as it time itself had paused mid sentence and was asking us to finish it. our late night talk still lingering in the air, half smoke, half memory. it felt like we already knew each other as old friends, though we never shared a past, only a coincidence that learned our names. and by the time we reached my door, the entire district seemed to smile, windows were blinking, streets leaning in to listen. and the absurdity of it all, how many times I wandered around without your address, orbiting you by mistake. it would be unnatural not to fall in love with this moment, because every sound I hear now are translated into our crooked slang, language bending itself just to sound like us. It feels as though my instructions were already written in you, and when you hold me, the world slows it spinning. And I think I like it exactly as it is.

/aug 23

On entend plus le craquement du mot quand il cède et tombe, ni le gémissement final des pendus. Juste l'infernal rotor coupant les choses en deux, coupant le corps, sa syllabe. On retue les morts. Et je tirais aussi le grand rideau sur eux, la couverture des feuillages, sacrifiant à l'oubli. Je ne vois désormais que leur ombre tranchée par la rougeur des toits, engrappée d'oiseaux sales, dévoreurs de boyaux.

Le mot arbre apparait 8 fois au singulier et 13 fois au pluriel dans Ma vie au Village.

#VoyageauLexique

Dans ce deuxième Voyage au Lexique, je continue d’explorer, en me gardant de les exploiter, les mots de Ma vie au village (in Journal de la brousse endormie) dont le nombre d’occurrences est significatif.

Am i right but we all hate trump ??

Hello!!!

Today i didnt ate sweets thats SO SO SO BADD :(((

Yeah i dont remember anything cleary so u had to look what i wrote about that , it was quite boring Its weird fronting tho ;–; I wanna go back but i cant the host doesnt want to he’s verryyy tired

By the way my name’s Ivy!!! ^^ Anyway i hope you guys had a great day i dont intend to make a whole “book” like the other loser Everyone should love PINK 💗💕💐💖💞💞💖💕💝💝🌷

Byee!! :3

In June 2024, Goldman Sachs published a research note that rattled Silicon Valley's most cherished assumptions. The report posed what it called the “$600 billion question”: would the staggering investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure ever generate proportional returns? The note featured analysis from MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who had recently calculated that AI would produce no more than a 0.93 to 1.16 percent increase in US GDP over the next decade, a figure dramatically lower than the techno-utopian projections circulating through investor presentations and conference keynotes. “Much of what we hear from the industry now is exaggeration,” Acemoglu stated plainly. Two months later, he was awarded the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, alongside his MIT colleague Simon Johnson and University of Chicago economist James Robinson, for research on the relationship between political institutions and economic growth.

That gap between what AI is promised to deliver and what it actually does is no longer an abstract concern for economists and technologists. It is reshaping public attitudes toward technology at a speed that should alarm anyone who cares about the long-term relationship between innovation and democratic society. When governments deploy algorithmic systems to deny healthcare coverage or detect welfare fraud, when corporations invest billions in tools that fail 95 percent of the time, and when the public is told repeatedly that superintelligence is just around the corner while chatbots still fabricate legal citations, something fundamental breaks in the social contract around technological progress.

The question is not whether AI is useful. It plainly is, in specific, well-defined applications. The question is what happens when an entire civilisation makes strategic decisions based on capabilities that do not yet exist and may never materialise in the form being sold.

The Great Correction Arrives

By late 2025, the AI industry had entered what Gartner's analysts formally classified as the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Generative AI, which had been perched at the Peak of Inflated Expectations just one year earlier, had slid into the territory where early adopters report performance issues, low return on investment, and a growing sense that the technology's capabilities had been systematically overstated. The positioning reflected difficulties organisations face when attempting to move generative AI from pilot projects to production systems. Integration with existing infrastructure presented technical obstacles, while concerns about data security caused some companies to limit deployment entirely.

The numbers told a damning story. According to MIT's “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025” report, published in July 2025 and based on 52 executive interviews, surveys of 153 leaders, and analysis of 300 public AI deployments, 95 percent of generative AI pilot projects delivered no measurable profit-and-loss impact. American enterprises had spent an estimated $40 billion on artificial intelligence systems in 2024, yet the vast majority saw zero measurable bottom-line returns. Only five percent of integrated systems created significant value.

The study's authors, from MIT's NANDA initiative, identified what they termed the “GenAI Divide”: a widening split between high adoption and low transformation. Companies were enthusiastically purchasing and deploying AI tools, but almost none were achieving the business results that had been promised. “The 95% failure rate for enterprise AI solutions represents the clearest manifestation of the GenAI Divide,” the report stated. The core barrier, the authors concluded, was not infrastructure, regulation, or talent. It was that most generative AI systems “do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time,” making them fundamentally ill-suited for the enterprise environments into which they were being thrust.

This was not an outlier finding. A 2024 NTT DATA analysis concluded that between 70 and 85 percent of generative AI deployment efforts were failing to meet their desired return on investment. The Autodesk State of Design & Make 2025 report found that sentiment toward AI had dropped significantly year over year, with just 69 percent of business leaders saying AI would enhance their industry, representing a 12 percent decline from the previous year. Only 40 percent of leaders said they were approaching or had achieved their AI goals, a 16-point decrease that represented a 29 percent drop. S&P Global data revealed that 42 percent of companies scrapped most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up sharply from 17 percent the year before.

The infrastructure spending, meanwhile, continued accelerating even as returns failed to materialise. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google collectively committed over $250 billion to AI infrastructure during 2025. Amazon alone planned $125 billion in capital expenditure, up from $77 billion in 2024, a 62 percent increase. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon publicly acknowledged that he expected “a lot of capital that was deployed that doesn't deliver returns.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called the environment “kind of an industrial bubble.” Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that “people will overinvest and lose money.”

Trust in Freefall

The gap between AI's promises and its performance is not occurring in a vacuum. It is landing on a public already growing sceptical of the technology industry's claims, and it is accelerating a decline in trust that carries profound implications for democratic governance.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, based on 30-minute online interviews conducted between October and November 2024, revealed a stark picture. Globally, only 49 percent of respondents trusted artificial intelligence as a technology. In the United States, that figure dropped to just 32 percent. Three times as many Americans rejected the growing use of AI (49 percent) as embraced it (17 percent). In the United Kingdom, trust stood at just 36 percent. In Germany, 39 percent. The Chinese public, by contrast, reported 72 percent trust in AI, a 40-point gap that reflects not just different regulatory environments but fundamentally different cultural relationships with technology and state authority.

These figures represent a significant deterioration. A decade ago, 73 percent of Americans trusted technology companies. By 2025, that number had fallen to 63 percent. Technology, which was the most trusted sector in 90 percent of the countries Edelman studies eight years ago, now held that position in only half. The barometer also found that 59 percent of global employees feared job displacement due to automation, and nearly one in two were sceptical of business use of artificial intelligence.

The Pew Research Center's findings painted an even more granular picture of public anxiety. In an April 2025 report examining how the US public and AI experts view artificial intelligence, Pew found that 50 percent of American adults said they were more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37 percent in 2021. More than half (57 percent) rated the societal risks of AI as high, compared with only 25 percent who said the benefits were high. Over half of US adults (53 percent) believed AI did more harm than good in protecting personal privacy, and 53 percent said AI would worsen people's ability to think creatively.

Perhaps most revealing was the chasm between expert optimism and public unease. While 56 percent of AI experts believed AI would have a positive effect on the United States over the next 20 years, only 17 percent of the general public agreed. While 47 percent of experts said they were more excited than concerned, only 11 percent of ordinary citizens felt the same. And despite their divergent levels of optimism, both groups shared a common scepticism about institutional competence: roughly 60 percent of both experts and the public said they lacked confidence that US companies would develop AI responsibly.

The Stanford HAI AI Index 2025 Report reinforced these trends globally. Across 26 nations surveyed by Ipsos, confidence that AI companies protect personal data fell from 50 percent in 2023 to 47 percent in 2024. Fewer people believed AI systems were unbiased and free from discrimination compared to the previous year. While 18 of 26 nations saw an increase in the proportion of people who believed AI products offered more benefits than drawbacks, the optimism was concentrated in countries like China (83 percent), Indonesia (80 percent), and Thailand (77 percent), while the United States (39 percent), Canada (40 percent), and the Netherlands (36 percent) remained deeply sceptical.

When Algorithms Replace Judgement

The erosion of public trust in AI would be concerning enough if it were merely a matter of consumer sentiment. But the stakes become existential when governments and corporations use overestimated AI capabilities to make decisions that fundamentally alter people's lives, and when those decisions carry consequences that cannot be undone.

Consider healthcare. In November 2023, a class action lawsuit was filed against UnitedHealth Group and its subsidiary, alleging that the company illegally used an AI algorithm called nH Predict to deny rehabilitation care to seriously ill elderly patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. The algorithm, developed by a company called Senior Metrics and later acquired by UnitedHealth's Optum subsidiary in 2020, was designed to predict how long patients would need post-acute care. According to the lawsuit, UnitedHealth deployed the algorithm knowing it had a 90 percent error rate on appeals, meaning that nine out of ten times a human reviewed the AI's denial, they overturned it. UnitedHealth also allegedly knew that only 0.2 percent of denied patients would file appeals, making the error rate commercially inconsequential for the insurer despite being medically devastating for patients.

The human cost was documented in court filings. Gene Lokken, a 91-year-old Wisconsin resident named in the lawsuit, fractured his leg and ankle in May 2022. After his doctor approved physical therapy, UnitedHealth paid for only 19 days before the algorithm determined he was safe to go home. His doctors appealed, noting his muscles were “paralysed and weak,” but the insurer denied further coverage. His family paid approximately $150,000 over the following year until he died in July 2023. In February 2025, a federal court allowed the case to proceed, denying UnitedHealth's attempt to dismiss the claims and waiving the exhaustion of administrative remedies requirement, noting that patients faced irreparable harm.

The STAT investigative series “Denied by AI,” which broke the UnitedHealth story, was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting. A US Senate report released in October 2024 found that UnitedHealthcare's prior authorisation denial rate for post-acute care had jumped to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020. The healthcare AI problem extends far beyond a single insurer. ECRI, a patient safety organisation, ranked insufficient governance of artificial intelligence as the number two patient safety threat in 2025, warning that medical errors generated by AI could compromise patient safety through misdiagnoses and inappropriate treatment decisions. Yet only about 16 percent of hospital executives surveyed said they had a systemwide governance policy for AI use and data access.

The pattern repeats across domains where algorithmic systems are deployed to process vulnerable populations. In the Netherlands, the childcare benefits scandal stands as perhaps the most devastating example of what happens when governments trust flawed algorithms with life-altering decisions. The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration deployed a machine learning model to detect welfare fraud that illegally used dual nationality as a risk characteristic. The system falsely accused over 20,000 parents of fraud, resulting in benefits termination and forced repayments. Families were driven into bankruptcy. Children were removed from their homes. Mental health crises proliferated. Seventy percent of those affected had a migration background, and fifty percent were single-person households, mostly mothers. In January 2021, the Dutch government was forced to resign after a parliamentary investigation concluded that the government had violated the foundational principles of the rule of law.

The related SyRI (System Risk Indication) system, which cross-referenced citizens' employment, benefits, and tax data to flag “unlikely citizen profiles,” was deployed exclusively in neighbourhoods with high numbers of low-income households and disproportionately many residents from immigrant backgrounds. In February 2020, the Hague court ordered SyRI's immediate halt, ruling it violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Amnesty International described the system's targeting criteria as “xenophobic machines.” Yet investigations by Lighthouse Reports later confirmed that similar algorithmic surveillance practices continued under slightly adapted systems, even after the ban, with the government having “silently continued to deploy a slightly adapted SyRI in some of the country's most vulnerable neighbourhoods.”

The Stochastic Parrot Problem

Understanding why AI hype is so dangerous requires understanding what these systems actually do, as opposed to what their makers claim they do.

Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington who was included in the inaugural TIME100 AI list of most influential people in artificial intelligence in 2023, co-authored a now-famous paper arguing that large language models are fundamentally “stochastic parrots.” They do not understand language in any meaningful sense. They draw on training data to predict which sequence of tokens is most likely to follow a given prompt. The result is an illusion of comprehension, a pattern-matching exercise that produces outputs resembling intelligent thought without any of the underlying cognition.

In 2025, Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a former Google employee, published “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want.” The book argues that AI hype serves as a mask for Big Tech's drive for profit, with the breathless promotion of AI capabilities benefiting technology companies far more than users or society. “Who benefits from this technology, who is harmed, and what recourse do they have?” Bender and Hanna ask, framing these as the essential questions that the hype deliberately obscures. Library Journal called the book “a thorough, witty, and accessible argument against AI that meets the moment.”

The stochastic parrot problem has real-world consequences that compound the trust deficit. When AI systems fabricate information with perfect confidence, they undermine the epistemic foundations that societies rely on for decision-making. Legal scholar Damien Charlotin, who tracks AI hallucinations in court filings through his database, had documented at least 206 instances of lawyers submitting AI-generated fabricated case citations by mid-2025. Stanford University's RegLab found that even premium legal AI tools hallucinated at alarming rates: Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research produced hallucinated or incorrect information 33 percent of the time, providing accurate responses to only 42 percent of queries. LexisNexis's Lexis+ AI hallucinated 17 percent of the time. A 2025 study published in Nature Machine Intelligence found that large language models cannot reliably distinguish between belief and knowledge, or between opinions and facts, noting that “failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgements and amplify misinformation.”

If the tools marketed as the most reliable in their field fabricate information roughly one-fifth to one-third of the time, what does this mean for the countless lower-stakes applications where AI outputs are accepted without verification?

The AI Washing Economy

The gap between marketing claims and actual capabilities has grown so pronounced that regulators have begun treating AI exaggeration as a form of securities fraud.

In March 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission brought its first “AI washing” enforcement actions, simultaneously charging two investment advisory firms, Delphia and Global Predictions, with making false and misleading statements about their use of AI. Delphia paid $225,000 and Global Predictions paid $175,000 in civil penalties. These firms had not been entirely without AI capabilities, but they had overstated what those systems could do, crossing the line from marketing enthusiasm into regulatory violation.

The enforcement actions escalated rapidly. In January 2025, the SEC charged Presto Automation, a formerly Nasdaq-listed company, in the first AI washing action against a public company. Presto had claimed its AI voice system eliminated the need for human drive-through order-taking at fast food restaurants, but the SEC alleged the vast majority of orders still required human intervention and that the AI speech recognition technology was owned and operated by a third party. In April 2025, the SEC and Department of Justice charged the founder of Nate Inc. with fraudulently raising over $42 million by claiming the company's shopping app used AI to process transactions, when in reality manual workers completed the purchases. The claimed automation rate was above 90 percent; the actual rate was essentially zero.

Securities class actions targeting alleged AI misrepresentations increased by 100 percent between 2023 and 2024. In February 2025, the SEC announced the creation of a dedicated Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit, tasked with combating technology-related misconduct, and flagged AI washing as a top examination priority.

The pattern is instructive. When a technology is overhyped, the incentive to exaggerate capabilities becomes irresistible. Companies that accurately describe their modest AI implementations risk being punished by investors who have been conditioned to expect transformative breakthroughs. The honest actors are penalised while the exaggerators attract capital, creating a market dynamic that systematically rewards deception.

Echoes of Previous Bubbles

The AI hype cycle is not without historical precedent, and the parallels offer both warnings and qualified reassurance.

During the dot-com era, telecommunications companies laid more than 80 million miles of fibre optic cables across the United States, driven by wildly inflated claims about internet traffic growth. Companies like Global Crossing, Level 3, and Qwest raced to build massive networks. The result was catastrophic overcapacity: even four years after the bubble burst, 85 to 95 percent of the fibre laid remained unused, earning the nickname “dark fibre.” The Nasdaq composite rose nearly 400 percent between 1995 and March 2000, then crashed 78 percent by October 2002.

The parallels to today's AI infrastructure buildout are unmistakable. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans for an AI data centre “so large it could cover a significant part of Manhattan.” The Stargate Project aims to develop a $500 billion nationwide network of AI data centres. Goldman Sachs analysts found that hyperscaler companies had taken on $121 billion in debt over the past year, representing a more than 300 percent increase from typical industry debt levels. AI-related stocks had accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns, 80 percent of earnings growth, and 90 percent of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Yet there are important differences. Unlike many dot-com companies that had no revenue, major AI players are generating substantial income. Microsoft's Azure cloud service grew 39 percent year over year to an $86 billion run rate. OpenAI projects $20 billion in annualised revenue. The Nasdaq's forward price-to-earnings ratio was approximately 26 times in November 2023, compared to approximately 60 times at the dot-com peak.

The more useful lesson from the dot-com era is not about whether the bubble will burst, but about what happens to public trust and institutional decision-making in the aftermath. The internet survived the dot-com crash and eventually fulfilled many of its early promises. But the crash destroyed trillions in wealth, wiped out retirement savings, and created a lasting scepticism toward technology claims that took years to overcome. The institutions and individuals who made decisions based on dot-com hype, from pension funds that invested in companies with no path to profitability to governments that restructured services around technologies that did not yet work, bore costs that were never fully recovered.

Algorithmic Bias and the Feedback Loop of Injustice

Perhaps the most consequential long-term risk of the AI hype gap is its intersection with systemic inequality. When policymakers deploy AI systems in criminal justice, welfare administration, and public services based on inflated claims of accuracy and objectivity, the consequences fall disproportionately on communities that are already marginalised.

Predictive policing offers a stark illustration. The Chicago Police Department's “Strategic Subject List,” implemented in 2012 to identify individuals at higher risk of gun violence, disproportionately targeted young Black and Latino men, leading to intensified surveillance and police interactions in those communities. The system created a feedback loop: more police dispatched to certain neighbourhoods resulted in more recorded crime, which the algorithm interpreted as confirmation that those neighbourhoods were indeed high-risk, which led to even more policing. The NAACP has called on state legislators to evaluate and regulate the use of predictive policing, noting mounting evidence that these tools increase racial biases and citing the lack of transparency inherent in proprietary algorithms that do not allow for public scrutiny.

The COMPAS recidivism prediction tool, widely used in US criminal justice, was found to produce biased predictions against Black defendants compared to white defendants, trained on historical data saturated with racial bias. An audit by the LAPD inspector general found “significant inconsistencies” in how officers entered data into a predictive policing programme, further fuelling biased predictions. These are not edge cases or implementation failures. They are the predictable consequences of deploying pattern-recognition systems trained on data that reflects centuries of structural discrimination.

In welfare administration, the pattern is equally troubling. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal demonstrated how algorithmic systems can automate inequality at scale. The municipality of Rotterdam used a discriminatory algorithm to profile residents and “predict” social welfare fraud for three years, disproportionately targeting young single mothers with limited knowledge of Dutch. In the United Kingdom, the Department for Work and Pensions admitted, in documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, to finding bias in an AI tool used to detect fraud in universal credit claims. The tool's initial iteration correctly matched conditions only 35 percent of the time, and by the DWP's own admission, “chronic fatigue was translated into chronic renal failure” and “partially amputation of foot was translated into partially sighted.”

These failures share a common thread. The AI systems were deployed based on claims of objectivity and accuracy that did not withstand scrutiny. Policymakers, influenced by industry hype about AI's capabilities, trusted algorithmic outputs over human judgement, and the people who paid the price were those least equipped to challenge the decisions being made about their lives.

What Sustained Disillusionment Means for Innovation

The long-term consequences of the AI hype gap extend beyond immediate harms to individual victims. They threaten to reshape the relationship between society and technological innovation in ways that could prove difficult to reverse.

First, there is the problem of misallocated resources. The MIT study found that more than half of generative AI budgets were devoted to sales and marketing tools, despite evidence that the best returns came from back-office automation, eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations. When organisations chase the use cases that sound most impressive rather than those most likely to deliver value, they waste capital that could have funded genuinely productive innovation. The study also revealed a striking shadow economy: while only 40 percent of companies had official large language model subscriptions, 90 percent of workers surveyed reported daily use of personal AI tools for job tasks, suggesting that the gap between corporate AI strategy and actual AI utility is even wider than the headline figures suggest.

Second, the trust deficit creates regulatory feedback loops that can stifle beneficial applications. As public concern about AI grows, so does political pressure for restrictive regulation. The 2025 Stanford HAI report found that references to AI in draft legislation across 75 countries increased by 21.3 percent, continuing a ninefold increase since 2016. In the United States, 73.7 percent of local policymakers agreed that AI should be regulated, up from 55.7 percent in 2022. This regulatory momentum is a direct response to the trust deficit, and while some regulation is necessary and overdue, poorly designed rules driven by public fear rather than technical understanding risk constraining beneficial applications alongside harmful ones. Colorado became the first US state to enact legislation addressing algorithmic bias in 2024, with California and New York following with their own targeted measures.

Third, the hype cycle creates a talent and attention problem. When AI is presented as a solution to every conceivable challenge, researchers and engineers are pulled toward fashionable applications rather than areas of genuine need. Acemoglu has argued that “we currently have the wrong direction for AI. We're using it too much for automation and not enough for providing expertise and information to workers.” The hype incentivises building systems that replace human judgement rather than augmenting it, directing talent and investment away from applications that could produce the greatest social benefit.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, the erosion of public trust in AI threatens to become self-reinforcing. Each failed deployment, each exaggerated claim exposed, each algorithmic system found to be biased or inaccurate further deepens public scepticism. Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, has warned about the security and privacy risks of granting AI agents extensive access to sensitive data, describing a future where the “magic genie bot” becomes a nightmare if security and privacy are not prioritised. When public trust in AI erodes, even beneficial and well-designed systems face adoption resistance, creating a vicious cycle where good technology is tainted by association with bad marketing.

Rebuilding on Honest Foundations

The AI hype gap is not merely a marketing problem or an investment risk. It is a structural challenge to the relationship between technological innovation and public trust that has been building for years and is now reaching a critical inflection point.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that the most powerful drivers of AI enthusiasm are trust and information, with hesitation rooted more in unfamiliarity than negative experiences. This finding suggests a path that does not require abandoning AI, but demands abandoning the hype. As people use AI more and experience its ability to help them learn, work, and solve problems, their confidence rises. The obstacle is not the technology itself but the inflated expectations that set users up for disappointment.

Gartner's placement of generative AI in the Trough of Disillusionment is, paradoxically, encouraging. As the firm's analysts note, the trough does not represent failure. It represents the transition from wild experimentation to rigorous engineering, from breathless promises to honest assessment of what works and what does not. The companies and institutions that emerge successfully from this phase will be those that measured their claims against reality rather than against their competitors' marketing materials.

The lesson from previous technology cycles is clear but routinely ignored. The dot-com bubble popped, but the internet did not disappear. What disappeared were the companies and institutions that confused hype with strategy. The same pattern will likely repeat with AI. The technology will mature, find its genuine applications, and deliver real value. But the path from here to there runs through a period of reckoning that demands honesty about what AI can and cannot do, transparency about the limitations of algorithmic decision-making, and accountability for the real harms caused by deploying immature systems in high-stakes contexts.

As Bender and Hanna urge, the starting point must be asking basic but important questions: who benefits, who is harmed, and what recourse do they have? As Acemoglu wrote in his analysis for “Economic Policy” in 2024, “Generative AI has the potential to fundamentally change the process of scientific discovery, research and development, innovation, new product and material testing.” The potential is real. But potential is not performance, and treating it as such has consequences that a $600 billion question only begins to capture.

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References and Sources

1. Acemoglu, D. (2024). “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI.” Economic Policy. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/The%20Simple%20Macroeconomics%20of%20AI.pdf

2. Amnesty International. (2021). “Xenophobic Machines: Dutch Child Benefit Scandal.” Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/10/xenophobic-machines-dutch-child-benefit-scandal/

3. Bender, E. M. & Hanna, A. (2025). The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want. Penguin/HarperCollins.

4. CBS News. (2023). “UnitedHealth uses faulty AI to deny elderly patients medically necessary coverage, lawsuit claims.” Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health-insurance-denials/

5. Challapally, A., Pease, C., Raskar, R. & Chari, P. (2025). “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025.” MIT NANDA Initiative. As reported by Fortune, 18 August 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/

6. Edelman. (2025). “2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.” Retrieved from https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer

7. Edelman. (2025). “Flash Poll: Trust and Artificial Intelligence at a Crossroads.” Retrieved from https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/flash-poll-trust-artifical-intelligence

8. Edelman. (2025). “The AI Trust Imperative: Navigating the Future with Confidence.” Retrieved from https://www.edelman.com/trust/2025/trust-barometer/report-tech-sector

9. Gartner. (2025). “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2025.” Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/hype-cycle-for-artificial-intelligence

10. Goldman Sachs. (2024). “Top of Mind: AI: in a bubble?” Goldman Sachs Research. Retrieved from https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/top-of-mind/ai-in-a-bubble

11. Healthcare Finance News. (2025). “Class action lawsuit against UnitedHealth's AI claim denials advances.” Retrieved from https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/class-action-lawsuit-against-unitedhealths-ai-claim-denials-advances

12. Lighthouse Reports. (2023). “The Algorithm Addiction.” Retrieved from https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/the-algorithm-addiction/

13. Magesh, V., Surani, F., Dahl, M., Suzgun, M., Manning, C. D. & Ho, D. E. (2025). “Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 0:1-27. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12413

14. MIT Technology Review. (2025). “The great AI hype correction of 2025.” Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1129174/the-great-ai-hype-correction-of-2025/

15. NAACP. (2024). “Artificial Intelligence in Predictive Policing Issue Brief.” Retrieved from https://naacp.org/resources/artificial-intelligence-predictive-policing-issue-brief

16. Nature Machine Intelligence. (2025). “Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact.” https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01113-8

17. Novara Media. (2025). “How Labour Is Using Biased AI to Determine Benefit Claims.” Retrieved from https://novaramedia.com/2025/04/15/how-the-labour-party-is-using-biased-ai-to-determine-benefit-claims/

18. NTT DATA. (2024). “Between 70-85% of GenAI deployment efforts are failing to meet their desired ROI.” Retrieved from https://www.nttdata.com/global/en/insights/focus/2024/between-70-85p-of-genai-deployment-efforts-are-failing

19. Pew Research Center. (2025). “How the US Public and AI Experts View Artificial Intelligence.” Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/

20. Radiologybusiness.com. (2025). “'Insufficient governance of AI' is the No. 2 patient safety threat in 2025.” Retrieved from https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/insufficient-governance-ai-no-2-patient-safety-threat-2025

21. SEC. (2024). “SEC Charges Two Investment Advisers with Making False and Misleading Statements About Their Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Press Release 2024-36. Retrieved from https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024-36

22. Stanford HAI. (2025). “The 2025 AI Index Report.” Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved from https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report

23. STAT News. (2023). “UnitedHealth faces class action lawsuit over algorithmic care denials in Medicare Advantage plans.” Retrieved from https://www.statnews.com/2023/11/14/unitedhealth-class-action-lawsuit-algorithm-medicare-advantage/

24. The Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal. Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal

25. Washington Post. (2024). “Big Tech is spending billions on AI. Some on Wall Street see a bubble.” Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/24/ai-bubble-big-tech-stocks-goldman-sachs/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

The Incident

#nsfw #CeCe

We had a satisfying orgasm together in that stairway. CeCe bare without any cover. Me with my clothes in a pile watching her use this moment to reset herself and find center. I knew deep down she was hurting. I knew in this moment this is all she had to help ground her. I chose her long ago before I even knew it. I didn't pity her. I still admired her. Even though the world was far different from how I saw it. I did my best to understand her. What made her tick, why she did things. Why she needed porn. Why she needed to be naked and risk it all. No matter how out of hand this got, I would always love her.

We looked each other in the eyes deeply as we rubbed ourselves to orgasm in the cool stairwell. It was late and the building was still. I wasn't worried about getting caught.

We made it back to the dorms that cold night. I was dressed now. CeCe's naked body still trembling from the stairwell release, her caramel skin chilled but her eyes a bit clearer, the orgasm having reset her just enough to function. I wrapped her in a blanket as soon as we slipped inside our room, the open blinds letting in the faint glow of streetlights and moonlight.

She curled up on the bed, silent at first, but I knew it was coming. She started sobbing quietly. I held her, whispering reassurances about jobs and apartments, our future together. “We'll be okay,” I murmured, stroking her thick thighs. “You're safe now.” She nodded, exhausted, and we drifted into an uneasy sleep, her head on my chest, the weight of her meltdown lingering like a shadow.

But the peace shattered around 4 a.m. A frantic pounding echoed through the hall, followed by shouting. Someone was yelling CeCe's name, over and over, laced with hysteria. I bolted upright, heart slamming, as CeCe stirred beside me, her eyes widening in terror. “Mom?” she whispered fearfully, but before we could react, the door burst open.

Somehow, her mother had sweet-talked, or probably forced, her way past the night security at the building entrance, breaking every rule in a desperate bid to “save” her daughter. Somehow with an extreme show of force and strength her mother had rammed the door open. It all happened so fast.

There she stood in the doorway, wild-eyed and disheveled, coat thrown over pajamas, her face a mask of frantic rage. “CeCe! What you said on the phone! Porn!? Masturbation!? You're coming home now!! This isn't you!”

CeCe scrambled back, clutching the blanket to her chest, but her mom lunged forward, grabbing her arm, trying to drag her out—naked, into the cold hallway, the winter air seeping through the building's drafty corridors. “No! Let go!” CeCe screamed, twisting away, her full breasts heaving as the blanket slipped, exposing her curves to the chaos. I jumped up, yelling for her to stop, but her mom was beyond reason, ranting about sin and family honor, all because of CeCe's raw confession about porn and refusal to conform to traditional marriage. It was a full mental breakdown—her mom clawing at CeCe, sobbing incoherently, the scene drawing neighbors out of their rooms in shock.

Someone down the hall must have called campus police; sirens wailed faintly in the distance, growing louder as officers arrived, pulling her mom off CeCe and restraining her as she thrashed and wailed. “She's ruined! My baby girl's ruined by that filth!” The arrest was swift almost as quickly as her mom had arrived. Trespassing, disorderly conduct, and assault charges were pending. Almost ever door was open with a resident peeking out.

CeCe was left standing there in the hallway, naked and exposed to the cold, her ass and pussy on full display under the fluorescent lights, neighbors gawking before averting their eyes. This was not the exposure she wanted or fantasized about. She was just in shock, curled up in a ball on the cold floor. The winter chill bit into her skin, goosebumps rising on her thighs. Everything was all wrong and she was wide eyed and non-responsive. I was horrified.

I rushed to her side, grabbing her favorite hoodie and a stuffed animal from the room. I slid the hoodie over her naked body and gently placed the stuffed animal in her arms hoping she would reach out and hold it. It just laid there on her arms.. as if it didn't exist. She stared blankly unfocused on anything. She didn't focus on me. She was in some far away place.

The anxiety attack gripped her fully. She collapsed against me, hyperventilating, her body shaking uncontrollably, sobs turning to gasps as the world spun. “Tasha... I can't... breathe...” Campus security escorted us to the health center, where they called for professional counseling right then and there. The therapist on call helped stabilize her with breathing exercises and a mild sedative, but when CeCe started sessions the next day, she never revealed the full truth—nothing about her porn watching, her chronic masturbation, or her naked habits. She framed it as “family stress” and “independence issues,” her brilliant mind compartmentalizing to protect her core self. While it was not the whole truth, it still was the root of the problem. Her porn addiction was her discovering her true self and claiming independence from a toxic and oppressive situation. Porn was her safe space. I wasn't going to take that away from her.

After that night, CeCe cut her mom off completely. She had no desire to call, no desire to visit. She visibly shuddered when I asked if she was going to talk to her mom again.

She changed her number the next week. Then as calls from extended family rolled in, she blocked every family contact. Eventually she deleted all of her social media apps entirely. She was on a quest to be totally unreachable.

The cutoff was so complete that never bothered retrieving her belongings from home. “It's not worth it,” she said flatly one evening, naked on the bed with porn muted on her phone, her fingers idly circling her clit as if on autopilot. Instead, she poured all her time and effort into landing a good-paying job. She had a scholarship, but her mom was funding a good portion of her education. She didn't want to rely on anything from her family for any reason.

Using her sheer will and determination, her engineering prowess was able to shine through in interviews. She aced a position at a local tech firm, something entry-level but solid, using her skills to design software prototypes—brilliant work that paid just enough for us to afford a small apartment off-campus by summer. We could live together on our own with my job and her entry level position. When she got the job offer, she smiled. But she was never quite the same.

That night had broken something in her; her dreams narrowed, ambitions stripped down to basics. No more talk of grad school or big career leaps. No talks of upper management or 6 figure salaries. She just wanted a stable savings account to fund our life, endless porn to fuel her obsessions, and the freedom to be naked whenever and wherever she wanted.

Everything else felt hollow, tainted by the trauma. The need to go above her goals felt like something her mother wanted. It wasn't something she really wanted. I was a silent witness to a beautiful woman barely clinging onto normalcy trying to put parts of herself back together again. I knew she was lost. I was her compass and her rock. I didn't complain. I can't help but love her.

We moved out. We were now two college drop outs taking a different path in life. During the move I helped CeCe focus on small goals. I reminded her to focus on small wins and not think about the big stuff. We didn't have much at first, just a queen size mattress on the floor, some cheap furniture to make a small office area for our computer, and basic utensils to cook. I looked at the pitiful state of or living arrangement. CeCe reminded me daily that we have each other. She was right. She knew when I needed her the most.

A year passed in our shared life. We saved up for furniture together, we made financial decisions together. We thrived together. It was a seamless blend of companionship and unspoken intimacy that we never bothered to label. Tasha and CeCe. We never defined our relationship publicly. We never talked about marriage or slapped a title on it. We were just long-term roommates, best friends who shared everything.

CeCe tried, though, more than once, to nudge me toward dating, to “get away from the always naked chick,” as she'd self-deprecatingly call herself. She'd catch me staring during one of her open window goon sessions, fingers buried in her slick pussy as she moaned to a video of black women flashing in public.

She sighed, “Tasha, you deserve someone normal. Go out, find a guy or girl who doesn't spend half the day rubbing one out. I'm holding you back. You could have gotten your degree, but I was too busy on the verge of breaking down for you to focus. Yes I have this job now and I can provide for us, but I wound up dragging you down with me.”

There was a long silence. She didn't stop rubbing or watching, but I saw a tear stream down her cheek. The wound was still wide open from what she endured. I knew she needed more than therapy to make it out of this. When I made that silent vow to stay with her, that resolve never wavered. I wasn't going anywhere. I have shaped my whole world around her.

She was my world. On her good days, I loved the thrill of her escalations. The safety of our bond was perfect. Her autistic focus made her love so intensely, so unfiltered. I got up, pull her close, kissing her deeply, whispering, “You're all I need, CeCe. This is us.” And she'd melt into it, her thick thighs wrapping around me, but the guilt lingered in her eyes, even as she came undone under my touch. “You are my world Tasha.” She turned and looked me in my eyes and kissed me softly.

Eventually, as her job at the tech firm stabilized and my cafe gig evolved into management. We didn't have a degree, but we had stability. We started our careers. We were happy with each other.

Slowly, CeCe started smiling again. She dressed like a baddie for work, but she started wearing her hoodies again on casual days. We started going out on dates again. CeCe started exposing herself in public again. As we approached our 2nd year living together, CeCe was almost back to her old self. I think CeCe was ready to meet my mom. One day I asked, “Do you want to meet my family?” Her eyes twinkled and she smiled. “Yes, I would love that very much.”

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

—Unknown, often incorrectly attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre

There may be hundreds of quotes from Stoicism and other traditions that make a similar point. I also wrote something along the same lines in “You're the only person you can control”.

There are chapters in Scripture that read like a single beam of light, piercing straight through us. But Luke 9 does something different. It unfolds like a mountain range. You climb one moment, descend the next, and before you can steady your breath, another summit rises in front of you. It is a chapter of contrast, collision, confrontation, and calling. It is a chapter where the disciples glimpse glory, then trip over their own confusion. It is a chapter where Jesus reveals the cost of following Him, not with gentle suggestions, but with firm clarity that shakes the dust off our illusions. And maybe that is why this chapter still haunts our modern faith—because everything in it whispers the truth we resist: that faith isn’t a moment; it’s miles. And we are always being invited to take another step.

Luke 9 opens with commissioning—Jesus sending out His disciples with authority, purpose, and power. But it’s not the commissioning we often imagine. They weren’t given comfortable tools, safety nets, or predictable outcomes. They were told to take nothing. No staff. No bag. No bread. No money. No backup plan. That alone would terrify most believers today. Everything in our world tells us to prepare, accumulate, and secure ourselves. Yet Jesus sends His followers out stripped of every earthly reassurance. Because the moment you lose your props, you discover where your foundation truly sits.

There’s a truth buried in that moment that modern faith desperately needs to recover. Jesus didn’t send them out empty-handed; He sent them out empty of the illusion that the hand of God ever depends on what we carry. Every disciple in Luke 9 had to learn the same lesson: God moves through those who stop trying to save themselves with substitutes. Jesus didn’t call them to walk light—He called them to walk free.

But Luke presses forward, and suddenly the scene shifts to Herod, perplexed, threatened, unsure of who Jesus is. It’s almost humorous how much power trembles in the presence of truth it cannot control. Herod heard the rumors—some said John had risen, others said Elijah had returned. Even kings panic when heaven disrupts their narrative. And in that, we’re reminded that spiritual upheaval is not a sign of something going wrong; it’s often a sign that God is getting close.

But then we reach the hillside, the crowds, and the humbling moment of humanity stretching too far. Five thousand men, not counting women and children, stand before the disciples hungry. And the disciples’ solution is the same one we default to: send them away. Let them fend for themselves. Let the world take care of its own needs. How often do we pray for miracles while quietly hoping God will send the need somewhere else?

Then Jesus answers with one line that dismantles the excuse-making part of our soul: You give them something to eat.

It is a confronting sentence. It demands courage. It demands responsibility. It forces us to look at our hands—not to see what we lack, but to discover what God is willing to multiply. And yet, the disciples immediately list the impossibilities: we have only five loaves and two fish. Only. It is always the word of limitation. It is the word that anchors us in smallness rather than surrender. And Jesus says, Bring it here.

Five loaves, two fish, thousands fed. But perhaps the real miracle wasn’t the food—perhaps the miracle was the disciples realizing that impossibility is often the doorway God chooses to walk through.

Then comes the conversation that defines Christianity. Jesus looks at His disciples and asks the question that reaches past the centuries into every human soul: Who do you say that I am?

Peter answers with conviction, but not yet comprehension. The Messiah. Yes—but not the Messiah Peter imagined. Because the Messiah he wanted would conquer Rome. The Messiah walking with them came to conquer death. The Messiah Peter expected would raise an army. The Messiah he received would raise a cross. And then Jesus says something so disruptive that even today believers read it and try to soften it: If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me.

Not deny a habit. Not deny a luxury. Not deny a small convenience. Deny self.

In our age of branding, self-care, self-expression, and self-protection, these words can feel abrasive. But Jesus isn’t attacking human worth—He’s dismantling human lordship. The self makes a terrible king. It is too fragile, too fearful, too demanding, too easily wounded. And yet we try to build life around it. Jesus calls us to step out of that prison.

But then, as if to pull back the veil just long enough to prevent despair, Luke 9 takes us up a mountain. And there, in an explosion of light, Jesus is transfigured. His face changes, His clothing becomes dazzling, and Moses and Elijah appear, speaking with Him. Humanity always needs a glimpse of glory before it can endure the weight of obedience. God knows that without revelation, responsibility feels impossible.

Peter, overwhelmed and unsure, suggests building three shelters. It is the instinct we all have when confronted with overwhelming divine beauty: freeze the moment. Preserve it. Stay where the glory feels safe. But Jesus did not come to build tents on mountains. He came to build a kingdom in the valleys. The glory was not meant to be kept—it was meant to be carried.

And as the cloud surrounds them, the voice of God speaks: This is My Son, whom I have chosen; listen to Him. That single sentence exposes the root of every spiritual struggle. We listen to culture. We listen to fear. We listen to the inner critic. We listen to doubt. We listen to the voices that sound like us but lead us nowhere. Yet heaven booms with clarity: listen to Him.

But the moment they descend the mountain, the disciples meet a child possessed by a destructive spirit—and the disciples cannot cast it out. They had just witnessed heaven open, but their faith could not stand under pressure. And it is here that Luke 9 drills into the tension every believer lives with: glory is easy on the mountain, but warfare waits in the valley.

Jesus heals the boy, rebukes the spirit, and then does something most of us are still recovering from: He rebukes His disciples too. You unbelieving and perverse generation. Jesus wasn’t insulting them—He was awakening them. Sometimes the truth that stings is the truth that saves.

Then He tells them something that burrows deep into the human heart: The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. The disciples don’t understand. Worse, the text says it was hidden from them. Sometimes understanding is withheld not to confuse us but to prepare us. God often lets truth sit like a seed under the soil until the season arrives for revelation.

But here is where Luke 9 becomes painfully human. Right after Jesus speaks of His suffering, the disciples argue over who is the greatest. The contrast feels almost embarrassing. Jesus is describing sacrifice; they are debating status. But isn’t that the same tension we see today? People want influence without intimacy with God. They want platforms without surrender. They want crowns without crosses. And Jesus quietly brings a child beside Him and says: Whoever welcomes this little one welcomes Me. In the kingdom of God, greatness is measured not by how high you climb but by how deeply you stoop to serve.

But the chapter keeps unfolding, and the tests keep coming. John tells Jesus, We saw someone driving out demons in Your name and tried to stop him because he is not one of us. The human need to control who God can use has not faded in two thousand years. And Jesus dismantles their boundaries with one line: Whoever is not against you is for you. Heaven has never been threatened by diversity of calling—only by hearts that try to own what God is doing.

Yet the chapter saves some of its most piercing truth for last. Jesus sets His face toward Jerusalem. That phrase alone is a sermon. Determination. Focus. Resolve. Purpose that does not flinch. And as He moves toward the city of His suffering, the disciples respond with fire, literally. When a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, James and John ask if they should call down heaven’s flames. Their instinct is destruction; Jesus’ instinct is redemption. And He rebukes them.

Then comes one of the most sobering sequences in the New Testament. Three would-be followers approach Jesus, each eager, each sincere, and each revealing a condition in their commitment. One says he will follow Jesus anywhere, and Jesus responds with stark honesty: Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head. Jesus is saying, I will lead you into purpose, but I will not lead you into predictability.

Another asks to bury his father first, an expression that meant waiting until the father died someday in the future. Jesus replies, Let the dead bury their own dead. It’s not cruelty; it’s clarity. Some people spend so long waiting for the perfect timing that they die standing still.

Another wants to say goodbye to his family first, and Jesus gives the final cut to the conditions people place on obedience: No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Meaning, God doesn’t call half-hearted wanderers—He calls forward-moving disciples who refuse to negotiate backward.

These final words expose the undercurrent of the entire chapter: the kingdom of God advances through those who refuse to drag their past into their calling. You cannot plow a straight line while staring behind you.

Luke 9 is not a chapter that invites comfortable Christianity. It is a chapter that confronts us. It forces us to examine our motives, our fears, our attachments, our excuses, and the places where our faith stalls out. But it also fills us with the strange courage of knowing that Jesus does not choose the impressive—He chooses the willing. He does not choose the flawless—He chooses the teachable. He does not choose the already transformed—He chooses the ones who are ready to follow Him up the mountain, down the valley, and all the way to the cross.

And the beauty of Luke 9 is that it mirrors the modern believer’s journey more precisely than we’d like to admit. We want power like the disciples were given at the beginning of the chapter. We want clarity like the revelation Peter received. We want mountaintop moments like the Transfiguration. We want authority like the healing of the boy. But we wrestle with doubt. We debate status. We misunderstand purpose. We resist sacrifice. We look back when we should move forward. And Jesus keeps walking, inviting us into the kind of life we were always meant to live.

Luke 9 does not simply end; it lingers. It keeps reaching into you long after the chapter closes. It is a mirror, a map, and a measuring rod—revealing who we are, where we are standing, and what still needs to change inside us if we are ever to walk the miles Jesus calls us to walk. And somewhere deep inside this chapter, under the transfiguration light and the dust of the valley floor, under the arguments about greatness and the warnings about the cost of following Him, the real heartbeat emerges: discipleship is not a spectator sport. It is a journey of transformation where hesitation must die if destiny is ever going to live.

But to understand the full weight of Luke 9, we have to sit inside the emotional texture of what Jesus is doing. He isn’t building an institution. He isn’t recruiting consumers. He isn’t gathering fans. He is shaping carriers of the kingdom. And the shaping is costly because the calling is costly. This chapter compresses the entire pattern of discipleship: revelation, resistance, misunderstanding, breakthrough, correction, surrender, and the steady forward motion of divine purpose. And maybe that is the greatest truth Luke 9 forces upon us: spiritual growth rarely comes in straight lines.

It comes in leaps and stumbles. It comes in clarity and confusion. It comes in the mountain highs and the valley lows. It comes in the tension of wanting glory while resisting the path that leads to it.

Think of Peter for a moment. He declares Jesus as the Messiah with boldness. He stands in revelation. He hears the voice of God on the mountain. He watches the impossible unfold before his eyes. Yet in the same breath of the same chapter, he misunderstands purpose, misreads the moment, and defaults to his own instincts. Peter is the disciple who shows us that revelation does not erase humanity; it illuminates the path we must now learn to walk.

And isn’t that exactly where many believers still live today? Caught between the revelation of who Jesus is and the wrestling of becoming who we are called to be. Luke 9 is not a story about perfect disciples. It is a story about invited disciples—called not because they were ready but because they were willing. Jesus didn’t choose them for their strength; He chose them for their surrender.

The conversation about the cross, though, is what sharpens the edge of the entire chapter. Jesus tells His disciples plainly that He would suffer, be rejected, be killed, and be raised. But notice the order. He doesn’t begin with resurrection. He begins with reality. The resurrection will come, but first the cross must be embraced. And the cross He asks His followers to carry is not symbolic. It is daily surrender. Daily obedience. Daily willingness to choose God’s way over our own impulses. Jesus wasn’t painting a poetic metaphor; He was building the backbone of Christianity.

But here is where Luke 9 becomes urgently relevant to our age. Today’s faith culture often preaches comfort, convenience, and blessing without sacrifice. It teaches that following God is about fulfilling personal dreams rather than dying to self. Yet Jesus calls us to something more rugged, more demanding, more glorious. He doesn’t sugarcoat the journey. He does not hide the cost. He says plainly: If you cling to your life, you will lose it. But if you lose your life for My sake, you will find it.

This is not a threat; it’s liberation. The life we cling to is too small. The life He gives is too large to fit inside our fear. Luke 9 is the reminder that spiritual power grows in proportion to spiritual surrender. The more we release, the more He fills. The more we let go, the more heaven moves.

But perhaps the hardest moment in the chapter is the failure of the disciples to cast out the spirit tormenting the boy. They had been given authority. They had seen miracles. They had witnessed divine power firsthand. So why did they fail? Luke does not give a technical explanation because the issue wasn’t technique—it was trust. Jesus’ rebuke was not about incompetence; it was about unbelief. Their hands reached toward heaven, but their hearts hesitated. Power without dependence collapses. Authority without intimacy thins out into frustration. This moment is the sober reminder that past victories do not guarantee present power. Yesterday’s faith cannot fight today’s battles. You must stay filled, stay anchored, stay surrendered.

Then there is the argument about greatness—an argument that unfolds in earshot of Jesus. They were following the Son of God while debating who among them was the most important. And Jesus answers the dispute not with a lecture, but with a child. A small, overlooked, humble presence. A symbol of vulnerability. In the kingdom of God, greatness is not in being celebrated but in being surrendered. Status is not measured by position but by posture. The kingdom does not advance with egos; it advances with servants whose hands stay open and hearts stay low.

But the entire chapter begins shifting the moment Jesus sets His face toward Jerusalem. This turning is more than geographical. It is spiritual. It marks a shift in tone, in momentum, in mission. From this moment on, Jesus’ path tightens. Distraction dies. Delay dies. Hesitation dies. Purpose hardens into resolve. The chapter is telling us something about discipleship: at some point you must set your face toward the calling God has placed on your life. You must stop wandering in circles of indecision. You must stop waiting for ideal conditions. You must stop negotiating the terms. Destiny belongs to the decisive.

And then come the three encounters—the three would-be disciples whose partial willingness reveals the full cost of following Jesus. One offers sentimental enthusiasm. One offers delayed obedience. One offers divided loyalty. Jesus answers all three with phrases that feel razor sharp: No place to lay His head. Let the dead bury their dead. No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom.

These are not rejections. They are clarifications. Jesus is saying: If you want the kingdom, you cannot keep the conditions. You must follow forward without dragging the past behind you. The moment you look back, your steps become crooked. The moment you hesitate, your conviction weakens. The moment you negotiate, your obedience fractures. Luke 9 is not demanding perfection; it is demanding direction. Jesus will walk with imperfect people forever—as long as they are moving forward.

And maybe that is the silent crisis of the modern church. Many believers want transformation without trajectory. They want revelation without responsibility. They want power without process. They want Jesus to bless the path they chose rather than lead them down the path He designed. But Luke 9 is the sober call back to the simplicity and severity of discipleship: follow Me. Not follow comfort. Not follow convenience. Not follow cultural trends. Follow Me.

To follow Him is to release control. To follow Him is to trust beyond understanding. To follow Him is to confront the patterns inside us that resist surrender. To follow Him is to accept that some mountains will reveal glory and some valleys will reveal the battles inside us. To follow Him is to understand that the kingdom does not move through the strongest—it moves through the surrendered.

But there is another layer to Luke 9 that modern readers often overlook: every moment of confusion, every misunderstanding, every failure from the disciples was not an obstacle to Jesus. It was a classroom. Jesus uses their arguments to teach humility. He uses their fear to teach dependence. He uses their impulse for destruction to teach mercy. He uses their eagerness to teach cost. He uses their hesitation to teach resolve. God is not threatened by the weaknesses of those who follow Him. He is only hindered by the reluctance of those who refuse to move.

And so the question rises off the page: where are you standing in Luke 9? Are you at the beginning, carrying more in your hands than God has asked you to carry? Are you in the crowd, unsure how to feed the need in front of you? Are you at the mountain, wanting to build a tent and stay where glory feels safe? Are you in the valley, trying to fight a battle without the depth of surrender needed? Are you in the circle, debating greatness when Jesus is calling you to humility? Are you standing with excuses, waiting for perfect timing before you follow? Or are you moving with Jesus toward the place of purpose, your face set, your heart steady, and your steps aligned with the calling you cannot ignore anymore?

Luke 9 stands as a chapter that calls us forward. It says, Grow deeper. Walk further. Trust more. Let go quicker. Move faster when heaven speaks. Stop dragging yesterday into tomorrow. Stop negotiating the price of discipleship as though God ever asked you to sacrifice more than He sacrificed for you. This chapter is not trying to crush you—it is trying to free you. The cross you carry is not punishment; it is purpose. The surrender you give is not loss; it is liberation. The forward motion you choose is not pressure; it is destiny awakening.

The journey Jesus asks you to walk is demanding, but it is the only journey that leads to the life your soul has been aching for. And the beauty of Luke 9 is that while Jesus calls His followers to pay the price, He never asks them to walk alone. He walks ahead, He walks beside, He walks within, guiding, shaping, correcting, steadying, and strengthening. Discipleship is not a burden when the One who calls you also carries you.

Maybe that is the final truth hidden in these verses: the kingdom doesn’t rise on perfect believers—it rises on willing hearts. Jesus didn’t expect His disciples to understand everything, get everything right, or walk flawlessly. He expected them to stay with Him. To trust Him. To follow Him into the unknown. And that expectation has not changed. He is still calling people who are flawed, uncertain, imperfect, and trying. People like the ones who stumbled their way through Luke 9—and people like us.

Luke 9 is the invitation to stop delaying and start becoming. It is the fire in the bones of every believer who senses that God is calling them out of the shallow waters and into the deep places of purpose. It is the reminder that you are not meant to live at the base of the mountain or stuck in the valley. You are meant to climb, descend, rise, fall, learn, surrender, and keep moving. The kingdom of God is not waiting for your perfection; it is waiting for your yes.

There will always be more miles ahead. More moments of revelation. More seasons of wrestling. More valleys to walk and more mountains to climb. But if Luke 9 teaches us anything, it is this: as long as you walk toward Jesus, you will never walk toward emptiness. He knows the way. He leads the way. He is the way.

And somewhere between the sending, the feeding, the revealing, the rebuking, the correcting, the calling, and the commissioning, you begin to realize that Luke 9 isn’t just a chapter to be studied. It is a life to be lived. A path to be walked. A rhythm to be embraced. A surrender that reshapes everything. And if you dare to walk it fully, you will discover the miracle hidden inside every mile: the more you lose yourself in Him, the more you become your true self.

That is the legacy of Luke 9. Not information—transformation. Not admiration—obedience. Not comfort—calling. Not hesitation—holy resolve. Set your face toward the purpose God has put before you. Go forward. Don’t look back. The kingdom of God is not behind you. It is rising in front of you.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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In Summary: * Listening to the feed from The Maryland Sports Network for the pregame show then the radio call of tonight's men's basketball game between the Iowa Hawkyes and the Maryland Terrapins.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.29 lbs. * bp= 145/83 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:15 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, fried rice, * 09:30 – garden salad * 10:30 – enchiladas * 14:00 – 1 fresh apple * 18:30 – 1 bowl of air-popped popcorn

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:10 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:20 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 16:00 – tune into Baltimore Sports Radio WJZ-FM – 105.7 FM The Fan for the pregame show then the call of tonight's men's college basketball game between the Iowa Hawkyes and the Maryland Terrapins. * 19.24 – And Maryland Wins! They upset the #25 team in the country. Final score: 77 to 70.

Chess: * 12:15 – moved in all pending CC games

It is 10:30 again.

The village lights fall away behind me, and I step into the Black Forest, a wall-less cathedral. The rain is light—barely rain at all—just a mist that gathers on my lashes and darkens the shoulders of my coat. The air smells like pine sap and wet earth. Everything is black and alive. And I am invigorated.

I've no phone, and I am utterly lost.

I walk until the road gives way to a narrow trail. The hills rise, then dip into shadowed valleys. I can no longer see the hazy blue/black sky. The trees knit themselves overhead, and the world becomes close and breathing. I hear footsteps behind me.

Not echo.

Not memory.

Her.

I do not turn at first. I know the cadence of her presence the way I know my own pulse. She comes alongside me without ceremony, her shoulder brushing mine. Her hair is damp from the mist. There is warmth coming from her, subtle but undeniable.

“You went too far last night,” she says softly.

“I was looking for you,” I answer.

“I was already there.”

We climb a small rise together. At the top, the forest opens into a dark meadow, a hollow between hills. It is absolute blackness—no houses, no distant lamps. Just the quiet breathing of the earth.

I reach for her hand.

Not urgently. Not greedily.

Just to know that this is real.

Her fingers are cool from the rain, and she threads them through mine as if it is the most natural covenant in the world. We walk like that, saying little. The silence between us is not empty. It is thick and full and holy. I confess things I could not say in daylight.

I tell her about the fire in me. The way desire rises unbidden. The way my body betrays the careful architecture of my vows. I tell her I feel sometimes like a boy again—uncontained, startled by the intensity of wanting.

She does not pull away.

“I know,” she says.

There is no shame in her voice. No accusation. Only understanding. The rain deepens. It gathers at the ends of her hair. I can barely see her face, but I feel her watching me. Studying me as if I am something fragile and fierce at once.

“You don’t need to prove anything to me,” she whispers. “I already know what you feel.”

Her hand comes to my chest. Over my heart.

I feel it hammering against her palm.

I sink down into the wet grass—not in despair, not in defeat—but in reverence. The forest presses in around us. The dark feels protective, not threatening.

I rest my forehead against her stomach like a fawn seeking warmth. My hands find her waist, steady and trembling at once. I am not asking to take. I am asking to belong.

She places her fingers in my hair and holds me there.

“You must walk your life in the light,” she murmurs above me. “But here, in the dark, we are honest.”

The words undo me.

I rise slowly. I cup her face in my hands, rain-slick and luminous. When I kiss her, it is not fevered or frantic. It is slow. Intent. The kind of kiss that holds back as much as it gives. The kind that says: I want you. I choose restraint. I burn anyway.

The forest witnesses.

An owl calls somewhere down in the valley.

She steps backward then, not abruptly, not cruelly. Just gently, as mist moves off water. Her fingers slip from mine.

I reach for her—

But my hand closes on nothing but rain. And I am alone again in the Black Forest.

Lost, perhaps.

But steadier.

Because I know she was here.

Because I know the path back exists.

Because even in the deepest dark, I am not wandering without love.

Forevermore.

---

#poetry #wyst #romancingiberia #germany #blackforest

There comes a moment in every spiritual journey when a person begins to wonder whether their life is something they control or something they merely inherit. The tension between God’s sovereignty and human freedom isn’t new; it has stretched across generations, echoing through the questions of thinkers, wrestlers, wanderers, and believers who have tried to understand what it means to be guided by the divine while still responsible for their own choices. But in our modern world, that tension feels sharper than ever. People speak about destiny with caution and about freedom with fear, as if the two were natural enemies. Yet the more you look at the fabric of human existence, the more you see something stunning: destiny and freedom are not opposites. They are collaborators. And once you understand how they work together, your whole life opens in a different way.

This is not a surface truth. It’s not a slogan or a simple reassurance. It’s something deeper—something that calls you to rethink the way you move through your days. Because the idea that God has a plan often gets flattened into something suffocating, something rigid, something terrifyingly easy to “mess up.” People walk around with a sense of divine pressure hanging over their shoulders, convinced that one wrong move can rip the future apart. They hesitate to make decisions. They over-spiritualize simple choices. They freeze when clarity doesn’t show up on command. Their faith becomes a tense waiting room where they sit hoping God will sign off on their next step.

But faith was never meant to feel like a waiting room. Faith was meant to feel like a journey—alive, unfolding, spacious, interactive. Faith was meant to feel like movement. And that movement relies on the freedom God intentionally placed inside you from the beginning.

You can’t understand God’s plan without understanding that He designed you with the power of self-determination. Not the illusion of choice. Not the appearance of movement. Real agency. Real will. Real creative influence. The kind of agency that lets you decide who you become. The kind that allows you to sculpt the inner architecture of your life with your thoughts, habits, character, and courage. The kind of self-determination that reflects the fact that you were made in the image of God—not as a passive recipient of fate, but as a participant in something eternal.

When people misunderstand this, everything else collapses. They imagine a God who micromanages rather than a God who empowers. They imagine a destiny built like a tightrope rather than a horizon. They imagine divine purpose as a fragile, breakable thing that can be shattered simply by choosing wrongly. But that picture of God is too small. That picture shrinks His sovereignty into a brittle, conditional structure instead of the robust, expansive landscape it truly is.

The truth is that God’s plan is spacious. Generous. Far-reaching. It is full of options and opportunities. It adjusts, adapts, absorbs, and recalculates with an intelligence beyond anything the human mind can fathom. To say that you can “ruin” God’s plan is to misunderstand the scale of the One who designed it. And yet, your choices matter. Your decisions matter. Your willingness to move matters. Purpose isn’t something God forces on you; it’s something God invites you into. And the invitation lives inside the freedom He has woven into your soul.

When you realize this, something shifts. Instead of living afraid of deciding wrongly, you begin to understand that your freedom is part of the plan. Your motion is part of the plan. Your failures, your recoveries, your detours, your revelations—they all become threads in a story God already knew how to redeem before the story even began. And that is where something powerful awakens inside you: a confidence you didn’t know you needed. Not the loud kind that shouts to prove itself, but the quiet, grounded kind that knows it can move because God is not threatened by movement.

This confidence doesn’t mean you stop seeking wisdom. It doesn’t mean you stop praying. It doesn’t mean you stop listening. What it means is that your listening becomes clearer because it is no longer drowned out by fear. You begin to hear God’s guidance not as commands barked from a distance but as gentle promptings woven into your steps. You begin to sense direction not only in signs and confirmations but in your own growth, your own desire for goodness, your own increasing clarity. You no longer wait for the map to appear in the sky. You learn that God often reveals direction through motion, not stillness.

The world may tell you that a single mistake can derail your entire life. But spiritual maturity opens your eyes to something deeper: you have never lived a moment God couldn’t work with. You have never made a turn He couldn’t incorporate. You have never walked a path He couldn’t use to grow you, shape you, or bring you back into alignment. Even the parts of your life you regret—the lost seasons, the broken relationships, the choices that still sting—are not wasted. They become material for your transformation.

This is why freedom matters. Not because you are meant to drift aimlessly but because you are meant to walk out your purpose with courage. The moment courage disappears, your freedom collapses into fear, and fear is the one thing that keeps destiny dormant. Fear shuts the door that faith is trying to open. Fear insists that your next step must be perfect, when faith only asks that you take it.

But let’s go deeper. What is this freedom, really? What does it look like in everyday life? It looks like waking up and understanding that you are not disqualified before the day even begins. It looks like stepping into your morning knowing that God is with you, not waiting for you to prove yourself. It looks like embracing the truth that your mistakes don’t frighten Him and your efforts don’t intimidate Him. It looks like walking through your day with the assurance that God is present in your thinking, your choosing, your learning, your stretching, and even your stumbling.

Freedom looks like the courage to make a decision without needing every variable to be confirmed. It looks like trusting your growth instead of doubting your instincts. It looks like recognizing that God’s voice is not always thunderous; sometimes it is an inner pull toward something better. It looks like acknowledging that God does not direct from above but alongside, moving with you as you move.

Self-determination, then, becomes something sacred. It becomes part of your worship. Because choosing the path of growth is choosing the path of God. Choosing responsibility for your inner world is choosing alignment with His vision for your life. Choosing to move forward even when you’re unsure is choosing faith over fear. This is not rebellion. This is participation.

You were always meant to participate. Your life was never meant to be a script you recite. It was meant to be a story you help write with God’s guidance and your willingness. The Creator does not reduce His children to passive spectators. He invites them to rise into co-laborers with Him in building a meaningful existence.

Consider how Jesus interacted with people. He did not hand them detailed instructions about every step they must take. He called them to follow. That’s movement. That’s participation. That’s freedom activated through trust. Jesus didn’t treat people as robots waiting for commands; He treated them as beings capable of hearing, responding, growing, and becoming. His invitations always required choice. His miracles often required action. His teachings constantly emphasized personal responsibility, inner transformation, alignment, and participation with God’s will.

Freedom, in this light, becomes something astonishing—something deeply spiritual, deeply human, and deeply necessary for your purpose to unfold. Without freedom, faith becomes compliance. Without self-determination, destiny becomes rigid. Without movement, your spiritual life becomes stagnant. But when freedom and purpose come together, life becomes something vibrant. Something alive. Something dynamic. Something filled with meaning even in the small moments.

This is why you must understand your freedom correctly. Not as permission to drift, but as empowerment to grow. Not as an invitation to chaos, but as an invitation to maturity. Not as a threat to God’s will, but as a doorway into it. When you understand freedom this way, your perspective shifts. You stop hoping life will “happen to you” and start understanding that life unfolds through the choices you make.

And when you understand that God works with your choices, not against them, something opens inside your heart that has been closed for too long. You begin to trust yourself again. Not because you believe you are flawless, but because you know God can work through your flaws. You begin to move again. Not because you have all the answers, but because you finally understand you don’t need all the answers to take the next step.

This is the beginning of a life that no longer feels like a tightrope but like a horizon. A life where you no longer avoid movement out of fear but embrace movement out of faith. A life where you understand that God does not steer statues; He steers those who are willing to walk. This is the beginning of a life where freedom and destiny no longer war within you but work together as two parts of the same sacred design.

As this understanding settles into your spirit, something else begins to rise inside you—an awareness that your choices are not competing with God’s plan. They are the way you step into it. Your decisions become a living dialogue between your will and His wisdom. Each time you choose courage over comfort, you are answering His call. Each time you resist the urge to shrink back into fear, you are aligning with the person He sees in you. Each time you take responsibility for the direction of your life, you are acknowledging that He has entrusted you with real power. The kind of power that shapes your inner world. The kind of power that influences your future. The kind of power that carries you into rooms you never thought you would enter.

This is why God gives people freedom—not so they can wander without purpose, but so they can learn to walk with Him in a way that transforms them. Growth requires freedom. Courage requires freedom. Love requires freedom. Faith requires freedom. Without the ability to choose, none of these things can come alive in your life. You cannot become the person you are meant to be if you are constantly afraid of ruining everything. Fear suffocates destiny long before failure ever could. Fear keeps people small. Fear keeps people stuck. Fear keeps people silent. But when you understand that the plan of God is strong enough to incorporate your humanity, fear begins to lose its grip, and you begin to see the horizon again.

When you step forward with faith, even imperfectly, God meets you in that motion. You may think you’re simply choosing a job, starting a project, reaching out to a friend, or rebuilding a broken area of your life. But in heaven’s eyes, those small decisions become turning points. They become markers. They become evidence that you trust the One who created you. And trust is what unlocks everything. Trust shifts the atmosphere of your inner world. Trust allows peace to settle where anxiety once lived. Trust opens your heart to guidance you could not hear when your mind was filled with fear. Trust turns your daily routine into holy ground.

This is why the spiritual giants of history were not perfect people. They were trusting people. They were moving people. They were participating people. They didn’t wait for flawless clarity or supernatural certainty. They moved because they knew that God could redirect them if needed. They understood that the presence of God was not reserved for the perfect but for the willing. They believed that purpose wasn’t discovered by sitting still but by stepping forward. And in that stepping, they found direction. They found strength. They found identity. They found destiny. You can too.

But to live like this, you have to let go of the myth that God’s plan is something you can fall out of with a single mistake. You have to release the belief that everything depends on flawless choices. You have to let go of the lie that God is standing behind you shaking His head whenever you hesitate. Instead, you have to embrace the deeper truth that God is much more interested in your growth than your perfection. He is much more invested in your development than your flawless execution. His plan is not fragile. His purpose is not threatened by your humanity. The Creator of the universe does not design destinies that collapse under pressure.

He designs journeys that transform you. He designs callings that draw your courage out of hiding. He designs seasons that strengthen your resilience. He designs challenges that form your character. He designs opportunities that require faith. And He allows all of this to unfold through the choices you make every single day. That is why freedom matters so profoundly. It is not a loophole in the divine design. It is the engine of your becoming.

And the truth is, your becoming has always mattered to God. Long before you ever wrestled with choices, He was shaping you. Long before you ever faced a crossroads, He had already prepared ways to meet you in every path. Long before you ever wondered whether you were moving in the right direction, He had already planned how to turn your steps into purpose. Nothing you have lived—your victories, your failures, your quiet moments, your loud mistakes—has surprised Him. Every part of your story has been held in His hands. And because He holds it, He can redeem it.

That redemption is not passive. It unfolds through your participation. Redemption happens when you choose to rise after falling. Redemption happens when you choose honesty over shame, growth over guilt, courage over frustration. Redemption happens when you choose to step forward instead of freezing under pressure. Redemption happens when you choose faith in moments that could easily pull you backward. This is the beauty of being human under God’s care—you are free to choose, and He is faithful to transform every choice into something meaningful.

Your freedom, then, is not a burden you carry alone. It is a conversation between you and the divine. A collaboration. A shared creation. You bring your will. God brings His wisdom. You bring your movement. God brings His direction. You bring your decisions. God brings His redemption. Together, a life takes shape—one that reflects not only the Creator’s love but the courage of the created.

When you begin living this way, something incredible happens: you stop fearing the future. You stop worrying about missing your purpose. You stop asking whether you are doing life incorrectly. You start to realize that you are walking with God, not performing for Him. You understand that His voice is not a demand for perfection but an invitation into trust. You understand that His plan is not a trap but a promise. You understand that your freedom is not a threat but a gift.

And when that revelation settles into your heart, the entire way you move through the world shifts. You start approaching decisions with peace instead of panic. You start viewing challenges as opportunities for growth instead of signs of failure. You start seeing your life with new eyes—not as something happening to you but as something unfolding with you. You stop waiting for permission to live. You stop overanalyzing every direction. You learn to walk, and in walking, you learn to hear. God guides moving feet. God strengthens moving hearts. God transforms moving lives.

This is the life you were always meant to live—a life where you trust the freedom God gave you, where you lean into the plan He designed for you, where you stop fearing the unknown because you finally believe that God is already in it. A life where you understand that destiny is not discovered in stillness but in movement. A life where you rise each day knowing you are not behind, not disqualified, not lost, not beyond repair. A life where you walk boldly because you know that whether your steps are straight or imperfect, God knows exactly how to turn them into purpose. You cannot break what He has built. You cannot undo what He has foreseen. You can only discover what He has always placed inside you.

Live like someone who finally understands that freedom is not rebellion. It is alignment. It is maturity. It is trust. It is faith in motion. It is the courage to say yes to the life God designed, even when you can’t see the entire path. And as you walk that path, you will learn that God does not guide you with fear. He guides you with presence. He guides you with peace. He guides you with the quiet assurance that you are not walking alone—not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

Your future is wide. Your choices matter. Your destiny is alive. And God’s plan is unfolding not above you or beside you, but within you, rising with every brave step you take into the horizon He has already made ready.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s inspiring faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

Multistage docker builds keep image sizes down by allowing us to discard tools needed for our build and test steps. We create multiple images as stages and can pass artifacts from preceding stages to the current stage.

This works because of how docker images are structured. Each image is a stack of read-only filesystem layers where each instruction in the Dockerfile (RUN, COPY...) creates a new layer on top of previous ones. Each FROM statement starts a new, independent layer stack. When you COPY —from=, Docker reaches into that other stages layer stack and copies files into a new layer in the current stage. The other stage's layers themselves are discarded from the final image.

# ---- Build Stage ----
FROM node:20-alpine AS build
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci
COPY . .
RUN npm run build

# ---- Test Stage ----
FROM build AS test
RUN npm run test

# ---- Production Stage ----
FROM node:20-alpine AS production
WORKDIR /app
ENV NODE_ENV=production
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --omit=dev
COPY --from=build /app/dist ./dist
USER node
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "dist/index.js"]

So this should run through when we do: docker build --target production -t myapp . right? Not quite, we are skipping the test stage since test is not in the dependency chain leading to production. Docker will only build stages that are directly referenced.

So instead of: COPY --from=build /app/dist ./dist we need to do: COPY --from=test /app/dist ./dist

I said I'd build it. Last post I wrote, “That's the next build.” The Eat Watch on my wrist worked, but it was deaf. I logged meals in MyFatnessPal, then tapped the same calories into the watch by hand. I was the middleware. Two systems, no bridge, me in the middle pressing buttons.

Then I built DogWatch.

DogWatch was supposed to be about counting dogs on the walk to daycare. It was. But it taught me plumbing. Data flowing from wrist to phone to server. A Garmin app that talked to Django. By the time the first walk synced, zero dogs and all, I had a pipeline.

If I could sync dog counts, I could sync calories.

The Build

The architecture is simple because the watch is stupid. On purpose.

Every five minutes, the Garmin sends one request to the server: give me today's numbers. The server checks what I've logged in MyFatnessPal, does the maths, and sends back three numbers. Goal. Consumed. Remaining.

The watch stores nothing. Calculates nothing. Decides nothing. It asks one question and displays the answer. Green means eat. Red means stop.

When I log a burrito at lunch, the server knows within five minutes. I don't open anything. I glance at my wrist. The number moved.

Midnight comes, the count starts fresh, and the watch goes green again. The first morning it worked, I just stood there looking at it. A zero I hadn't typed.

Walker called it a fuel gauge. The gauge doesn't know how the engine works. It just reads the tank.

The Skin

Walker never built the Eat Watch. But he drew one. In The Hacker's Diet he mocked up a watch face: square, black, a red-bordered LCD screen with “Marinchip Eat Watch” in italic script across the top. It looked like a Casio from 1985. A “Turbo Digital” badge sat at the bottom like a maker's mark on a thing that never existed.

I wanted mine to look like that. The problem was shape. Walker drew a rectangle. Garmin makes circles. So I redrew it: same bezels, same script, same badge, bent around a round face. The LCD tan, the red border, the italic branding. All of it, just curved.

Now it sits on my wrist. Green text, “EAT,” the remaining calories underneath. A relic from a future that never shipped, finally running on real hardware.

The Arc

A calorie counter. Then a Garmin app. Then a system to connect them. Each build was the logical next step, each question a little harder than the last. Could I build something useful? Could I build for hardware? Could I wire it all together?

The answer kept being yes.

The calorie counter talks to the watch. Loop closed.

I look at my wrist. Green. I can eat.

Walker imagined this in 1991. He never had the watch. I do.

-—

If you want to try this yourself:

FatWatch is a Garmin watch face that connects to MyFatnessPal. If there's enough interest I'll make both available. MyFatnessPal is the calorie counter that started all of this. You can read about it in the first post in this series.

I haven't seen the new Star Trek show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. It's not that I wouldn't. I don't have Paramount+ because I don't have money coming in. Even if I did, I don't pay money to people eager to kiss the ass of fascists. I do pal around a lot in Star Trek communities.

One of the things I saw coming out of certain ends of 'the fandom' is this “It's impossible to have Jem'Hadar women. How do they have Jem'Hadar women?!” thing. Academy has had like six episodes or something so it's likely this question has already been answered.

It didn't really need to be, though.

Reading the text

As a long time Star Trek fan who has watched DS9 numerous times (and recently finished up another DS9 watch through), I saw Lura Thok (played by Gina Yashere) in some promotional graphics and thought “Oh, cool! Jem'Hadar!” I'm annoyed to say looking up her character's name gave me a slight spoiler but I'm not going to replicate that issue for you here.

In DS9, we're given hints over the course of several seasons that ultimately amount to this: the Founders didn't create the Vorta or the Jem'Hadar from scratch. They took some species that existed already and modified them to suit their purposes. The Jem'Hadar were created to be their soldiers and the Vorta were created to be administrators. According to Vorta legend, the Vorta had been tiny little critters we would likely assume were not fully sentient when they were what old SciFi might call “uplifted” by the Founders. Given how much the Founders lie, I'm not sure I would take that particularly seriously.

We don't have any information about where the Jem'Hadar originally came from but we have solid reasons to believe they weren't created from scratch. One example is in Hippocratic Oath where we discover that one Jem'Hadar was able to break his hold over the genetic addiction to ketracel-white. If the Founders had created the Jem'Hadar completely from scratch and completely controlled their breeding, it's unlikely that Goran'Agar would have been able to manage that. Other episodes reveal that the Jem'Hadar's genetic conditioning isn't as strong as the Founders believe (or purport to believe) it is.

The obvious answer

All of this speaks to the likelihood that the Jem'Hadar are another species that has been modified. It hints that Jem'Hadar women may actually still have been somewhat involved in the process of making new Jem'Hadar for the Gamma Quadrant at least. Even if the average Jem'Hadar warrior is completely unaware of that possibility.

That's stuff we can imagine while ignoring the end of DS9 but taking everything else in DS9 into account (without touching Picard or other properties).

Once we do take the end of DS9 into account, we have Odo leading the Founders and we have at least two species who have existed mainly to serve the Dominion which no longer exists. We see time and time again that Odo feels that wholesale slaughter is deeply evil. We also know how much he feels the Jem'Hadar should be able to choose their own destinies on an individual level.

Given that information, it's very likely that Odo would lead the Founders to restore the Jem'Hadar's independence and solve some of the dissatisfaction the Weyoun clones discussed about the Founders' tinkering with the Vorta genetic makeup.

Now, that last paragraph is a simple guess about what might have happened on the basis of my knowledge of the previous paragraphs and my knowledge of Odo as a character. There are certainly other ways that the creators of Starfleet Academy could have solved any issues — if I was to agree there were an issue to address.

One of several long roads

It's a SciFi show. There's any number of ways they could have solved it.

Goran'Agar could have stolen an orb and a shuttle and ridden it into the Celestial Temple and begged the Prophets to restore his people to what they were before the Founders messed with them. There could have been a big debate because What Was Before Can Never Be Again. Prophet Benjamin says that's true but every sentient being deserves a chance at a new start. Then the prophets coming up with some brand new way of being Jem'Hadar inspired and directed by the things that Goran'Agar has managed to make of himself since last we saw him.

Julian Bashir, international spy, could have taken over Section 31 through subterfuge. He could then repurposed their knowledge and capacities to create a retrovirus that would spread through the Jem'Hadar like a plague. The plague could remove their genetic propensity toward believing the Founders are gods and given them the ability for their bodies to synthesize what they need from food and restoring their ability to mate regularly.

The imagination is the limit.

The adventure's only getting started

With all that, we've still got people complaining because a Jem'Hadar woman showed up in a trailer and some promotional material for a show that hadn't yet come out. Complaints that, to my eye, seem to not reasonably engage with the information from shows we've theoretically already seen.

Now, I've got my own theories about why someone might want to do that. I wouldn't call those fan theories since I'm not a fan of what I think is going on. I won't impugn them by suggesting that they aren't actually fans of Star Trek. I will suggest that looking at the shows while paying a little more attention to the themes and subtext might be in order.

Now, how's the show? I still don't know. I hope it's the best Star Trek ever, though. It probably won't be but that won't necessarily be because it sucks. There's only one spot for “best.”

I hope I get to see it one day. I think the first time I heard people talking about wanting a Starfleet Academy show was sometime in the 90s. That wasn't an idea that really appealed to me at the time but there's no reason it can't be great. That's what I hope for it. That it's great. (I do also still hope that it's the best ever but, again, that's unlikely because of the way best works.)

Support the author

I've got two books out in the Vay Ideal series. It's a science fiction adventure series built around an eclectic assortment of travelers who find themselves running an independent ship. I'd love it if you'd check them out. While you can buy them on Amazon, the cover links will take you to a landing page which will let you choose any one of several other stores also.

#StarTrek #Essay #SciFi