I think the next task, maybe tomorrow, is to record some test timing audio tracks for the scenes there so I can start blocking them out. See where there's not enough dialog to cover the distance walked or whatever.
Status at - Fri, 16 May 2025 11:08:14 +0000
I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
Status at - Mon, 12 May 2025 10:28:35 +0000
I see Starmer is once again taking to the national stage to tell everyone that Reform are correct, that Reform have accurately described the source of the problems of British people.
Telling everyone that migrants are a problem, that migrants are causing trouble, that migrants need to be cracked down upon.
And then he somehow thinks this will make people more likely to vote Labour?
It's basically a massive country wide national advertising campaign for Reform.
Well done Labour. When you lose it will be your own fault.
Status at - Sun, 11 May 2025 16:13:09 +0000
Make that 2nd in the entire world at Black Magic Hard Reckless Hell. 🤘
Was looking at my other favourite level "Boomtown". It seems to have only ever even been completed once in Hard Reckless Hell at all ever.
It's certainly very challenging. Barely get through the first minute. Hales and hales of bullets.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.CD / Blur - YouTube - Thu, 22 May 2025 18:44:34 +0000
Captain Disillusion looks at unblurring, inverse fast furry transforms and convolutions.
Thank God for immigrants - by Ian Dunt - Striking 13 - Fri, 16 May 2025 17:56:32 +0000
A third of my friends are immigrants of one kind or another and they are all great. Wish I could deport all those who want to stop immigration. It enriches us. We are better because of immigrants. I am better because of immigrants. Here's Ian Dunt: "Imagine how much poorer the world would be without British
Asians in general. I'm not talking about the subcontinent. I'm not
talking about Britain. I'm talking about British Asians themselves, as a
distinct group, quite apart from their other loyalties or their other
identities. Imagine how much more impoverished we would be, in food and
music and literary life, in social habits and intellectual and political
history. Imagine how poor we would be, the vast riches which would have been taken away from us."
The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI - YouTube - Sun, 11 May 2025 10:54:59 +0000
Some interesting visualizations and good explanation in this video about why training a neural network by gradient descent doesn't get stuck in local minima as you train. We tend to find it hard to visualize a higher dimensional landscape, let alone one with billions of dimensions. What loos like a local minima when mapped into a 3d visualization of a 2d landscape has all sorts of escape routes in the higher dimensions. It has a good visual on the way the landscape mapping can change as a result of changes to the other parameters, creating new "wormholes" as they change. Great video.
Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast - Wed, 07 May 2025 14:42:02 +0000
NYMag has a good essay on using AI in education: "In
January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey
of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used
the chatbot to help with homework assignments." -- I guess all marks have to be in exam conditions with pen on paper in future?
OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry - Mon, 05 May 2025 11:41:05 +0000
"OpenAI currently requires more money and more compute than is reasonable to acquire. Nobody
has ever raised as much as OpenAI needs to, and based on the sheer
amount of difficulty that SoftBank is having in raising the funds to
meet the lower tranche ($10bn) of its commitment, it may simply not be possible for this company to continue."
Sowing and Reaping in Trump’s America - Thu, 01 May 2025 08:16:54 +0000
The instruments of repression, security theater, and white supremacist ideology Trump is employing to create his own patchwork dictatorship in America were embraced and installed by a largely bipartisan consensus of US political leaders happy to exploit popular reaction to increase their own power and enrich the ruling class via imperialism, extractivism, and objectively racialized exploitation.
AI 2027 - Sat, 26 Apr 2025 19:33:14 +0000
"We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like.1 It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes."
How is the media still getting the Gaza murdered paramedics story so wrong? - Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:21:57 +0000
"The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create
the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to
make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the
world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us
from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns
precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth
depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit."
The Next Terrorist Attack - by Timothy Snyder - Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:48:14 +0000
Snyder posits that Trump's administration have weakened terrorism prevention, and would exploit any resulting attack to consolidate power: "Do not give the present regime the benefit of the doubt after it
allows a terrorist attack to take place on American soil. Be skeptical
about its account of who is to blame. Insist that Musk-Trump take
responsibility. And understand that freedom
is the first condition of security. A terrorist attack is no reason to
concede anything to this regime. On the contrary: such a failure by
Musk-Trump would be one more reason, and a very powerful one, to resist
it."
The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian - Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:25:25 +0000
"An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and
without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate,
profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs
have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s
side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources
and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the
last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they
themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy
anyone who gets in their way."