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 read your link, and you need to retake basic literacy if you believe that satisfies any sort of proof. All it says is “Microsoft totally has a keylogger, this setting disables it.” It does not show any evidence of the claim. It does not link to evidence of that claim.

No one’s arguing that they aren’t gathering typing data. I’m arguing that it isn’t a full-on keylogger siphoning passwords.

Please stop fighting a strawman. I’ve not said anything good about Microsoft here. I’ll insist again that I’m more familiar with their rot than most, given my career.

I did Google, with multiple search terms. Check my last post again. There’s a spoiler with plenty under it. It’s the line in a section all it’s own that says “Did my research, I’m not finding the hard evidence.” Tap to expand the multiple paragraphs not only summarizing my findings but also linking specific examples. If you have some specific issue with what I found, let’s hear it.

I’ll state it again and clearly: Everyone should turn off the feature. But hundreds of sites copy pasting the same article, the headline claiming it’s a keylogger, the same instructions to disable predictive text data collection, and nothing else is not evidence. It’s copy paste tech support slop.

If sites claiming things about how Windows worked were reliable, or repetition meant reality, “sfc /scannow” wouldn’t be a meme in the sysadmin world. 90% of the time it doesn’t help. It’s a specific tool for fixing issues caused by corruption to the OS files, not the cure all it’s touted to be by many sources.

So show me some network traffic analysis. Show me a whitepaper. Show me a security reseacher’s write up. Show me process explorer screenshots showing the file lock for the file where the data is stored. Show me someone testing two default Windows installs in VMs, one with keystrokes entered and one without, and the clear difference in network traffic, file activity, anything.

Anything more than simply saying “trust me bro”.

Because headlines can’t be wrong right? The CrowdStrike outage was totally an issue with Microsoft Update, as originally reported far and wide, and not an issue with an update to CrowdStrike software running at kernel level that mirrored the same issue they caused in Linux deployments a few months earlier. People still don’t get that wrong, not at all.

Look. The ball’s in your court. Again, if it’s so easy, prove it. Stop wasting effort trying to rub my nose in it like I’m a bad dog, and just prove I’m wrong.

My research doesn’t show what you insist is so evident it doesn’t need to be sourced. If it’s as you say, spoonfeed me. Prove it. It’ll be faster, and I’ll gladly edit all my previous comments here to say whatever disparaging thing about myself you desire.

Crow is delicious and I look forward to eating it.

Come. On.

Edit: I’m not normally the kind of person to look up who up/downvoted me, but I spent the better part of an hour trying to find evidence in support of this guy’s claim. Apparently it’s easier to downvote than prove me wrong in such a simple way that they claimed I couldn’t have done a google search or I would have found it.

So let’s fucking go. I’ll extend this “bet” to anyone.

Show me evidence that Microsoft is capturing all (or most) keystrokes, specifically including passwords entered across multiple programs, through the setting for predicitve text and handwriting analysis which can be switched off through the settings menu, it is happening on live/prod/general use releases of Windows, not preview builds, and it does not rely on unlikely edge cases like a user somehow accidentally running Calculator with a debugger attached to the process and then typing passwords into Calculator.

Note: Being able to hijack the service and exploit speculative execution shit like spectre to access other areas in memory doesn’t count. This has to be inteded behavior.

If you can prove that for Windows 7, 10, or 11, I will do just about anything you want as a punishment. Want me to speedrun getting banned across the fediverse? Want me to make a video smearing peanut butter on my junk while singing your praises?

No doxxing myself, no physical harm, permanent body modifications, nothing that would get the cops called, make me ill, or jeapordize my job. Monetary cost can’t be over $20. Thinking more like I’d write that you were right on my ass, make it my profile picture here, and edit every comment I made on here (over 4000 at time of writing) to add praises for you and to point to my shame. That sort of thing.

If you can get the instance admins in on it, I’d fully accept old 4chan rules of deliver or suffer permaban.

Just to cover my ass for Microsoft doing something dumb as hell with Recall, that doesn’t count (see specifications about it having to be connected to this predictive text/handwriting thing), and this offer is only valid for the year of 2026.

I highly reccomend Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, which that wonderful quote is from.

Have you been on them, or is this an arm chair take?

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)

You can find plenty more shit like this just taking a scroll through the settings app/menu. Anything mentioning “predictions”, “suggestions”, “send data to microsoft”, “help us make your experience better”, “automatic personilazation”, “use your data to improve”, “telemetry” and the like is data collection for Microsoft’s sake with little to no direct impact on the function of the OS or other software.

Cool it with the attitude. If it’s so easy to find this evidence, you could have posted links yourself to it instead of whatever the hell you think this is. Public shaming?

There’s plenty of easily proven reasons to hate Microsoft without pulling stuff out of our collective asses. Like the collection of image thumbnails I already mentioned, which as I said was confirmed (as much as analyzing SSL encrypted web traffic can be without breaking the encryption) by traffic analysis.

I have a decade of experience doing tech work in Windows environments. More than half of that time now in systems administration and infrastructure “engineering”. I’m better versed in Microsoft’s bullshit than the average bear, and I’m definitely not trying to argue they’re great.

Proof of this sort of thing can make a career in infosec, so I don’t have any issues believing that people have been digging deep for any evidence of this. If direct evidence is out there, you’re right that it shouldn’t be hard to find.

So now I’ve danced to your tune. I’ve “done my research”.

If this is so damn obvious, please for the love of all that is holy just link me the damn receipts. I promise I can handle whatever hacker writeups, white-papers, etc that you could throw at me. I want to see them. Please don’t blueball me.

So, it’s easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?

There’s plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.

Those are some pretty damn big claims for “trust me bro”.

It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like “Hey, I’ve analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it’s sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn’t generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent.” with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone’s image thumbnails.

Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!

Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don’t want.

Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I’m not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.

I disabled it within the first hour post-install.

Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you’ll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You’ll also get a handful of people here who can’t help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn’t just the fucking worst.

I’m primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone’s college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn’t just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.

I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else’s debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I’ve had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I’m in control of my own updates (although you can’t delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I’ve set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.

But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure “engineer”. I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.

As far as Linux goes, I’m no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I’m the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don’t belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.

But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00’s as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.

I’m out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.

Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn’t possible at all… and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.

But I’ll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that “just works” on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.

I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.

Lol, same. I spend more time writing guard rails, setting up verbose debugging output/logs, figuring out how I can test without blowing up shit, backing up data before, backing up what it’s going to do, and then trying to set up automated confirmation of success or failure than I do coding the purely functional parts.

I’ve run the “person has quit, yeet their access” script I made on people days early more than I should admit. Had to put in a lot of extra checks on that.

If you’re at a place still using VMWare, a tip: if you’re trying to automate shutting down all the VMs for some hardware moves (get list of VMs, send Guest OS shutdown command, wait a certain amount of time, if VM still showing online force shutoff), VSphere will return the VM management devices/servers/whatever they’re called (what vSphere runs on) in the list of VMs, and it will accept Guest OS shutdown commands sent to the thing hosting VM management/vSphere. Halfway through shutting it all down for a move I started getting “cannot reach VSphere” errors. Added an extra hour or two to that weekend project as we had to get into things through some other back end shanigans to finish shutdowns manually.

If you’re good at scripting you might be able to find a spot automating back end stuff for a sysadmin/infrastructure team. Of course, that would be in a sane job market.

I started in IT support with a general tech AA degree (with some extra programming background from a comp sci BS I dropped out of when I realized I could never code 8 hours a day for a living) and started automating the grunt work of tech support and basic access management. Caught the eye of the sysadmin/infra team and they snatched me up. I’ve been learning project management, infra stuff, and deep sysadmin stuff, but I mostly automate everything I possibly can surrounding our duties. Most systems and software have pretty static apis/sdks for automating with them, so I don’t need to stay current with whatever language or fad practice.

Recent projects have been around cleaning up shit in our Active Directory. Easy wins like deleting security groups with no members. Automating checks like once a month checking for any emtpy that haven’t changed in two weeks. Recently got rid of our on-prem exchange email servers, so I whipped up a script to take contact objects from AD, delete any non-functional ones (typo’d domains, domains that were internal to us so there was no need for a contact object), and then to recreate the valid ones in Exchange Online, and finally delete the originals from AD.

It’s not super difficult scripting-wise. And a lot of greybeards could learn scripting, but a lot are content to let new blood do it, which opens opportunities.

Where meme?

Edit: Here’s a quick image for posts like this, enjoy.

Haven’t watched a ton of him, but wendigoon seems to do neat stuff with urban legends.

f4mi doesn’t do long form content, but she does fun dives into niche 90s-00s tech and gaming stuff.

I got my Associates degree (meant to be a two year degree) at 28. Most of my co-workers don’t even have degrees and most of us are making just shy of 6 figure salaries in tech.

I have a friend who didn’t complete their BA (meant to be 3-4 years) until they were 29. They manage the prop department and stage techs for a “big deal” live theater and performance center (that industry is small, so can’t give more specifics than that).

We’re both in our mid-30s, so this wasn’t multiple generations ago or anything.

Farther back, my father has no degree and is an accomplished nuclear engineer. Has held leadership positions on numerous engineering regulatory and oversight groups. Tagged along on a business trip with him a few years ago and every morning at the convention space/hotel breakfast, there were around 10 new people each day coming up and going “Hey, are you [name]? Your work on [governing standard] is great!” or something similar. I knew he was good at what he was doing where he worked, but I hadn’t realized how well he was known in the wider industry.

TL;DR- No, it’s not embarassing. Success comes in many different forms.

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

TL;DR- Drunk and with no experience I lead a small group in pretty big parade.

I once led a small marching band in a parade while incredibly drunk, with a flagpole effectively attached to my cock (yeah, just rest the end against your belt, it’s fine), and with only 45 minutes of training the weekend before. At the largest fife and drum muster in the US. I had no prior experience at anything remotely related. I had only been to one of the corp’s meetings previously. Later that night I kissed my future wife for the first time.

I’m sure there’s some wonderful psychoanalysis take away that I thought of the flag as an extension of my cock.

To this day I have no idea why they didn’t get the actual marching band member boyfriend of one of the members to lead, because apparently I was pretty awful at it. It got some minor news coverage, so there’s a chance a picture exists somewhere.

If I recall correctly they had involvement with the harassment the drove byuu (another emulator dev) to suicide. There was also some supposed harassment of the Duckstation dev, and potentially some license violation when they forked Duckstation to make the “Swanstation” core. Ah, found the weird obsessed wordpress site, and it looks like most of the shit was around a decade ago, so I guess it’s not really even worth mentioning anymore.

I intentionally try to stay away from emulator dev drama. It takes a certain type of person to develop these things and they pretty frequently aren’t in a good headspace and aren’t particularly good at interacting with other people.

Go ahead back to .ml’s China comm. Your blatant attempts to keep people fighting amongst each other instead of doing anything better with their time won’t be missed.

Mmmmm yes daddy billionaire business mogul, feed me more headlines, tell me what to think! Seed and manipulate my entire worldview harder! I love it when you twist my point of view! Twist it harder! Oh, you’ve brought vague state-sponsored talking points to double team me? Yes. Yes! Make me your sloppy anxiety ridden mess daddy! Let me slurp up your scum! Make me forget about how innacurate articles about my field of expertise are while I swallow every other article you give me! Fill me with your news daddy! ❤️

Dropping the shitposting though? (Not that you really deserve it with the blatant patronizing)

There are so many better targets for your effort than people choosing to not be led around by corporate interests through intentionally emotionally charged news.

There are fucking 20 year old studies that show that over exposure to news media causes people to overestimate crime rates to a ridiculous degree, and even more so with violent crime rates. The news has only become significantly more polarizing and emotionally charged in the many years since.

Save your efforts for careful organization and planning locally. Understand that 90% of the news will have no impact on you and those around you and is only meant for shifting public opinions. Not for actually informing. Shut the fuck up online and stop painting a target on your back. Practice fucking OPSEC if you have absolutely any seriousness about this, otherwise admit to yourself that you’re just larping or not going to take any action yourself.

I sure as hell aren’t taking any action that could put the people I care about at risk before shtf. It’s not a judgement or impugnment of your character, it’s just that you should stop being so damn openly judgemental if that’s the case for you.

Most importantly, as I called out in my first fucking sentence of my last comment responding to you, it’s a massive fucking false dichotomy. It is entirely possible to stay informed and up to date on events without fucking wallowing in the nonstop deluge of “sky is falling” headlines.

And even if this black and white dichotomy was in any way valid, your insistence that only “duh libruls” do it is even more absurd. Get outside and meet people. I’m fairly introverted and I still regularly meet and see people from all across the political spectrum multidimensionalhypercompass showing the full variation of news awareness from “What do you mean ICE has built a Guantanamo on US soil for illegal immigrants?” to “I read every headline from 6 different news sources and cross reference each article”. Yes, that means I see fucking MAGATs that are absurdly tapped into the vein of fresh news but somehow still deluding themselves into MAGA. One is a relative of mine unfortunately.