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.)