TherapyGary

What I hate about Linux is how many critical paths are not only visible, but interceptable.

If a process is slow, I’m not left guessing, but that’s part of the problem. I end up having to perf record -g and immediately dig through where cycles are going- kernel vs user, cache misses, branch mispredicts- because nothing is abstracted or simplified. If that’s not enough, suddenly I'm expected to drop into eBPF and attach to sched_switch, sys_enter_*, or specific kprobes and build a live latency histogram, which just adds more complexity. No rebuilds, no special debug environment, no guardrails. Production is debuggable, so now I’m expected to debug production??

Memory behavior is clear, which sounds good until it isn’t. /proc/<pid>/smaps gives me per-region breakdowns- RSS, PSS, shared vs private- but now I’m responsible for interpreting all of it. Wtf. I can correlate that with page faults via perf or tracepoints and pretend I understand whether I’m thrashing, fragmenting, or just overcommitting, but I'd rather be free to just give up. If I feel like influencing it, I’ve got madvise, mlock, THP toggles, NUMA policies- all directly accessible, which means more knobs to get wrong.

I/O is explicit, which quickly becomes exhausting. With io_uring, I can submit batches of reads/writes without syscalls per operation, control submission queue polling, and eliminate context switches in hot paths; managing all of that complexity myself is overwhelming. If something regresses, I can trace block layer latency (block_rq_issue/complete) and see exactly where time is spent- device, scheduler, or filesystem- this is arguably knowledge the user shouldn't have access to. The scheduler ought to be a black box. I can inspect CFS behavior via /proc/sched_debug, tune sched_min_granularity_ns, or isolate workloads with cpusets and SCHED_FIFO when I need determinism, and misconfiguring any of this can make things worse. Combine that with cgroup v2 and I get hierarchical CPU weight distribution that holds under contention, which only adds yet another layer of configuration to worry about.

Networking is just as tangible, and just as burdensome. If I’m debugging latency, I can trace packets through the stack with eBPF hooks at XDP, TC, or socket level. I can see drops, queueing delay, retransmits, all without packet captures, and so I find myself deep in kernel-level tooling just to answer basic questions. If "needed", I can modify behavior inline before the kernel even allocates an skb, which is dangerously easy to misuse and a power I shouldn't have. File systems expose their tradeoffs clearly, which means I have to care about them?? With ext4 or xfs, I need to know what journaling mode I’m in, how writeback behaves, and potentially trace it. If I need different semantics, I switch to btrfs or zfs and accept their costs, because nothing smooths over those differences for me. Nothing is simplified, when I'd rather things just pretend to be something they're not.

Process relationships are concrete, which again shifts responsibility onto me. /proc/<pid>/fd shows exactly what a process has open, leaving me to interpret it. I can nsenter into its namespaces, strace -p it live, or inject behavior with ptrace, but these are sharp tools that are easy to misuse. File descriptors are transferable over UNIX sockets, so I can hand off live connections between processes without ceremony (boring), and that "flexibility" comes with added complexity in coordination. Even boot and init aren’t sacred, which means more decisions to make. If systemd does something I don’t like, I can read the unit, override it, or replace the whole init system, and then I’m left maintaining my impulsive choices. Same with networking- NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, or raw ip and tc. Nothing is welded shut; it's all fucking loosey goosey.

Edit:

Rules for this post:

• Linux Lovers who downvote me will be banned on sight

Something crazy occurred to me at the gym with the boys today. I used speech to text, so I hope it makes sense.

The surface refuses honesty. What stands in the mirror is not your body but a compliant apparition, obedient to light, angle, and the small tyrannies of perspective. It resembles you with unnerving fidelity, yet resemblance is not identity. A map may trace a territory with exquisite precision and still fail to contain a single grain of its soil. This is the same failure. You say you are checking your form. No, you are consulting an external witness, a flattened emissary of yourself that exists only in the optical regime. It is reversed, displaced, temporally thin. It cannot feel you, and yet you begin, insidiously, to feel for it. The so-called mind-muscle connection is not mystical; it is merely interiority reclaimed. Muscle is not a visual object. It does not exist in the domain of sight except as a crude translation. It exists as pressure, resistance, heat, trembling. An intelligence written in sensation. To lift properly is to collapse the distance between intention and execution until there is no observer left to arbitrate between them. There is only contraction, and the will that becomes it. Then the mirror intervenes. A third presence emerges, uninvited, quietly sovereign. Now there is the one who acts, the tissue that responds, and the one who watches. Attention fractures. Sensation is demoted. Appearance ascends. You begin asking the wrong question with increasing confidence. Not is the muscle speaking? But does the image approve? This is how the split stabilizes. The reflection offers something dangerously close to certainty. Clean lines. Immediate feedback. A geometry of effort that appears legible. But it is a counterfeit epistemology. The mirror cannot register efficiency, cannot perceive recruitment patterns, cannot testify to honesty of exertion. It is blind to the interior and therefore authoritative only about the irrelevant. Still, you defer to it. Over time, the watcher becomes primary. Movement is edited in real time. Not for function, but for legibility. You curate yourself for an audience that is both you and not you, adjusting trajectories to satisfy a silent, optical criterion. The body is no longer inhabited; it is managed. Display displaces experience. This is the quiet sabotage. Proprioception, your native sense of where you are, how you exert, what you recruit, atrophies under the regime of sight. Vision colonizes domains it was never designed to govern. You learn to distrust the internal signal because it lacks spectacle. Yet all meaningful adaptation occurs precisely there, in that opaque interior where nothing can be seen and everything can be known. You are not your reflection is not metaphor. It is operational fact. The reflection is delayed, inverted, and structurally incapable of representing force, fatigue, or coherence. It shows you a shape performing an action, not an action generating a shape. These are not equivalent processes. Understand, then, what you face. It is not your body. It is not even a degraded version of your body. It is an image. Useful, occasionally instructive, but fundamentally exogenous to the act of becoming stronger. Confuse it for the process, and you will begin to train the image instead of the organism. And the organism will notice. The real event occurs elsewhere. Posterior to the eyes, anterior to language, beneath the threshold where observation can interfere. It is quiet there. No symmetry, no applause, no confirmation. Only the precise, unshareable fact of effort as it is lived. That is where the muscle is. The mirror will never find it. Gary, what are you doing? Bro, this pre-workouts got me fucked up, bro.

(I did ask for permission before sharing this)

Hi!

I hope this is an okay thing to ask/post here.

I have a couple hybrid self-help books in the works, and it occurred to me that some of the language I've been using is exclusionary. The tone/style is basically the opposite of magical realism, in which evidence-based therapy, psychology, and neuroscience stuff is presented as if magical.

Because of this, I can certainly make use of terms like "being," "entity," etc, (and I already do, to some extent) but there are times where I (maybe naïvely?) feel like I need to be more specific about what/who I'm referring to. This is important and difficult because I'm trying to avoid breaking the fourth wall by using the word "you" (or referring to the reader directly at all).

Questions/ Discussion Topics:

Do you have an opinion on the word "person"? I would argue that non-human animals are people, but I imagine it could feel dysphoric to be referred to this way

What about "one" or "individual"? This seems exclusionary of systems, and possibly objects

Is there any alternative to "human"/"humanoid" that captures the spirit of what that conveys without being problematic?

When I read "he or she," I automatically think "ah okay, this isn't about me." and that feeling fucking sucks. I don't want a single reader of mine to feel this way, if I can avoid it

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53464271

once youve strained it a whole can of creamed corn gives you barely a third of a cup why isnt anyone talking about this

i think it has to do with government corn subsidies

edit you people arent getting it so ive created a diagram

look at all that blue thats wasted space between the creamed corns and it takes up over half the can

I get the vibe "lefty memes" is a misnomer, and an actual liberal like me won't be accepted here even though I'm the definition of "left wing" so I've never tried posting anything in here yet - but everywhere else this was posted so far has hated it, so I'm trying here now.

I like this meme because I noticed parallels in how Republicans and Democrats refuse to coordinate to defend my rights and protect me and my loved ones from senseless danger from extremists.

I'm not quite ready to give up on finding a community where people like this meme. I know it's actually one of the most well-crafted ones yet, no matter what some people say. It was originally posted by @fediverse_fremont@lemmy.world here

Alt text for people who can't read:
(Mirrored "Is this a pigeon" meme format, repurposed to represent the lack of US uniparty politics, not blindly misused without understanding it as some commenters will say)

A Republicans on one side and a Democrat on the other, gesturing toward the butterfly between them labeled "compromise" with caption of them saying "What is this thing?"