You don’t have to store them in intune, as far as I know. I’m not a desktop engineer, but I know at my workplace they historically are stored in AD.

Initially connect when the target isn’t home, as a number of speakers make a distinct “startup” noise when a device connects.

After that, bear in mind that most bluetooth speakers have a small delay before they play audio, and this often means that the first second or so of audio will be cut off. Unless you use another app to keep a constant silent noise playing. The silence being sent as audio to play effectively “warms up” the speaker so the cut off portion is during the silence, not the actual noise you want. Some speakers need this silence to be infintessimally quiet static, as they’ll just drop pure silence. Pretty sure there’s an app on F-Droid for this.

You wouldn’t want your friend to only hear part of the chirp after all.

Also, most devices with a screen have a way to display the name of what device is connected. This especially applies to casting to screens. Name your phone something generic for safety.

There have also been a rash recently of newly created accounts making 3-10 posts to comics comms and then bouncing (deleting the account or just not doing anything else).

Last.fm is probably the closest thing functionality-wise to what you’re looking for as far as reccomendations go.

You can “scrobble” or log what you’ve listened to or enjoyed from a metric ton of sources, and reccomendations are based off the user community and tagging. Covers popular to underground and everything in between.

Not sure what the whole “federated” part of this adds to anything.

Anime and Altered Carbon?

You might like Ghost in the Shell. There’s a handful of different movies and timelines, but I think the anime show Stand Alone Complex is a good entry point. For that continuity, after SAC is SAC 2nd Gig, then the movie Solid State Society, and finally the recent Netflix CG show SAC_2045.

Cyberpunk future, although not as gritty as Altered Carbon or Cyberpunk 2077. This trailer gives a good idea of the action scenes, but the show isn’t mainly about that, instead more about the psychological themes. Story follows a cyborg special forces group in the Japanese Government. Lots of side plots about stuff like privacy and being able to trust your senses when hackers can hijack your eyes, what does conciousness and self mean when someone can literally shove their brain in a self sustaining VR box effectively forever, at what point does AI reach personhood, when brains can be fully digitized and be treated as data how do you ensure abscence of tampering, how do you even begin to handle people that opt into a gestalt existence, and more. The idea of self is a core thing repeatedly. Main plot of Stand Alone Complex is some wide reaching thing about corporations and billionaires holding critical medical knowledge hostage from the public and a specific hacker fighting to get the info out.

Speaking of Cyberpunk 2077, go watch Edgerunners if you haven’t yet. The dub is great, but I can’t find that trailer dubbed. If you’re even remotely aware of the videogame or the tabletop you know the kind of thing to expect. Gritty, dark. Starts about a year and a half before the game, ends around half a year before. Holy shit, nothing I could say would do it justice and it’s best to go in blind. Just… be prepared to hurt. There are no happy endings in Night City.

If you’re up for a little less cyberpunk but still heady sci-fi future, give Psycho-Pass a try. Hard to find a good trailer for this one, the dub is fine but I was only able to find a decent subtitled trailer. The world is one of near omnipresent surveillance by “the sybil system” which can analyze a person’s mental state to detect criminal intent before it happens. MC is a fresh graduate who has just started her job as a police detective, and has to adapt quickly to the reality that detective work is no longer true investigation, but mostly using the reports from the system together with using a troop of people flagged as criminals by that system to hunt down the other potential criminals. Of course cracks in the surveillance and the system itself begin to show pretty quickly, even before someone starts fucking with it for fun. First season is the best and works very well as a standalone thing. The movie and other seasons aren’t bad, just not as good.

If you just want some good anime without the cyberpunk elements, Cowboy Bebop is universally considered a classic. Great great stuff. Struggling bounty hunters just trying to make ends meet as their pasts eventually catch up with them through background details episode to episode. Heavy jazz influence and wonderful jazz soundtrack. You’re gonna carry that weight.

If you only pick one, go with Edgerunners, if you pick two, add Bebop. Edgerunners is a short show, I think 12 eps. Bebop is 25 episodes (and a movie technically between I think episode 23 and 24, but it came out years later and isn’t needed for the overall plot).

I don’t get why these lazy one-off text replacement extensions keep making “tech news”. You can do this shit easily with a short userscript, and there are plenty of extensions for practically every browser that let you set your own text replacement settings. No need for individual extensions for each.

• slams -> literally disintegrates the bloodline of
• keyboard -> leopard
• cloud -> butt
• microsoft -> microslop
• 

There’s always plenty of garbage on Steam and itch.io

Lol, Palantir doesn’t care remotely enough to make an excuse like that. They’re openly proud of what they do.

Not feeling any empathy is horrible, but feeling absolutely god awful about things you can’t do shit about isn’t exactly a virtue.

Just like many people already have it.

And there it is. This is a not so thinly veiled post being highly judgemental about people on anti-depressants and the like.

As you’ve identified:

I’m sure that what me caring does to my mental state is far worse than however good is anything it does to anyone else.

So… if it’s not helping anything, and arguably harming yourself, what is the point?

I promise you that it is possible to be aware of these horrible things going on, accepting that you cannot do anything about them, minimizing of the negative impact on your own emotions and mental state… and to be able to move on with your own life and enjoy what there is to enjoy around you. All at once.

That isn’t a “lack of caring”, it sure as hell isn’t fucking ignorance. I honestly take quite a bit of offense at that.

It’s basic acceptance of what you can and cannot change. The relatively recent idea that if you aren’t emotionally distraught about world events then you don’t care is one of the most toxic and damaging to mental health things in recent time.

Some people will call it stoicism, but it’s not even going that far.

This whole idea of “I have to stay aware of all the suffering in the world, and I have to have strong feelings about all of it!” is just “thoughts and prayers” with a whole bunch of extra steps that people often use as justification to look down upon others who don’t stay as up to date, or who don’t get as emotionally invested.

So to answer your question, no. I wouldn’t take pills that work as you describe.

Thankfully, that’s not how anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication fucking work! (Unless you’re on far too high a dose or perhaps on anti-psychotics instead)

Now that’s what I call shitposting!

That gives me vague ideas for a fun short story: The AI “revolution” has occurred, but due to training data issues it’s all optimizing for some random specific boring schlub. Harold from Oklahoma or something.

Had to argue my case to the transit overseer AI about how me getting to work is vital for Harold’s quality of life again. So fucking demeaning.

Harold posted something to social media 15 years ago about having a bad experience at the restaurant chain I worked at. Overseer shut the while chain down and now we’re all on the run from enforcers that want to kidnap and make us personally apologize to him. I worked on the other side of the country.

Trying to get a new car but all that’s on the market are ridiculous scaled up hotwheels the guy liked as a kid, a shitbox he made teenage memories in, or some generic suburbanite thing that lasted him the longest.

New fashion trend: White t-shirt and green plaid boxers are out, jeans and a grey t-shirt are in!

Depends entirely on the implementation. If it’s wired right into the power line for the camera/mic, then it comes on when power goes to that hardware, but without extra engineering you could just pull off the LED and solder over the gap in the trace/wire.

And I have to apologize, I had forgotten that there are already third party companies advertising services to bypass/disable it on the meta glasses. Have to edit my last comment.

The meta glasses supposedly are designed with a bright led on the front that comes on when the camera or microphone is recording.

Edit: I had forgotten when I wrote this that there are companies already offering services where you can send in your meta glasses and they claim they will somehow disable/bypass the LED indicator.

I’m not sure what you think your threat model is here. I’m not happy about it either, but my place of residence isn’t entirely private information already. I’m pretty certain it’s available through multiple public information sources. Cameras being able to see me in that vicinity might help someone determine my daily habits and schedule, but there are many other ways of that as well.

Again, I’m not happy about it, but I feel like you need to ask yourself what risk you’re trying to protect yourself against here.

As another commenter pointed out, any of the amazon based ones are part of amazon sidewalk and record nearby bluetooth and wifi devices. Sidewalk is also partnering with flock, so that data is available to law enforcement and possibly corporations that use flock for security to be able to use for advertisement.

But so is your phone’s location data.

So if you’re trying to protect against this sort of thing, you’d need to be taking much more extreme steps. Different dogs at different times with entirely different outfits and rocks in shoes to make different gaits. Face coverings. Multiple burner phones not tied to your identity, and only taken out of farady bags to use in association with different identities.

And then it still would all tie back to the same house/general vicinity.

There’s no perfect privacy options, so you need to identify your threat model. What are you trying to protect against, how important is it, what are the quantifiable risks of failure, and how inconvenienced are you willing to be to achieve this.

It sucks. I’m not happy about it. But you can’t stop your neighbors from using them. So you’ll need to accept it, or come up with alternatives. Feel like moving to someplace more rural?

It’s always going to be a balance.

Why bother with creative writing drawing more subtle parallels between fantasy and reality that might be more effective in changing hearts and minds, when you can just point at real things and go “bad thing is bad”.

Anyone who already has a clue gets to go “hahaha bad thing bad they’re so right” and people who don’t just get bounced off the show so there’s no chance to get them to think about things.

Got a coworker where his sinuses just built up again or something after a few years and his doctor told him he’d have to have it done again. Best of luck to you.

*Martial Law

It would be lovely if everyone took the time to explain that as nicely as you. Thanks!

It’s not nearly as present in discourse as it used to be, but it wasn’t too long ago that it felt like so many people had internalized the idea that saying “all lives matter” was 100%, no room for nuance, a dogwhistle for racist people who somehow really meant “white lives are the only lives that matter”. Maybe it was for some racist assholes.

I just felt like focusing on any one skin color was limiting. I wasn’t against BLM, I wanted even more!

I have a hard time believing this isn’t a shitpost project.