Dalliance

Projects

Here’s the stuff I’ve made that I’m most proud of.

“Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny”
Interactive VR Sci-Fi Story

“Tentacles: After The End”
30 minute cartoon

“Word Cloud Tarot”
Tarot Deck And Weekly Video Readings

“Handsome Jack’s Showband”
My punk & rock covers band

“Bookshelf”
An album about my favourite books

“Do Dream Sheep Bleat?”
Pocketbook Novella

“YES! The Conspiracy really exists
And furthermore it’s all your fault”
Mini-book rant

Here’s my latest posts to the free fediverse, some rambling, some ranting, mostly just commenting on stuff I’ve read lately. Some of it gets syndicated to Twitter but mostly not. The best of it reaches my monthly digest email.

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 18:07:46 +0000

Ugh. Fucking Ubuntu is complaining that a Firefox Snap needs some kind of attention?

Fuck this Snap bollocks then. Didn't ask for that. Don't want it. Don't want to deal with whyever it's now asking for attention.

Why do they keep doing this stuff to me?

Now I gotta figure out what a Snap is and how to uninstall one so I can install Firefox properly like Mozilla intended....

> sudo snap disable firefox
> sudo umount /var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell
> sudo snap remove --purge firefox

Download firefox tar, untar into ~/src/

sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s ~/src/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Right. Now I at leas have real firefox instead of stupid Snap version that distracts me with bullshit when it wants to upgrade.

But it's no longer in the start-menus etc.

sudo cp /usr/share/applications/audacity.desktop /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
sudo vi /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop

Loads of changes there to make it a Firefox launch descriptor isntead of an Audacity one.

Fucking snap.

I tell you, I'm gonna just snap one of these days the way they keep shifting to new package managers under me.

Should probably just wipe ubuntu completely.

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 13:16:26 +0000

Was nice to find that in these tablets they didn't come pre-installed with un-removable Facebook and TikTok apps or whatever.

Really the only thing I felt like I had to remove was the Youtube app.

But that'll depend on what dirty money your tablet-manufacturer has taken I suppose.

Amazing what you can get for barely over 100 quid these days.

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 12:54:42 +0000

Spent pretty much all weekend installing/configuring new computers for the family.

Remove bullshit mal-ware apps, install nice free ones, set up folder-syncs, generally make the OS for the Windows and Android tables tolerable and less exploitative.

Most controversially removing the Youtube app, and denying The Cloud by using SyncThing.

Here's a blog with notes for myself if I have to do it again. Or indeed for anyone looking to make their machine be owned by them instead of megacorp.

#android #windows #install #configure

https://dalliance.net/vPre2/install2023

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 11:31:08 +0000

Seems like it's impossible to turn that update-auto-reboot off.

Best I can do is set "active hours" so that it thinks it's "active" during the night-time and apparently won't auto-reboot while I'm in bed at least.

Hopefully if it tries to do it while I'm awake there's some kind of cancel popup that hopefully I'll notice if I'm the middle of a 30 hour render that can't continue after interruption.

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 11:18:32 +0000

And you can put the search-box back in the task-bar as many times as you like I'll still immediately remove it while that's an option you wankers.

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 11:17:11 +0000

Gee, thanks for rebooting in the middle of the night and ending my 30 hour batch-job before it finished Microsoft. It's that kind of love that makes me know you care.

Ugh.

/me starts it again 🙁

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 15:18:50 +0000

Setting up this new Acer laptop for my mum...

Oh, nice, it comes with Firefox already installed...

Why can't firefox find ublock addon?

What? This is some weird damaged firefox they've installed!?

Uninstall firefox, re-install firefox from Mozilla themselves.

Now ublock *can* be found.

🤨 🤔

Oh dear. Don't trust machines that come with Firefox pre-installed. Uninstall it and make a clean one.

:sigh:

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 00:25:09 +0000

Twenty Six years #southpark has been doing southpark. Amazing that they're still brilliant. That contrast between the crude text and the astute political subtext is always top notch.

Half my life they've been turning it in, on time and on point, over and over again. Amazing.

First four of S26 at once was more laughs than the rest of TV so far this year combined.

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:14:37 +0000

The 360 degree 3-D version of that marxist VR cartoon is finished and available:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKb513O97E

#vr #animation #aliens #matchoftheday #lineker #sport #government #ukpol

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:28:55 +0000

12 hours remaining of the Webm encoding. Jesus it's slow. Not gonna finish till lunch-time.

🤔

Hope there's job-work I can do from Windows. Should be okay. Mostly just a terminal to a cloud server.

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 21:19:03 +0000

The 360 render is complete, but to have it at full 4096^2 resolution it needs to be stitched together with wemb encoding.

Wemb VP9 is some kind of miracle how small it can make the files, but my god is it CPU heavy!

That seven minute film will take about 13 hours to stitch and encode on my monster machine.

An mp4 it can do in about an hour. But an mp4 of that size won't play in a Quest headset: Needs to be webm.

So I reckon it'll finish about ten minutes past ten. Which is ten minutes after I'm supposed to have re-booted back into Linux and started work.

Sorry I was late, rending my topical marxist VR cartoon meant I couldn't log in on time.

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 19:16:35 +0000

@ajroach42

^^^^ made a new one of these. Want that for your TV thing too? Same drop-box? If so, what was that again?

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 18:10:46 +0000

Here it is folks, my newest animation in which the aliens discover a planet where a sports commentator was silenced for calling out a fascist government that was persecuting refugees.

https://dalliance.network/w/fNs7xjYzq7bpXE4yor2wFn

Y'all can boost this one, even if it feels a bit late to the party now.

#lineker #matchOfTheDay #bbc #sports #ukpol #aliens #animation #fascism

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 20:51:30 +0000

Canada talking about a link-tax, where social media companies have to pay when their users link to news companies.

Imagine it. You make a facebook post "Hey everyone, this news about Facebook having to pay a link-tax is great! Check it out here:"

Facebook: Your post contains a link to a news organization. You account will be charged 0.1p for every time your friends click the link. To end the charges, delete your post.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meta-block-news-liberal-online-bill-1.6776485

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 10:34:24 +0000

Annoyed that I didn't get the weekend project finished at the weekend and now I have to do proper day-job work instead before i can finish it tomorrow. Grr.

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 23:23:18 +0000

#matchoftheday #ukpol #fascism

Watched a bit of the silent playing. Disappointingly the crowd aren't chanting anti-fascist messages. Can't really tell what they're shouting. They seem pleased when the ball goes into the gap there.

Does seem lacking without any voice-over. Weird times.

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 11:05:41 +0000

Just wondering why my package with a new kettle didn't turn up yesterday, leaving me to boil water in a saucepan again today like a caveman or something.

"Unfortunately, Hermes ran into an issue when attempting your delivery. They will try again. "

Oh. Hermes. Course. It's nice that they employ mostly ghosts. Good for the ghost community to get some work. They aren't very good at delivering things though.

#hermes #delivery

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 12:49:38 +0000

#matchoftheday #ukpol #fascism

Even 5 live has pulled all it's football coverage too now.

Hilarious.

The Tories have managed to make Football so politically charged that it can't be broadcast 😆

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 22:57:36 +0000

#matchoftheday #ukpol #fascism

I'm hearing they're going to show the match but without any commentary.

Crowd noises only.

Fingers crossed that the crowd are shouting in unison

🎵 The Tories Fascists 🎵,
🎵 The Tories are clearly Fascists 🎵

So they have to turn the crowd down too and it'll just be silence and zen and men kicking a ball about and taking the knee.

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:57:37 +0000

#matchoftheday #ukpol #fascism

They should just cancel the football show entirely and do a documentary about the methods of fascism and how governments often scape-goat minorities in order to divert public attention, provoke fear and unite their base against an imagined enemy. Often even causing a problem like drowning immigrants in order to profit from blaming the immigrants for the governments lack of investment in the wealth and health of the country and it's workers.

#matchoftheday #ukpol #fascism

Click Here For More...

Bookmarks

A list of the last few things I’ve enjoyed reading/watching or sometimes bookmarked to read later. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here or follow the little robot on the fediverse that toots them out as I bookmark them.

On the Crisis at Silicon Valley Bank | Don't Worry About the Vase

TheZvi on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse etc. Long! Detailed. Seems about right though. The risk of moral hazard is high, the banking system is all wrong.

Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365 - YouTube

Sam Harris on Lex Fridman's show.

GPT-4 Developer Livestream - YouTube

OpenAI's livestream #video introducing #AI system #chatgpt4

The Drums Of War With China Are Beating Much Louder Now

Washington continues to push for war with China: "Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let's have a look at some of the most significant recent developments."

SVB Banking Collapse and the Chaos in Congress: What You Need to Know - YouTube

Chris Martenson was the guy who first taught me what money is, in about 2008 or maybe the crash before that. I forget. There are so many. Here he chats about the latest bank crash any why it's inevitable they must all go bust one day because of the nature of using fractional reserve bank debt for money.

I believe chatbots understand part of what they say. Let me explain. - YouTube

To understand whether a trillion parameter machine understands a thing we have to understand what we mean by understanding. Does GPT understand that sentence? In what sense? - Sabine does a good job of explaining that here so that you can understand it too.

Chokepoint Capitalism with Cory Doctorow - FACTUALLY Podcast - YouTube

Adam Conover interviewing Cory Doctorow about Chokepoint Capitalism for 90 minutes.

I Studied Car Chase Data. This is Insane. - YouTube

VSauce on Car-chases. They are not good and kill innocents. The only winning move is not to play.

The only reason we have a ‘small boat crisis’ is that the Tories manufactured it to suit its news agenda

Let me be clear then. There need be no small boat crisis. It could be solved by rapid, easy to work out and simple policy changes. So let usstop pretending that Tory manufactured crises are real. They are not. They are its news agenda. But people suffer as a result. That is how callous they are. And this is only the start.

Fascist Judges - Craig Murray

On jury-nullification / "perverse verdicts", and the right of a defendant to explain his motive. I love jury nullification and wish everyone understood it. Craig describes a case where on public interest ground the jury ignored the judge insisting they should convict a secrets-leaker: "The judge was furious. He could not actually send the jurors to prison for disobeying his direct instruction to convict, but he banned them from future jury service – which they probably weren’t too sad about."

How WIRED Will Use Generative AI Tools | WIRED

Wired Magazine still exists, and they have a policy on GTP and chat AI now which amounts to: We will avoid using it. Hurrah.

Kelly Bets On Civilization - by Scott Alexander

Scott responds to the other Scott: Yes, betting on tech is good, but don't bet all your civilisational-stack. Use the kelly criterion! No all in!

The Memex MethodWhen your commonplace book is a public database

Cory doctorow tells why he blogs and how it's useful "I have endless running text-files from the 1980s and 1990s in which I jotted down notes to myself. These are better than my actual notebooks in that they are searchable and I don’t have to decipher my handwriting, but I can’t really say that they generate much value for me as a writer. I couldn’t tell you the last time I referred to them. They are inert, more like logfiles than project-notes."

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Why am I not terrified of AI?

Scott Aaronson is not terrified of the coming AI. He thinks it might be nice just because it's hard to be complicated and intelligent and understand the world and also be uncaring for things in it, and because he doesn't want to bully a baby AI. Don't really find any of the reasoning here convincing at all.

This farce is now a national embarrassment | RobinMcAlpine.org

Robin Calpine on the SNP election: "Where to start in my attempt just to spell out how pathetic things have become? I think I’ll kick off by asking how it can possibly be the case that the election of a new First Minster is being wholly run by the husband of the previous leader, a man who is subject to a recently-escalated police inquiry into fraud who is expected to be interviewed under caution imminently?"

Pluralistic: Solving the Moderator’s Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"Facebook, Twitter and other walled gardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high switching costs to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls. Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades"

159 - We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky - YouTube

Eliezer Yudkowsky is gloomy because he thinks the world is ending soon. Not coz of ChatGPT of course, but the proper actually general AI that we will build without proper safeguarding. We have no idea *how* to safeguard in fact, and have an economic system set up to push companies and nations into a race to build it anyway. The AI does not hate you, but it does not love you either and it has use for the atoms you are made of.