Picture of me, long black hair in a tentacles shirt

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

Blog header image, me silhouetted against an orange/yellow sunset

My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.

Visit at dalliance.net/blog

Or check out the categories index

Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny

A crew of five stand in a green field with a flying saucer behind them next to a planet like earth in the sky.

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

A spread of cards scattered around. Each has a picture, and also a world cloud in the background

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 woman in a blue dress and a red and chrome robot flee from tentacle monsters chasing in the background

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 white pocketbook with the icon of a black and white fat penguin

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 book cover with a starburst, pyramid and eye

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

Pre behind some keyboard

After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.

Bookshelf

dusty old books in a bookshelf plus logo

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

A semi-circular logo and silhouetted crowd of arms

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

Screenshot of a game, made from pictures of plush toys and balloons

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 - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:54:40 +0000

    Hey Netflix, I'm never going to install a mobile phone game from an advert on your header. Never. I never install ANY mobile phone games. They are all trash.

    Fed up with it all. Added block-rules for the headers of the netflix page.

    Now it's just a black empty background.

    This is on you Netflix.


    Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 13:52:55 +0000

    Read "What went wrong with capitalism" by Ruchir Sharma.

    A mildly interesting description of the major events in world an US economics in the last 50 years. Might
    be a fair summary for anyone who didn't live through it or has a poor memory.

    In short he thinks what went wrong was government bailing out failure leading to massive debts and increa
    sed inequality.

    Governments took over all the things instead of letting capitalism sort them out, he reckons, and wheneve
    r a big industry or company fails you just get socialism for the rich and a bail-out from new printed money.

    Easy cheap money, constant bail-outs, government intervention, leading to zombie companies racking up every larger debt to exist, billionaires who can't fail due to government support, and a stock market that's up-only bringing a flood of inefficiently-allocated capital.

    Is he right? I mean, maybe, sort of. But when an industry really can't be allowed to fail, say water supply and waterway management, allowing private capital to extract maximum resources from it isn't the best method to manage it in the first place. No wonder they need bail-outs. Capitalism fails here because capitalism isn't the right solution here. We need publicly owned national services, not robber barons without
    bailouts.

    So, you know, half right. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why capitalism fails, but also we shouldn't even be trying to apply capitalism to every single thing in the first place.


    Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:30:02 +0000

    Oh, interesting. After two days and two nights powered down in the cradle, on the third day it is risen!

    Strange.

    Maybe whatever controls the charging can drain from the battery even when it's at zero until even that bit of battery is also at zero and then that forces the firmware controlling the charging to reset?

    Anyway. It seems to be alive again and now starts charging when put in the cradle properly.

    So I guess it's back!


    Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:44:08 +0000

    Had a nice time in Greenwich park with friends though. That view of the city from the hill there is magnificent. Lovely park, great observatory.


    Status at - Sun, 15 Jun 2025 10:43:34 +0000

    Drove through the Blackwall Tunnel to Greenwich and back to Islington yesterday.

    South of the river it's all 30MPH speed limits and everything feels too fast and scary compared to the sedate and pedestrian-friendly 20MPH limits in the north.

    Since I last went through it, it seems the Blackwall tunnel has added a toll.

    The TFL website for setting up to pay the tolls is absolutely awful. Failed in Librewolf, Failed in Firefox. Failed because VPN. Took me four attempts in three different browsers to get it to take payment card details.

    Demands *no* special characters in the password?!? And doesn't even tell you what the specific problem with the password is, just "doesn't meet the rules above"

    Uses awful validation questions like "mothers maiden name". Bad enough practice to use them at all, but the "memorable date" question restricts to ddmmyy format so you can't even put in a date from outside this century.

    For some reason asks for a PIN and and Password both!? Pointless. Then actually refuses the login form if you supply both!?

    Setting up the auto-payment doesn't seem to have covered the charges added to the registration plate yesterday, so had to do the payment-details entering yet again to deal with yesterday's charges.

    Email validation message contains the link only in the HTML of the email, not the text version, so viewed in Mutt it has no link.

    And this all seems to be separate from the Dartford Crossing charge, which had a less crappy but still pretty crappy signup.

    Good god council programmers suck at web-dev.


    Status at - Sat, 14 Jun 2025 11:55:26 +0000

    Huh, so the American "No Kings Day" is happening on the same day as the Commonwealth's "Kings Official Summer Birthday".

    Strange coincidence.

    I think there should be no kings and no king's birthday celebrations FWIW. Power passed down the genetic line like a mutation is ridiculous, and anyway no power should be concentrated in one person like that in the first place.

    Have a happy holiday, whichever you are celebrating/protesting.


    Status at - Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:50:54 +0000

    I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.

    First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?

    Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.

    So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.

    Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.

    Um. Okay. So?

    Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.

    Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?

    Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?

    Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.

    God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.


    Status at - Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:14:57 +0000

    So farewell then Pinetime Watch 🪦.

    It isn't showing any signs of charging. even after a completely-flat battery reset. Last hope gone.

    Now nobody at all is running my custom software I think, and I have no way to fix the bugs.

    Could replace it, but I'm not really paying any attention to the things it measures anyway. Heartrate is too unreliable to be useful and steps seems likely to be counting my leg-jiggles since I tend to hit 10,000 most days without trying or leaving the flat.

    The software which tracks my time and mood is probably better running on the phone really. Easier to add notes and detail. Can't really input text from a watch. Location data can be added in ways the watch couldn't.

    So back to not wearing a watch at all I think. Who needs it now we all carry pocket watches with internet and telephony.


    Status at - Wed, 11 Jun 2025 18:19:18 +0000

    Down to 37% battery now, and won't charge so probably when the battery is flat that's the end of it's life :(

    Quite sad seeing it count it's last steps.


    Status at - Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:39:04 +0000

    Hummm. My has stopped charging 😦

    Seems like there's voltage across the charger pins, but the watch shows no sign of being attached to it when it's attached.

    Damn. That's annoying. Seems like it happens to some people now and then but nobody on Reddit has proposed a solution.


  • Bookmarks

    Things I have bookmarked lately.
    Sales Pitch: Give Us Your Ad Business or We’ll Sue - Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:15:06 +0000
    musk sues his customers to get them to spend.

    📺 Introducing the Fediverse: a New Era of Social Media - Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:37:30 +0000
    Four minute fedi explainer

    Trump's Relationship With Musk Collapses in Nasty War of Words | TIME - Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:57:44 +0000
    Time sums up the word's first global Forum Admin Spat in it's full glory.

    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."

Subscribe