the null-log

On the Malaise of the Dispossessed Millenial

The vastly dispossessed Millennial consumer class sees little hope in the future and thus it turns to high confidence high risk get rich quick schemes such as sports betting and crypto out of sheer desperation and as their hail mary, all stemming from a desire to avert the all-so-imminent economical crash. The reason why the fatigued, exploited, tired Millennial turns to these is because every institution, every father figure, every person who was supposed to tend to them and care after them seems to have rugpulled them out of a future. They feel like they got fucked by the powers that be who left them with nothing but a phone, funko pops and an Onlyfans subscription instead of a house and a family. And thus they go and open up binance every day and look at the price –or their portfolio, or their whatever else, dreading the worst.

One of my biggest gripes with the modern world is how Crypto is used as an speculative asset or an investment, something to be exchanged into fiat, whereas the whole raison d'etre of Cryptocurrency is to be tender itself, something to trade with that will necessarily only obtain value out of how many people believe in it and accept it for goods and services. It will most absolutely be used to that effect in due time by the way, but currently, we’re in the fringe between the old and the new. But the Millennial FOMOs, and desires to get in on the wave.

Do not fret, my children.

The crossing of the great waters is coming. Be patient. Meditate. Do not give into the many distractions why try to sap away your Zen and return to the source…

Securing Turing Pi Kubernetes Cluster With HTTPS

Of course I’m not done yet. I’m a responsible citizen :)

Last time, I told you to encrypt everything or else I was going to eat you. Do you want me to eat you? Do you now? I am going to eat you if you come to me with a silly “this certificate is not valid” warning on your website.

Encryption costs literally 0 thanks to http://letsencrypt.org. You don’t have to pay a CA to get an SSL certificate for your site. Of course, in some cases in the enterprise you will, but as an indie, you literally don’t have to fork a single cent with letsencrypt, or with a self signed certificate. I cannot stress this enough, I need you to learn how to wrangle certificates. It’s not that bad and it pays massive dividends.

If you setup your Turing Pi Raspberry Pi cluster with k3s-ansible you will notice that the traefik ingress you get by default already created a dummy certificate for “ExampleCorp” if you visit your site with https://. Of course, this certificate is malformed, and you will see a google chrome warning if you try to open your site under https. This is referenced in the issue here: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s-ansible/issues/109

Let’s setup traefik on Kubernetes now with cert-manager so it can generate letsencrypt certificates and use them for SSL when people visit your site under HTTPS. For more details about SSL certificates and how SSL works with the CA system, refer to the video I linked above.

1. Install the traefik CRDs with a kubectl apply -f .... This includes the Middleware CRD, which we’ll use to handle HTTP traffic incoming to our cluster.
   • CRDs are additional domain models added to the Kubernetes domain models which allow for new features and definitions. Third parties will offer them as a way to extend what Kubernetes does or to implement their own systems and features with them.
2. Now, install a version of cert-manager compatible for your Kubernetes 1.17 cluster (I picked 1.6.2): kubectl apply -f https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.6.2/cert-manager.yaml. This will create some pods, let it finish.
   • Cert-manager is an extension that talks to ACME certificate services, integrates their resources into Kubernetes and handles their lifecycle so you don’t have to. For example, for us, when this is setup correctly, cert-manager will drop our letsencrypt certificate into a Secret of our choice.

3. Next, create a certmanager ClusterIssuer. Save the following into issuer.yaml, ensure that you have exported the EMAIL and DOMAIN environment variables first, and run cat issuer.yml | envsubst | kubectl apply -f -:

   apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
   kind: ClusterIssuer
   metadata:
     name: letsencrypt-prod
   spec:
     acme:
       email: ${EMAIL}
       server: https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
       privateKeySecretRef:
         name: letsencrypt-prod
       solvers:
       - http01:
           ingress:
             class: traefik
   

4. Next, create the traefik Middleware. Save this as middleware.yaml and run kubectl apply -f middleware.yaml:

   apiVersion: traefik.containo.us/v1alpha1
   kind: Middleware
   metadata:
     name: redirect-https
   spec:
     redirectScheme:
       scheme: https
       permanent: true
   

5. Finally, **reconfigure the smbdxfortunes-ingress traefik ingress you set up last time to allow for HTTPS traffic, adding annotations for certmanager and traefik. You probably want to modify your deploy.yaml from the other time…

   • Pay close attention to the secretName field under tls in the spec: it seems a bit counterintuitive, but the name here will be used to create the secret which will host your letsencrypt certificate over time.

   apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
   kind: Ingress
   metadata:
     name: smbdxfortunes-ingress
     annotations:
       kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik
       cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: letsencrypt-prod
       traefik.ingress.kubernetes.io/router.middlewares: default-redirect-https@kubernetescrd
   spec:
     rules:
     - http:
         paths:
         - path: /
           backend:
             serviceName: smbdxfortunes
             servicePort: 80
     tls:
       - secretName: smbdxfortunes-tls
         hosts:
           - ${DOMAIN}
   

And presto, if done correctly (takes a couple minutes to kick in fully), open https://smbdxfortunes.zapto.org and you should get a nice, beautiful lock symbol next to https on the address bar. Thanks :3

I love you.

Catholic Guilt

Upon colonization, the Spaniards knew that the Indio was useful workforce to keep around, so they chose to teach them Christianity rather than how in North America the Indians were genocided. This created an interesting phenomena: sure, the mestizo occupies the lowest rung in the social order, but at least it’s something. It’s a position. It’s effectively to be given a new lease in life, shitty as it may be. Unfortunately, this complex of Catholic guilt, like a generational trauma, has trickled down the collective unconscious of Latin-American people. Yet another classic example of “Nature or Nurture?”.

I remember when I started working outsourcing with USA companies, a lot of my colleagues would constantly tell me that it was not necessary to be so apologetic. I didn’t even know I was being overtly apologetic, though: I merely continued to display a localized version of my mannerisms and my usual way of conducting. Looking back and being critical of myself (while at the same time trying to be kind towards myself, of course), I see the remnants of this whiplash still present in me then.

A mutation in this is in the Puritan work ethic and morality, which teaches people to be ashamed of themselves and their bodies, to conceive themselves from an inherently sinful point of view rather than just “being themselves”. I am strongly convinced, now that I’ve broadened my horizons, that these forces still resonate in the collective unconscious very strongly.

Mexican Catholicism in particular has this very strong element of flagellation to it, of “oh woe is me because God says so, so I shall crawl all the way to the main temple in town under the scorching sun until my knees bleed”, which is something that I do find interesting, but I believe we owe it to ourselves to also be critical of this: are you displaying any such biases in your daily life?

The upside to this is that it leverages the principle of sacrifice, which is a principle that is sorely lacking in the North American collective unconscious. Good things do come from sacrifice, but maybe drop the silly raceplay-based power dynamic and the “oh woe is me because…”, because those principles don’t hold true.

You know what I’ve learned? That, yes, people are prejudiced, and they’re meanies and a lot of things are going horribly wrong in the world and I will never get the acceptance or approval of some people.

And that’s fine.

You just keep going.

It should never preclude the richness and happiness of your inner world.

As platitudinal and vapid as the fetishization of the modern rugged individualist life is, and as devoid of meaning, absurd and ruthless everything is in life, actually embrace it and do stupid fucking bullshit with it, and sometimes just out of sheer miracle, this will lead you to powerful, great things.

Yes, it feels frustrating to hear the same talking points over and over: to be stoic, to read Seneca’s epistles, to not worry about anything else but your own welfare, to love yourself, to enjoy your solitude, to be “outcome independent”, to just “be patient”; there’s still a problem, that of pervasive, vicious alienation. My shoulders feel heavy and my body still feels sore.

But, listen, those points are actually true, so heed them.

Yes, I know you’re sad that this is not the way you hoped things would go. Receive the warmest of hugs. It’s okay.

I know that things look grim. If all women are being convinced that having children is a bad thing, and if love is over, and if the only women who want me are bad news, I understand why things look so dark. It’s like a massive suicide pact. It’s okay. You’re not the problem.

I feel like somebody may pull a mean prank on me anytime. I feel as if I could die. People ignore you, and they don’t actually care about you. It’s all right. I’m here with you.

The solution is not in moping around. Keep going. Do the next right thing, or just simply do the next thing right (if you don’t know what the next right thing is). Nothing stays the same forever.