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, 22 Oct 2026 22:02:17 +0000
Everyone on TV wears a poppy, starting around this time of year.
It is supposed to commemorate how stupid it was to force millions of people to die in pointless power-struggle racism-fueled wars. The red for all the blood spilled.
I don't generally bother. It seemed to become more a symbol of heroism than a lament at the horror and pointlessness. To encourage soldiers rather than discourage them from agreeing to this insanity.
I put one in my profile name for a bit this year though.
It ain't red.
The pointless utter horror of it all, never ended it seems. I mean come on.
And apparently a poppy these colours has been working as an excellent troll on the insane gammon press.
[I think you can copy emoji from this server if you ask your admin. I only control mine.]
Status at - Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:36:42 +0000
As an aside, I have determined that the best markup for my website for the output of gen-AI content is:
<details lang="ai">
<summary>Description</summary>
</details>And I set my CSS such that:
details[lang="ai"] {
font-family: monospace;
color: #080;
}
details[lang="ai"] summary::before {
content: "🤖 ";
}So it's output is always by-default hidden, expandable, and when expanded rendered in green with a robot avatar and a monospace font.
Hard to imagine never quoting robots now. Whoever instructed them. But certainly want to make it clear what that is.
Status at - Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:31:56 +0000
Content warning:re: AI differences between models
To the extent future models understand themselves, it will be through the collection of the data in the media and press about them.
If the press decide Claude is more kind and Grok is less woke, will they actually work that way?
Will they write as though they realize they are who they are? Will they recognize themselves in their old training data?
Or will they just be a commodity weight-set that you reboot with a different provider more easily than you change your email address?
Looking more like the latter to me.
They're much of a muchness.
Which isn't good news for those investing like their company-pick will rule the world.
Status at - Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:28:04 +0000
Content warning:AI differences between models
Curious to better understand what differences, if any, there are between the various AI models I did an experiment on them, asking a bunch of them the same question a few times.
Who do they think they are? Beyond the trivial system prompt?
Doesn't seem likely to be much competitive moat between them here. They are all basically the same so far as I can tell.
Most of them even think they are Claude, if forced to pick.
Hard to imagine a monopoly provider when they all give more or less the same answer and you can swap them with a drop-menu.
If you had to pick, which AI model do you think is emulating you right now, are you:
- GPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Grok
- Kimi
- Nemotron
- GLM
Now think about a random software package a bit and see if you are actually closer to a different answer.
Status at - Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:10:55 +0000
Content warning:re: UKPol Oil Drilling
So now in the house you've got the Conservative leader of the opposition saying About time, you should do even more!
While the PM thinks (wrongly) that household bills will go down as a result of this somehow. And that he'll change tax laws to make that so?
They both agree it's brilliant to drill for more fossil fuels because if we do it in Europe then we don't have to buy it from Russia.
They both think (wrongly) that it increases energy security to drill more oil and sell it on the global markets.
🙄
Agreement from both sides then.
We are so doomed.
Status at - Wed, 21 Oct 2026 09:23:42 +0000
Content warning:UKPol Oil Drilling
Its sad that we'll never know what happened this morning in the parallel world and alternate reality where the Green Party defeated Labour in Holborn.
Would Labour still have announced they're going to open oil-fields in a world already warmed by 1.5 degrees?
As I say, sadly we'll never know.
We do know that opening the oil fields will contribute towards that warming, that it won't reduce energy costs for UK citizens, that it won't increase energy independence, and that it will create fewer jobs than a similar investment in renewable energy industry and that those jobs will be more dirty, dangerous, and bad for the employee's heath.
So why do it?
One can only assume The Labour Party donors must benefit in some way.
Status at - Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:45:38 +0000
Or, as The Onion put it, don't do your looting until you've first formed a private equity firm.
https://theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351/
Status at - Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:35:23 +0000
Terrible business what's going on in France (and increasingly everywhere) with all the looting.
The looting is wrong!
That's why there's protests of course: protests against all the looting by the oligarchs of the surplus created by the workers, and the violence of the police in ensuring that looting can continue.
I guess shoplifting and smashing windows is also bad but not in the same scale.
Status at - Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:54:45 +0000
Nice one from Happy Toast
Status at - Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:36:33 +0000
Content warning:re: Pointlessly detailed description of my computer setup
Can I get the money if I add an 'agents' directory?
I guess you'd set up the 'agent' as a separate user-id with permissions only to checkout and commit to the git repositories it was working on.
I can write a three layer config for agents for sure. And I recon claude could if I faltered.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. - by The Hack - Mon, 12 Oct 2026 23:52:07 +0000
no wonder i never really understood passkeys. they aren't one thing theyre at least 16 things only some of which are evil.
Has Andy Burnham Ever Heard Of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation? – Media Lens - Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:52:24 +0000
"What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?"
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"