Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent
Kurtzgesagt video on these flies.
Maybe it's time to get a screen for my front window.
Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent
In Colombia, the parasites were caught expanding into endangered wild mountain tapirs.Beth Mole (Ars Technica)
Watch This Documentary About 'Star Trek: Phase II' and See What Could've Been
A fascinating look back at the potential 'Star Trek' sequel TV show includes some incredible imaginings of what the new USS 'Enterprise' may have looked like.
The existence of Star Trek: Phase II—the plans for a Star Trek continuation series in the mid-1970s that eventually gave way to Star Trek: The Motion Picture—has been known for a very long time at this point. We’ve seen concept art, we’ve seen story ideas, and we’ve seen it for long enough to see how those nuggets have gone on to influence the Star Trek that we would go on to get for another 50 years. And yet, there’s still plenty to enjoy in this new documentary about the bumpy road Star Trek almost made on the journey home back to our screens.
Deploying Nextcloud on AWS ECS with Pulumi
i am not a devops engineer. i appreciate any critique or correction.
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.
- A Pulumi account. This is for creating a Personal Access Token that is required when provisioning the AWS resources.
- Create a non-root AWS IAM User called
pulumi-user. - Create an IAM User Group called
pulumi-group - Add the
pulumi-userto thepulumi-groupUser Group. - Attach the
IAMFullAccesspolicy topulumi-group. TheIAMFullAccessallows your IAM User to add the remaining required IAM policies to the IAM User Group using the automation script later. - Create an access key for your non-root IAM User.
- On your Pulumi account, go to Personal access tokens and create a token.
- Also create a password for the Aurora Database. You can use a password generator.
- Clone this repository either to your GitLab or GitHub.
- 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.
- Store the credentials from steps 6-8 as
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN, andPOSTGRES_PASSWORD. These will be used as environment variables by the deployment script. - On AWS Console, go to EC2 > Load Balancers. The
DNS nameis 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 themain.go,.gitlab-ci.yml, or theci.ymlfile upon doing agit push.
Onmain.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)
- Install Go, AWS CLI, and Pulumi.
- Follow steps 1-8 above.
- 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 {}- 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"- 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 upDeprovisioning
pulumi destroy --yesLocal Testing
The Pulumi.aws-go-dev.yaml file contains a code block to use with Localstack for local testing.
Features
- Subscription-free application - Nextcloud is a free and open-source cloud storage and file-sharing platform.
- Serverless management - using Fargate and Aurora Serverless reduces infrastructure management.
- Reduced cost - can be scaled and as highly available as an AWS EKS cluster, but with cost lower per-hour.
- Go coding language - a popular language for cloud-native applications, eliminating syntax barriers for engineers.
Diagramme
GitHub - joevizcara/pulumi-aws
Contribute to joevizcara/pulumi-aws development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Everyone is free to pick their poison, but I have to ask...why? What is the target audience here?
This is a massively overkill architecture IMHO. Not to talk about the fact you now need 3 managed services (fargate, s3 and aurora at least) for a single self hosted tool, and that is being generous (not counting cloudwatch, ALBs, etc.).
- Why do you need security groups to allow egress anywhere (or, at all)?
- I would pin the image to a digest, rather than using latest.
- what is the average monthly cost for this infra for you?
Oh yeah, I am aware.
Mostly here I would question the idea to have multi-AZ redundancy and using a manage service for DB (which indeed is expensive). All of this when a 5$ VPS could host the same (maybe still using s3 for storage) and accept the few hours downtime in the rare event your VPS explodes and you need to restore it from a backup.
So from my PoV this is absolutely overkill but I concede that it depends a lot on the requirements. I can't ever imagine having requirements so tight that need such infra to run (in fact, I think not even most businesses have these requirements, I have written on the topic at loudwhisper.me/blog/hating-clo…) for my personal stuff...
As far as long we say about serverless solutions, they can be great and helpful (I can say that from both SysOps and DevOps perspective that work on many projects), but I don't think they should be used in homelab form, as they do not provide that much customisations, and homelabs are the place where we want to experiment and have some fun, not just deploy something in a way that will "just work".
Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025
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.)
What Are Your Thoughts On Tolstoy's Thoughts On Truth And Free Will? (Part Two)
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"
Police officer dies after shooting near US's CDC headquarters
Police officer dies after shooting near US's CDC headquarters
The shooting took place near the headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Cachella Smith (BBC News)
same d.rose officer who choked a handcuffed man, who was already forcibly thrown to the ground while complying?
Another officer, Rose, then appears to choke Marrow, who is heard making choking sounds and mouthing, “I can’t breathe!” before going limp.
globalnews.ca/news/4201311/des…
Georgia cop fired after video shows him choking ex-NFL player during arrest
The video shows the officer choking former NFL player Desmond Marrow, who is heard making choking sounds and mouthing "I can't breathe" before going limp.rahulkalvapalleglobal (Global News)
What Are Your Thoughts On Tolstoy's Thoughts On Truth And Free Will? (Part Two)
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"
Alberta government will provide free legal support to Anti-Canada separatists
rabble.ca/politics/canadian-po…
Alberta government lawyer to provide support to separatists in court - rabble.ca
The province argues a separatist proposed referendum question should be allowed to be on a petition without a court review.David J. Climenhaga (rabble)
Midnitte
in reply to Powderhorn • • •Seems fitting
marsza
in reply to Powderhorn • • •