The tech, surveillance and private prison providers arming Donald Trump’s massive expansion and weaponization of immigration enforcement are running a victory lap after reporting their latest financial results.

Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

”Well, as usual, I’ve been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers,” said Alex Karp, the Palantir chief executive, in an investor call earlier this week. Then he crowed about the company’s “extraordinary numbers” and his “enormous pride” in its success.

Private prison company executives, during their respective calls, could barely contain their excitement, flagging to investors opportunities for “unprecedented growth” in the realm of immigration detention.

• This episode was directed by Johnathan Frakes, the actor who portrayed Thomas Riker in “Second Chances” and “Defiant”

• Frakes also plays the director of the fictional television show, “The Lost Frontier” that exists within the re-creation room simulation.

• Obviously “The Lost Frontier” is a pastiche of TOS

• The title, “The Lost Frontier” is a reference to ”the final frontier,” mentioned in the introductory monologue spoken by Captain Kirk during the opening sequence of every episode.

• The lighting aboard the *USS Adventure” is heavy on the greens and purples, mimicking the lighting of TOS.

• Some of the music cues are lifted directly from TOS.

• Just as TOS had Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as its main cast trio, the only protagonists we see on “The Lost Frontier” are the captain, the first officer, and the doctor.

• The plot of the episode, involves the Agonyan empire stealing the brain cells of the Adventures’ human crew, which is similar to the plot of “Spock’s Brain” where aliens stole Spock’s brain. Additionally, being robbed of their brain cells afflicts the characters with melancholia, a condition that seems to remove their joie de vivre; similar to the passive Kirk lacking any drive or motivation in “The Enemy Within”.

• The episode’s opening sequence has been replaced with the sequence for “The Lost Frontier”, which is also a send-up of TOS’s opening, including its own version of the captain’s monologue.

• The Agonyan Zipnop is played by Kira Guloien, who previously played the Edosian bartender in “Wedding Bell Blues”.

• ”Now, the device we’re going to be testing is called the…re-creation room?” In “The Practical Joker”, M’Ress pronounces it *”recreation room** as in used for recreational activities.

• ”Holodeck, for short.” In “The Practical Joker”, they call it the ”rec room,” even in the signage, which is even shorter, and derived from the thing’s apparently official name.

• The holodeck was first seen in the TNG series premiere, “Encounter at Farpoint”.

• La’An asks of the re-creation room is based on battle simulators; we presumably saw a battle simulator in the Disco episode, “Lethe”, when the episode opened with Captain Lorca and Ash Tyler running a simulated combat against holographic Klingons, and a certain segment of the viewers decided to be real normal about a holodeck existing before TNG.

• La’An claims that battle simulators are usually on starbases due to the massive energy and computing requirements, but I think we can agree that the USS Discovery could have been one of those implied exceptions, seeing as Lorca likely just yelled at the admiralty that he’s trying to win a war until they agreed to install one on his ship.

• In “Unexpected” we saw that the Xyrillians had holographic simulators that impressed Trip, even aboard a ship significantly smaller than the NX-01, and it is implied that the technology would work aboard the Klingon battle-cruiser in the episode as well.

• ”It’s the kind of thing I’d do all the time when I was a test pilot.” Pike loves bringing up that he used to be a test pilot. He’s mentioned it in “Light and Shadows”, and “Among the Lotus Eaters”, and confirmed that he was one in “Hegemony”.

• La’An explains to Scotty that she wants her program to be inspired by the stories of Amelia Moon, a fictional detective. Captain Picard’s own holodeck adventures also cast him in the role of a fictional detective, Dixon hill. Specifically in: “The Big Goodbye”, “Manhunt”, “Clues”, and “Star Trek: First Contact”. And, of course, Data takes on the role of Sherlock Holmes in “Elementary, Dear Data”.

• La’An says it was the captain of the ship who rescued her from the Gorn breeding planet that introduced her to the character of Amelia Moon; we learned in “Strange New Worlds” that it was the USS Martin Luthor King Jr. that rescued her.

• To populate the re-creation room -- and give the principle actors something to do in this episode - Scotty needed to use the high resolution scans of individuals from the transporter’s pattern buffer. In “Our Man, Bashir”, the characters in Doctor Bashir’s spy adventure holosuite program have their likeness replaced by those of the senior staff after Eddington and Odo need to upload their transporter patterns into the station’s computers. And, in “A Fistful of Datas”, all the characters in Worf and Alexander’s old west program are overwritten to have Data’s face and skintone.

• Uh oh! La’An committed the mistake Geordi made in “Elementary, Dear Data” by requesting the computer ”create a new mystery that [La’An] will find challenging to solve.” Geordi prompted the computer to, ”Create an adversary capable of defeating Data/”

• The re-creation room is a re-creation of the holodeck as seen on TNG, with black walls lined with a yellow grid. When not active, the rec room seen on TAS was a large, empty, grey room.

• ”I can practically smell the ocean and the cigarettes.” La’An implies that the re-creation room doesn’t include scents in its simulation. In “The Big Goodbye”, Picard was very impressed with the newly upgraded holodeck’s verisimilitude, including smells.

• in “Unexpected”, Trip claimed he could smell the ocean in the Xyrillian holographic simulator.

• In “Encounter at Farpoint” Data explains to Riker that the holodeck functions by using light and forcefields in conjunction with the replicators to actually physically manifest some of the scenery, such as trees. Here, Scotty says everything is down with holograms and tractor beams.

• ”As my ancestor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would write, ‘The game is a afoot.’” It was implied that Spock was a descendant of Doyle in “Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country” when he attributed another of Sherlock Holmes’ quotes to his ancestor, but this confirmation that’s the case. Assuming we’re to believe a holographic re-creation of Spock created by the computer to foil La’An.

• We’re introduced to the dramatis personae of La’An’s re-creation room adventure:

• Joni Gloss, who has Uhura’s likeness

• TK Bellows, who has Pike’s likeness

• Bellows is the creator of “The Last Frontier. His soft spoken mannerisms and womanizing might have been inspired by Gene Roddenberry, though his appearance looks to be based on Isaac Asimov, and his willingness to threaten people with a gun could have been taken from the writer of the TOS episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”. The alcoholism might have been lifted from all science fiction writers. Except Harlan Ellison.

• Sunny Lupino, who has Number One’s likeness

• Sunny is a former actor turned producer who we’ll learn was largely responsible for keeping “The Last Frontier” afloat, at her own personal expense, much like Lucille Ball did for TOS. Her name is almost certainly inspired by Ida Lupino, who was also an actor who became a producer later in life. Sunny’s might also have been inspired by Jessica Tandy, who was a model until appearing in “The Birds”. Sunny claims, ”Until I convinced Alfred to put me in ‘The Crows’ I was just another pair of lips.”

• Adelaide Shaw, who has Chapel’s likeness

• Adelaide plays the first officer on “The Last Frontier” just as Majel Barrett played Number One in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage”. Jess Bush gets to use her actual accent to play the character.

• Maxwell Saint, who has James Kirk’s likeness, which raises the question of how long they keep the high rise transporter scans of individuals.

• Saint is the captain on “The Last Frontier”, and Paul Wesley is leaning very heavily into a William Shatner impersonation, which stands in stark contrast to how he actually plays Kirk.

• Lee Woods, who has Ortegas’ likeness

• Woods portrays the doctor on “The Last Frontier”, like DeForest Kelly, Woods is a fan of the western. Also, DeForest…Lee Woods…get it?

• Anthony McBeau, who has Doctor M’Benga’s likeness

• ”You know I’m an actor, not a doctor, right?” Lee Forest gets to say the inverse of Bones famous recurring line, first used in “The Devil in the Dark”.

• Number One suggested Pike reinstate Ortegas to active duty, which certainly doesn’t render taking Ortegas off active duty in the previous episode moot.

• TK Bellows claims, ”Our fanbase is small, but it's quite passionate.” When it was rumoured that TOS was going to be cancelled after the second season, Gene Roddenberry secretly funded a letter writing campaign that is attributed with saving the show for a third season

• La’An speculates that Lee Woods is the murderer, believing Tony Hart stole a script she wrote and was going to credit someone else, ”Probably a man because that happened all the time back then.” In “Far Beyond the Stars” 1950s science fiction writer Kay Eaton had to use a male pen name and not appear in promotional photos for the magazine she worked for to be able to continue to get work.

• Not being able to end the program is a common trope of holodeck episodes. See: Most holodeck episodes.

• ”You know what’s not realistic? A lady first officer.” Apparently Maxwell Saint agrees with the suits at NBC who rejected the first TOS pilot.

• Pike is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of a re-creation room being a fixture on Starfleet ships. In “An Obal for Charon” Pike claims that he never liked the holographic communication system because it reminded him too much of ghosts.

• Scotty recommends that if re-creation rooms are to be installed in Starfleet ships they should have independent power and processing.

• In “The Practical Joker” the rec room is affected by the same computer virus as the rest of the ship, and in both “Elementary, My Dear Data” and “The Nth Degree”, the ship is able to be controlled to some degree from the holodeck.

• The USS Voyager and the USS Titan-A both have independent power sources, as established in “Parallax” and “No Win Scenario” respectively. The USS Enterprise D did not, a plot point in “Booby Trap” and Voyager eventually has the holodeck integrated into the rest of the ship’s power grid, which is alluded to in “Night”.

• Number One informs Scotty that there are 203 crew on the Enterprise. That number was established in “The Menagerie, Part 1” and remained true for “Brother”, and “All Those Who Wander”, though in “Subscape Rhapsody” Spock implied there were only 200 crew on the ship.

• La’An and Spock seemingly begin a relationship. in “Charlie X” Uhura sings a song about how Spock is a heartbreaker; how many ”female astronuats” will she watch him run through?

• The episode ends with a “The Last Frontier” blooper reel.

• The director’s voice is clearly that of Johnathan Frakes, which, considering Scotty had to use transporter scans for the characters in the program would imply that serving somewhere aboard the Enterprise is a descendant of the NX-01’s Chef.

• Maxwell Saint attempts to perform the Riker maneuver over the captain’s chair, with disastrous results.

• Bonus! Clues that Spock was a re-creation before the actual reveal:

• Scotty shows La’an a pad with the pattern buffer likenesses, and Spock is there, and is the only one of the eight to not have a character in the narrative.

• Spock is in the re-creation room when La’An enters.

• Scotty tells La’An that the holodeck is drawing more processing power than expected, and it’s because it also simulating Spock.

• Saint asks Spock if he was the one to kill Tony and Sunny Lupino

• When he goes to Uhura for advice, Scotty only mentions that La’An is trapped in the re-creation room, not Spock.

i am not a devops engineer. i appreciate any critique or correction.

code: gitlab github

Deploying Nextcloud on AWS ECS with Pulumi

This Pulumi programme deploys a highly-available, cost-effective Nextcloud service on AWS Fargate with a serverless Aurora PostgreSQL database.

Deployment Option 1 (GitOps)

The first few items are high-level instructions only. You can follow the instructions from the hyperlinked web pages. They include the best practices as recommended by the authors.

1. A Pulumi account. This is for creating a Personal Access Token that is required when provisioning the AWS resources.
2. Create a non-root AWS IAM User called pulumi-user.
3. Create an IAM User Group called pulumi-group
4. Add the pulumi-user to the pulumi-group User Group.
5. Attach the IAMFullAccess policy to pulumi-group. The IAMFullAccess allows your IAM User to add the remaining required IAM policies to the IAM User Group using the automation script later.
6. Create an access key for your non-root IAM User.
7. On your Pulumi account, go to Personal access tokens and create a token.
8. Also create a password for the Aurora Database. You can use a password generator.
9. Clone this repository either to your GitLab or GitHub.
10. This works either on GitLab CI/CD or GitHub Actions. On GitLab, go to the cloned repository settings > Settings > Variables. On GitHub, go to the cloned repository settings > Secrets and variables > Actions > Secrets.
11. Store the credentials from steps 6-8 as AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN, and POSTGRES_PASSWORD. These will be used as environment variables by the deployment script.
12. On AWS Console, go to EC2 > Load Balancers. The DNS name is where you access the Nextcloud Web Interface to establish your administrative credentials.

[!NOTE]
The automatic deployment will be triggered if there are changes made on the main.go, .gitlab-ci.yml, or the ci.yml file upon doing a git push.
On main.go, you can adjust the specifications of the resources to be manifested. Notable ones are in lines 327, 328, 571, 572, 602, 603, 640.

Deployment Option 2 (Manual)

1. Install Go, AWS CLI, and Pulumi.
2. Follow steps 1-8 above.
3. Add the required IAM policies to the IAM User Group to allow Pulumi to interact with AWS resources:

printf '%s\n' "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonS3FullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonECS_FullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/ElasticLoadBalancingFullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/CloudWatchEventsFullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2FullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonVPCFullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/SecretsManagerReadWrite" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonElasticFileSystemFullAccess" "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonRDSFullAccess" | xargs -I {} aws iam attach-group-policy --group-name pulumi-group --policy-arn {}

1. Add the environment variables.

export PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN="value" && export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="value" && export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="value" && export POSTGRES_PASSWORD="value"

1. Clone the repository locally and deploy.

mkdir pulumi-aws && \
cd pulumi-aws && \
pulumi new aws-go && \
rm * && \
git clone https://gitlab.com/joevizcara/pulumi-aws.git . && \
pulumi up

Deprovisioning

pulumi destroy --yes

Local Testing

The Pulumi.aws-go-dev.yaml file contains a code block to use with Localstack for local testing.

Features

1. Subscription-free application - Nextcloud is a free and open-source cloud storage and file-sharing platform.
2. Serverless management - using Fargate and Aurora Serverless reduces infrastructure management.
3. Reduced cost - can be scaled and as highly available as an AWS EKS cluster, but with cost lower per-hour.
4. Go coding language - a popular language for cloud-native applications, eliminating syntax barriers for engineers.

Diagramme

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context: reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's Thoughts On Truth And Free Will (Part One): reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

"Every man during his life finds himself in regard to truth in the position of a man walking in the darkness with light thrown before him by the lantern he carries. He does not see what is not yet lighted up by the lantern; he does not see what he has passed which is hidden in the darkness; but at every stage of his journey he sees what is lighted up by the lantern, and he can always choose one side or the other of the road. There are always unseen truths not yet revealed to the man's intellectual vision, and there are other truths outlived, forgotten, and assimilated by him, and there are also certain truths that rise up before the light of his reason and require his recognition. And it is in the recognition or non-recognition of these truths that what we call his freedom is manifested.

All the difficulty and seeming insolubility [impossible to solve] of the question of the freedom of man results from those who tried to solve the question imagining man as stationary in his relation to the truth. Man is certainly not free if we imagine him stationary, and if we forget that the life of a man and of humanity is nothing but a continual movement from darkness into light, from a lower stage of truth to a higher, from a truth more alloyed with errors to a truth more purified from them. Man would not be free if he knew no truth at all, and in the same way he would not be free and would not even have any idea of freedom if the whole truth which was to guide him in life had been revealed once for all to him in all its purity without any admixture of error. But man is not stationary in regard to truth, but every individual man as he passes through life, and humanity as a whole in the same way, is continually learning to know a greater and greater degree of truth, and growing more and more free from error. And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to refuse to recognize them. These, then, are the truths which man is free to recognize or to refuse to recognize.

The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged whither he has no desire to go. Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man's freedom lies in the power of this choice.

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it. Some—the determinists—consider this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it at all. Others—the champions of complete free will—keep their eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom. This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be inevitably forced to carry it out in life. A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be dragged with it. And so it is with man. Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable by man. And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

According to Christ's doctrine, the man who sees the significance of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to the Christain doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has transported his life to the domain in which it is free—the domain if causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession and realization in life of revealed truth. Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance. "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." (Matt. xi. 12.) It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and can be made in our times.

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble themselves about the general external conditions in which they are not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste on those material things to that in which they are free, to the recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end at once of the false organization of life which makes men miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future. And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of development of their conscience. Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with conscience may be established, and through this change of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And it depends upon us to make this effort.

Let each of us only try to understand and accept the Christian truth which in the most varied forms surrounds us on all sides and forces itself upon us; let us only cease from lying and pretending that we do not see this truth or wish to realize it, at least in what it demands from us above all else; only let us accept and boldly profess the truth to which we are called, and we should find at once that hundreds, thousands, millions of men are in the same position as we, that they see the truth as we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in recognizing it, and like us are only waiting for others to recognize it also. Only let men cease to be hypocrites [acting], and they would at once see that this cruel social organization, which holds them in bondage, and is represented to them as something stable, necessary, and ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by the falsehood of hypocrisy, with which we, and others like us, support it. But if this is so, if it is true that it depends on us to break down the existing organization of life, have we the right to destroy it, without knowing clearly what we shall set up in its place? What will become of human society when the existing order of things is at an end?

"What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we are abandoning? "Fear will come upon us—a void, a vast emptiness, freedom—how are we to go forward not knowing whither, how face loss, not seeing hope of gain?..... If Columbus had reasoned thus he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better one—it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no one to get humanity's new dwelling ready for it. The future is even worse than the ocean—there is nothing there—it will be what men and circumstances make it." - Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom Of God Is Within You, Chapter Twelve: "Conclusion—Repent Ye, For The Kingdom Of Heaven Is At Hand"

When Tolstoy speaks of Christianity, he's referring to his more objective, philosophical, non-supernatural interpretation of his translation of the Gospels: The Gospel In Brief. For context: reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

This is a direct continuation of Tolstoy's thoughts on truth and free will part one: reddit.com/r/TolstoysSchoolofL…

"Every man during his life finds himself in regard to truth in the position of a man walking in the darkness with light thrown before him by the lantern he carries. He does not see what is not yet lighted up by the lantern; he does not see what he has passed which is hidden in the darkness; but at every stage of his journey he sees what is lighted up by the lantern, and he can always choose one side or the other of the road. There are always unseen truths not yet revealed to the man's intellectual vision, and there are other truths outlived, forgotten, and assimilated by him, and there are also certain truths that rise up before the light of his reason and require his recognition. And it is in the recognition or non-recognition of these truths that what we call his freedom is manifested.

All the difficulty and seeming insolubility [impossible to solve] of the question of the freedom of man results from those who tried to solve the question imagining man as stationary in his relation to the truth. Man is certainly not free if we imagine him stationary, and if we forget that the life of a man and of humanity is nothing but a continual movement from darkness into light, from a lower stage of truth to a higher, from a truth more alloyed with errors to a truth more purified from them. Man would not be free if he knew no truth at all, and in the same way he would not be free and would not even have any idea of freedom if the whole truth which was to guide him in life had been revealed once for all to him in all its purity without any admixture of error. But man is not stationary in regard to truth, but every individual man as he passes through life, and humanity as a whole in the same way, is continually learning to know a greater and greater degree of truth, and growing more and more free from error. And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to refuse to recognize them. These, then, are the truths which man is free to recognize or to refuse to recognize.

The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged whither he has no desire to go. Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man's freedom lies in the power of this choice.

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it. Some—the determinists—consider this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it at all. Others—the champions of complete free will—keep their eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom. This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be inevitably forced to carry it out in life. A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be dragged with it. And so it is with man. Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable by man. And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

According to Christ's doctrine, the man who sees the significance of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to the Christain doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has transported his life to the domain in which it is free—the domain if causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession and realization in life of revealed truth. Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance. "The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." (Matt. xi. 12.) It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and can be made in our times.

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble themselves about the general external conditions in which they are not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste on those material things to that in which they are free, to the recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end at once of the false organization of life which makes men miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future. And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of development of their conscience. Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with conscience may be established, and through this change of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And it depends upon us to make this effort.

Let each of us only try to understand and accept the Christian truth which in the most varied forms surrounds us on all sides and forces itself upon us; let us only cease from lying and pretending that we do not see this truth or wish to realize it, at least in what it demands from us above all else; only let us accept and boldly profess the truth to which we are called, and we should find at once that hundreds, thousands, millions of men are in the same position as we, that they see the truth as we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in recognizing it, and like us are only waiting for others to recognize it also. Only let men cease to be hypocrites [acting], and they would at once see that this cruel social organization, which holds them in bondage, and is represented to them as something stable, necessary, and ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by the falsehood of hypocrisy, with which we, and others like us, support it. But if this is so, if it is true that it depends on us to break down the existing organization of life, have we the right to destroy it, without knowing clearly what we shall set up in its place? What will become of human society when the existing order of things is at an end?

"What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we are abandoning? "Fear will come upon us—a void, a vast emptiness, freedom—how are we to go forward not knowing whither, how face loss, not seeing hope of gain?..... If Columbus had reasoned thus he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better one—it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no one to get humanity's new dwelling ready for it. The future is even worse than the ocean—there is nothing there—it will be what men and circumstances make it." - Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom Of God Is Within You, Chapter Twelve: "Conclusion—Repent Ye, For The Kingdom Of Heaven Is At Hand"

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50693956

::: spoiler Transcript
A post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying:
courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps:
In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure!
I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. circumstances.run/@davidgerard…

It has a reply by the author saying:
in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: github.com/ProtonMail/WebClien…

given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public
:::

David Gerard

2025-08-02 21:59:56

Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/02/pro… - text
pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250802-… - podcast
youtube.com/watch?v=HDPZbUPUFy… - video

Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source

Proton Mail is famous for its privacy and security. The cool trick they do is that not even Proton can decode your email. That’s because it never exists on their systems as plain text — it’s always…

^{Pivot to AI}