Book notes
Updated on : read Jim Wendler's book
This is a "living" webpage in which I jot down notes from some of the books that I have read. These notes are things I consider worthy to remember and repeat, interesting ideas that came to me while reading, or summaries of big ideas.
Fiction
Yukio Mishima - The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
- You cannot have opposing goals. It is even advised to have complimentary goals. I begun to realize this after I have experimented with extremes.
Because the act of looking was a proof that I existed.
Fitness
Jim Wendler - 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System to Increase Raw Strength, 1st edition
- Basic tenets:
- Emphasize big, multi-joint movements
- Start too light
- Progress slowly
- Break personal records
- Squat rules (for me to remember):
- Pick a point straight ahead or slightly downward and stare at it during the squat.
- Keep your elbows down and under the bar.
- Grip the bar with the narrowest grip you can manage and squeeze it hard.
- At parallel, drive your elbows under the bar and explode up.
- Military press:
- Position your feet where you are comfortable.
- Arch your lower back.
- Bench press:
- Arch your entire back.
- Grip width is up to you; preferably narrow.
- Hold your breath for the first 2-3 reps.
- Deadlift:
- First activate the legs, then the back.
- Keep the bar close to you — it should touch your shins and your thighs on the way up.
-
One word of warning, however: don't take the lighter sets for granted. These will set you up mentally for the big sets. If these sets are light and explosive, you'll feel confident and strong for your last set. If you take these lightly, or you take a carefree attitude toward them, your mind will not be right for the last set.
-
You'll eventually come to a point where you can't make any more progress on a lift. You won't be able to hit the sets and reps you're supposed to hit, and the weights will start to get too heavy. When this happens, I simply take 90% of my max (either a 1RM or a rep max) and start all over again. [...] You may stall out with one lift before you do with the others. When this happens, you only need to decrease the one stalled lift. If you're stalling out on multiple lifts, and you feel like everything is catching up with you, take a deload week and recalculate your maxes. [...] If you're really starting out with 10% less than your actual maxes, you can expect to go through 5-7 cycles at a minimum before you stall out. I've gone through 8 before having to back off.
- Besides lifting weights, you also need to warm-up (foam rolling, static stretching, jumping rope, etc.) and do conditioning work (e.g. hill runs and prowler pushes).
- Me time is time when you are with yourself, not spent entertained (read: distracted); this is when you are away from yourself.
Do it today and forever.
You should rest for as long as it takes to perform the set with good form, but not enough to get cold. For most lifters, this is about 3-5 minutes.
If you're deloading, DELOAD! Cut back on everything [including the assistance work] and let your body rest and recover.
If you think looks trump performance, ask the last girl you slept with.
Philosophy
Almost all of Nietzsche's books (save for the ones about Wagner)
- Nietzsche believed in upgrading man to a new species through a transvaluation of all values, which included getting rid of Christianity (although he saw its necessity, even now) and acknowledging that men have a Will to Power (i.e. domination or mastery over others, oneself, or the environment).
- He thought that Christianity comes from a slave morality and promotes values appropriate only to inferior people, values which are damaging and opposed to superior people, which have a master morality.
- He encouraged us to live a life so full that we will not regret it, since, according to him, we will live it, identically, an infinite amount of
times. This he called the eternal recurrence, or
the absolute and eternal repetition of all things in periodical cycles.
Such a life is the happy life, him defining happiness asthe feeling that power increases.
One instrument we can use to create such a life is amor fati — to love one's fate, with tragedy, suffering, and all:The saying of yea to life, and even to its weirdest and most difficult problems: the will to life rejoicing at its own infinite vitality in the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I meant as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to cast out terror and pity, or to purge one's self of dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence,—this was Aristotle's misunderstanding of it,—but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself—that lust which also involves the joy of destruction." "The yea-saying to the impermanence and annihilation of things [...]; the yea-saying to contradiction and war, the postulation of Becoming, together with the radical rejection even of the concept Being.
- One particular form of the Will to Power is what he calls self-overcoming. Here the Will to Power is harnessed and directed toward
self-mastery and self-transformation, guided by the principle that
your real self lies not deep within you but high above you,
as Zarathustra bid us:Lose me and find yourselves.
This is kinda similar with Jung's encouragement (Nietzsche makes it feel more noble):
There is only one way and that is your way. There is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking for help? Do you believe help will come from outside? What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare. Do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
— Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition (page 384)
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture.
-
- Here I think he argues that it is hard for normal people (modern, cultural, educated, etc.) to see the truth because they have been
taught (and reinforced themselves as well) a lie — a different 'cultural' truth; therefore, it takes a lot of effort to undo that veil.
Also, he argues that truth is not only accessible to smart people, but to anyone that is willing to put in the work. In the same
paragraph:
The Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their highest power: he seems himself transformed into a satyr.
I think he means that, to know the truth, you must become (not be afraid of, idolize, worship, etc.) the ideal person.
- Here I think he argues that it is hard for normal people (modern, cultural, educated, etc.) to see the truth because they have been
taught (and reinforced themselves as well) a lie — a different 'cultural' truth; therefore, it takes a lot of effort to undo that veil.
Also, he argues that truth is not only accessible to smart people, but to anyone that is willing to put in the work. In the same
paragraph:
- So, you want knowledge, huh? You gotta pay. But don't worry, you'll find the reality of life
indestructibly powerful and delightful
and that will give you an Apollonian consolation. The pre-condition of this Prometheus myth is the extraordinary value which a naive humanity associates with fire as the true divine protector of that rising culture. But the fact that man freely controls fire and does not receive it merely as a gift from heaven, as a stirring lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared to these contemplative primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine nature. And so right there the first philosophical problem posed an awkward insoluble contradiction between man and god and pushed it right up to the door of that culture, like a boulder. The best and loftiest thing which mankind can share is achieved through a crime, and people must now accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of suffering and troubles with which the offended divine presences afflict the nobly ambitious human race. Such things must happen — an austere notion which, through the value which it gives to a crime, stands in a curious contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation, lust, in short, a row of predominantly female emotions are look upon as the origin of evil.
-
- I think this is a seed of his future
God is dead
quote. This means that, with every technological breakthrough that leads to a change of perspective, we will kill God.
- I think this is a seed of his future
However, without myth that culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon reorganized through myth completes the unity of an entire cultural movement.
-
- So, you can only have an ultimate goal (ideal) which is very vague (
horizon reorganized through myth
) so that it leaves room for change, for creativity.
- So, you can only have an ultimate goal (ideal) which is very vague (
- Don't expose yourself to the unknown (Dionysian) constantly because you will not tolerate life. Veil yourself (lie to yourself, if you must say it like this) with Apollo and its beauties, so you can take the next step and experience the next moment. Why do this? Ha-ha, this is a Dionysian question that needs to be asked through an Apollonian lens, in which case it will not be asked anymore.
But, you strange foreigner, how much must these people have suffered in order to be able to become so beautiful!
-
- You need suffering to have beauty and you need beauty to be able to suffer.
Friedrich Nietzsche - On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense
- If languages represented Truth, there wouldn't be these many. Language appoints the relation of things to humans.
- We don't know the laws of nature. We only see their relations with each other and add to them time and space, or
relations of succession and numbers.
Thus, we can't grasp Truth because, partly, everything we see is part of nature and we grasp everything in nature under our understanding of its laws:Everything marvelous that we admire in the laws of nature and that promotes our explanation and could mislead us into distrusting idealism, consists exclusively of the mathematical stringency and inviolability of time- and space-perceptions.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
That flight was not a world-flight in the sense of Indian philosophers; no deep religious conviction as to the depravity, transitoriness and accursedness of Existence demanded that flight — that ultimate goal, the rest in the 'Being,' was not striven after as the mystic absorption in one all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a puzzle and a scandal to common men.
-
- So, ascetics search for a way out of this world (or, at least, out of the social world) due to their
conviction as to the depravity, transitoriness and accursedness of Existence.
- So, ascetics search for a way out of this world (or, at least, out of the social world) due to their
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thoughts Out of Season
- Knowledge, not culture, wins a war. If you ascribe culture as a contributing factor to winning a war, you make it rotten because culture which doesn't stand against war is corrupt to begin with.
- Knowledge is a tool towards a purpose.
- Philistines sometimes enjoy art but separate it from real life — from their wives, jobs, etc. — so that art cannot affect their life.
- In philosophy, like in any work, one should start from the bottom — don't fly to the highest ideas without doing the grunt work of explaining first principles.
It is, in short, the recognition of the fact that the two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the tyrannical side.
-
- So, it's not about destroying your bad side, it's about keeping your good side better than your bad side.
Improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible! One would think modern men had but one virtue left — presence of mind. Unfortunately, it much more closely resembles the omnipresence of disgusting and insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness become universal.
-
- This is the source of security engineering: because people now only have cupidity over nil admirari and care of things eternal, spying inquisitiveness becomes universal — security engineering is the answer to modern man's cupidity which is brought about, can be argued, because of the lack of nil admirari and of a goal that focuses the mind on eternity (or, in any case, not on the present).
A struggle which never ceased until his evolution was complete.
-
- So, you can't reach perfection (maybe) but you can stop evolving, being better.
- Myth is
the people's creation and their language of distress.
When all that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but one thing — nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to be transfigured through love: the former would fain not be, the latter would fain be otherwise.
-
- Here he almost matches Nature with Existence. So, depression is the scream of something unnatural in us? Nature doesn't want to die? Of course not, she MAKES suffering!
- Knowledge needs to be alive. You can't express externally (talk or act) what is dead knowledge because if you would be able to then that would be knowledge that is alive. Having dead knowledge contributes to the chaos and disorder of your inner being.
- Truth is not useful. Look at monks. They seem (to me) to be better people than most; not because of their beliefs, precisely, but because they enacted them, because they followed a path and stuck to it. Science says we can't reach truth, only not reject a hypothesis. Philosophy and religion say the same thing in other terms. Show humility: admit that you can't know everything and stick to a path. I have a thirst for knowing stuff, and that is my path. The problem with this path is that I must make the rules myself. So be it.
- Having too much dead knowledge suffocates your character which will no longer express itself — so the modern man is a
compendia, abstractions made concrete.
- Don't use knowledge to tell you what to feel (to alter your nature). Trust your nature. So then, what is the purpose of acquiring knowledge? Close to altering your nature and, at the same time, not: acquire knowledge to beautify your nature. Knowledge that is alive gives a form to your character and adds substance to that form too. To put this in modern terms: knowledge is used to help inform you about a problem which, ultimately, YOU must solve. In modern terms, knowledge that is alive is a SKILL.
- Be careful not to honor knowledge above life, for knowledge serves life — it tells you how you should act IN life. So, don't do anything when you're depressed except for trying to get out of it because everything that you read while depressed will serve no purpose or will build towards a bigger hate of life, everything that you think will have the undertones of hate, from which seed can spring only bad stuff. You can write though, I think, while suffering. NOT while hating!
Everything in the process of 'becoming' is a hollow sham, contemptible and shallow: man can only find the solution of his riddle in 'being' something definite and unchangeable.
-
- You must live as something defined 'cause otherwise you're nothing — therefore you need to have rules, to be consistent, to follow something. You do not need a purpose in life, you need a function for it. Therefore, you cannot become something that you are not lest you will be shallow. So, know thyself!
- You can't use other people's opinions to discover yourself. You will see in yourself only those opinions as a consequence.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
- There is no absolute Truth because everything is evolving. An absolute Truth implies something unchangeable, static. This is not the case with humans. Yeah but this only means that an absolute Truth may exist outside and regardless of humans.
- Bad habit in reasoning: an opinion brings happiness; therefore, it is the true opinion. Its effect is good; therefore, it is itself good and true. Reversed this would mean that an opinion which brings pain, and which effects a bad thing is false and bad. Maybe this is why I don't enjoy being happy, because I know it is not necessarily true and because I feel am farther from Truth than when suffering. Nevertheless, now that I learned that Truth cannot be reached (at least by me in this lifetime) because, as far as we know, it doesn't exist, I can enjoy myself more.
- It is okay to have sweetmeats and playthings if you have a good goal that demands severity and self-restraint; without them you will be morose.
- Encourage curiosity in your philosophy by leaving it incomplete, so that the reader can wonder and continue the work.
- You usually are ill because of your job or society; because of them you have lost self-possession. Find the balance between working for others' benefit and working for your benefit. Don't be active all the time. Take time for yourself. Balance.
- Conscience finds excuses if you follow it to an error. Intelligence can't make excuses, since it is exploratory. Conscience assumes to know that it knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Dawn of Day
- Paul, the founder of Christianity, made his religion because he wanted to destroy the Jewish law (frustrated because he couldn't fulfill it) and found in Christ the perfect means to this goal.
- We use rules to automate (remove thinking from) the way towards a goal. Rules distract our attention from their fundamental aim. Just like a man is more careful with his health when the doctor is not around and is more reckless when he is under medical observation.
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science
- If you want ecstatic feelings, high enjoyment, new levels of happiness, you must also be willing to support the greatest possible amount of pain. If you don't want pain, you will also receive the least amount of pleasure.
- Pain is good. We think it bad because it brings displeasure, but displeasure is necessary for greatness. Strive for the greatness and see suffering as the joyous thing you must travel through to it.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Just as Israel and his twelve tribes were laying the ground for Jesus, so do we lay the ground for the Superman (maybe when Jesus comes back... maybe).
- If you cannot love a place, a person, or a thought anymore, move on. If you sit with it, you sit in a lukewarm state.
- You find your way by questioning AND answering the ways you are currently on.
- All is in flux, but humanity has long ago learned how to make bridges which stand against change.
- Hate can bring wisdom: there are things to hate in even the best things. Hate them to create better things.
- False is the truth that comes without laughter.
Friedrich Nietzsche - The Antichrist
- There are no universal virtues. They are
an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life.
We must make our own virtues, according to themost profound laws of self-preservation and of growth.
Virtues mustspring out of our personal need and defence.
- He defined consciousness, or
the spirit,
as asymptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily—we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously.
If wetake away the nervous system and the senses
, thenthe rest is miscalculation.
- When you are going on a downward spiral, when your will to power decreases, when you are mentally weak,
there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence.
- Why I am attracted to the devil (maybe, partly, ... all qualifications here):
The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to "goodness-in-itself" also prompts them to eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.
- The loftier you make an idea you also tend to make it
ever thinner and paler.
That image we have of an angel soaring into the sky, becoming pure light, becoming everything (a system of thought, a religion), and finally disappearing? What use have we of something which disappeared or of something which represents everything? We need precise, strong, earthly, well-fed ideas! - Pilate, Nietzsche thinks, is the only honourable character in the Gospels. The only valuable words in the New Testament are his:
What is truth?
- Nietzsche defines lying as
to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is
and attributes it as the first requisite for a party man. - He defines a conviction as
a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose
and ponders if lying is not an embryonic form of conviction.
Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
- Taste is the popular word for the instinct of self-preservation that empowers acts of choosing one's
diet, locality, climate, and one's mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of self-love.
This is defensive — guarding against bad taste. The small defensive acts take a lot of energy. This can deplete one:When he has not a book between his fingers he cannot think. When he thinks, he responds to a stimulus (a thought he has read),—finally all he does is to react.
This leaves the scholar exhaustedin saying either 'yes' or 'no' to matter which has already been thought out, or in criticising it—he is no longer capable of thought on his own account.
This exhaustion leads to decay:In him the instinct of self-defence has decayed, otherwise he would defend himself against books.
This decay leads to disinterestedness — man will ingest anything; he will become full of not-himself and thus empty:In the concepts 'disinterestedness' and 'self-denial,' the actual signs of decadence are to be found.
- For Nietzsche, man needs to
never have spared himself, he must have been hard in his habits, in order to be good-humoured and merry among a host of inexorable truths.
- He sees a free spirit as a
spirit that has become free, that has once more taken possession of itself.
- Nietzsche realized that he was stuck in a rut and got free by ceasing
for years [...] from reading
which wasthe greatest boon I ever conferred upon myself!
- The first condition of a creative act,
of every act which proceeds from the most intimate, most secret, and most concealed recesses of a man's being,
is theexpenditure of all defensive forces.
I even think it probable that one does not digest so well, that one is less willing to move, and that one is much too open to sensations of coldness and suspicion; for, in a large number of cases, suspicion is merely a blunder in etiology.
The psychological problem presented by the type of Zarathustra is, how can he, who in an unprecedented manner says no, and acts no, in regard to all that which has been affirmed hitherto, remain nevertheless a yea-saying spirit? how can he who bears the heaviest destiny on his shoulders and whose very life-task is a fatality, yet be the brightest and the most transcendental of spirits—for Zarathustra is a dancer? how can he who has the hardest and most terrible grasp of reality, and who has thought the most 'abysmal thoughts,' nevertheless avoid conceiving these things as objections to existence, or even as objections to the eternal recurrence of existence?—how is it that on the contrary he finds reasons for being himself the eternal affirmation of all things, 'the tremendous and unlimited saying of Yea and Amen'?... 'Into every abyss do I bear the benediction [i.e. a short invocation for divine help, blessing and guidance, usually after a church worship service] of my yea to Life.' ... But this, once more, is precisely the idea of Dionysus.
-
- Tragedy transcends paradoxes and breeds a positive outlook of life.
- After expending goodness, you need recreation:
It was God Himself who, at the end of His great work, coiled Himself up in the form of a serpent at the foot of the tree of knowledge. It was thus that He recovered from being a God.... He had made everything too beautiful.... The devil is simply God's moment of idleness, on that seventh day.
- He defines the conscience as
the instinct of cruelty, which turns inwards once it is unable to discharge itself outwardly.
- A gentleman is a man who has
a feeling for distance in him,
whosees rank, gradation, and order everywhere between man and man,
and whomakes distinctions.
To tell the truth and to aim straight: that is the first Persian virtue.
-
- It is also what Jordan Peterson talks about ad nauseum.
It is from this passage, and from no other, that you must set out to understand the goal to which Zarathustra aspires—the kind of man that he conceives sees reality as it is; he is strong enough for this—he is not estranged or far removed from it, he is that reality himself, in his own nature can be found all the terrible and questionable character of reality: only thus can man have greatness.
-
- Reality is great. If a man has the attributes of reality and sees reality for what it is, he is great.
- He defines self-love as
the profound need of growth and expansion.
Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents, actuated by a desire to avenge themselves with success upon life. I attach great value to this definition.
-
- If somebody tells you that what you are doing is bad or good does so, in part, out of hate for life; and — if what you are doing comes from your Will to Power — out of envy, jealousy, etc.
Carl Jung - The Red Book
- The image of the redeemer is the child because, after destroying the old, you need to start anew, as/like a child.
- The mandala is
formation, transformation, the eternal mind's eternal recreation.
They arecryptograms on the state of [...] self.
- The self is
the wholeness of the personality, which, when everything is well, is harmonious, but which can bear no self deception.
It is alsothe principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.
- In him, Jung had the spirit of the time, concentrated on
use and value,
and the spirit of the depths,which led to the things of the soul,
and whichrules the depths of everything contemporary.
From Faust:What you call the spirit of the times is fundamentally the gentleman's own mind, in which the times are reflected.
The spirit of the timechanges with the generations
whereas the spirit of the depthsfrom time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time.
The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement
for themelting together of sense and nonsense
whichproduces the supreme meaning.
Both are necessary:The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.
- Jung said that not all people have to know themselves. The shadow of the image of God is as big as the image itself and some people need the
shadow. But, his spirit of the depths then said that:
No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, [...] [it is the] foundation stone of what is to come.
- Following my own way, I feel, will be very lonely:
The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos.
As in,let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.
However, this is necessary, as an instinct in myself is telling me, and Jung expresses better:Laws and teaching held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.
Because of this venom I have to run away in myself. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection.
-
- Jung favored wholeness over perfection.
If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian. Initially, I wanted to emulate and imitate Christ by living my life, while observing his precepts. A voice in me protested against this and wanted to remind me that my time also had its prophets who struggle against the yoke with which the past burdens us. I did not succeed in uniting Christ with the prophets of this time. The one demands bearing, the other discarding; the one commands submission, the other the will. How should I think of this contradiction without doing injustice to either? What I could not conjoin in my mind probably lends itself to living one after the other.
-
- This is like my soul spoke through Jung. I used to talk the same idea: Christ said that to follow him we must get rid of everything. That includes HIM!
The creating of the new shrinks from the day since its essence is secret.
-
- Maybe this is why I am more creative in the evening.
Something evil is attached to the creation of the new, which you cannot proclaim loudly.
-
- Maybe this is why I become a little crazy when I am being creative in the evening.
Fear the soul, despise her, love her, just like the Gods. May they be far from us! But above all never lose them! Because when lost they are as malicious as the serpent, as bloodthirsty as the tiger that pounces on the unsuspecting from behind. A man who goes astray becomes an animal, a lost soul becomes a devil.
-
- I think he just brought his balance to an ultimatum. Regarding everything spiritual, mystical, the unknown: only be interested enough in
it so that you understand what is happening, what are you experiencing, what are you living, even though you cannot comprehend it. Some
things we cannot understand, some animals we cannot tame — however, it is our duty to be aware of them: stay inside if there are wolves
outside, but be able to kill them if they attack. Or, at least, know what killed you. He compresses all of this elegantly in the
sentence
May man rule in the human world.
He seems to follow this with an advice for your soul, which I will extend to the God too:The excess of your rage, your doubt, and your love belong to her, but only the excess. If you give her this excess, humanity will be saved from the nightmare.
The seed of these sentences, to me, is: only invest into the things not of daily life your left over energy propelled by curiosity, respect, love, and probably other things. Making this your entire life is not healthy, for you can become a scholar, hermit, etc., extremes which cannot be referred to as men who have experienced it all — whole men (holy men) — but as specialized men.
- I think he just brought his balance to an ultimatum. Regarding everything spiritual, mystical, the unknown: only be interested enough in
it so that you understand what is happening, what are you experiencing, what are you living, even though you cannot comprehend it. Some
things we cannot understand, some animals we cannot tame — however, it is our duty to be aware of them: stay inside if there are wolves
outside, but be able to kill them if they attack. Or, at least, know what killed you. He compresses all of this elegantly in the
sentence
Technology
Bilgin Ibryam and Roland Huß - Kubernetes Patterns
- The microservices architecture trades development complexity for operational complexity.
- Kubernetes needs a lot of info up front so it can manage the resources automatically and make intelligent decisions.
- You can check the liveness and readiness of a Pod by sending an HTTP GET request and checking for a 200-399 response code, or by sending a TCP Socket probe and expecting a successful connection, or by executing arbitrary code and expecting a 0 exit code. The corrective action of the liveness probe is a Pod restart and that of a readiness probe is the removal from the Service endpoint so the Pod will not be accessed if it's not ready.
- Containerized apps don't control their lifecycle. This was handed over to Kubernetes. This abstraction removes the need for application-specific lifecycle management. Less code to take care of.
- Watch out for Defer containers, the opposite of Init containers. Coming soon to a cluster near you.
- At the moment, Cluster Autoscaling is very experimental. Even its concept still implies manual configuration of nodes that may be used later for scaling up; a form of hot stand-by. I'm curious if this Kubernetes feature can be extended with a meta, self-aware agent that will search for potential nodes to assimilate.
K.C. Wang - Systems Programming in Unix/Linux (only partly read)
- Use
visudo
, notvim
, when editing/etc/sudoers
becausevisudo
includes error checking and validation for this special file. - Vim has 3 modes: command (the default mode; used for entering commands), insert (text manipulation), and last-line (saving files and exiting).
To enter insert, press a (append) or i (insert). To enter last-line, use
:key
wherekey={w, q, wq, q!}
. - The C
volatile
keyword tells the compiler to not optimize that variable and the code operating on it. - Each
struct
member has a unique memory area. Eachunion
member shares the same memory area. You can see unions as a flag value. You can have multiple variables in the union but the union can store only as much as the largest variable. You can cram the variables in astruct
using__attribute__((packed, aligned(X)))
. - In ext2/3, directory contents are
dir_entry
objects:struct dir_entry {
int ino; // index node number (stores file metadata)
int entry_len;
int name_len;
char name[];
}
- The
PATH
environment variable is a list of directories Linux checks for commands. - A named pipe (e.g.
mkfifo named-pipe-piper; ls -al > named-pipe-piper; cat named-pipe-piper
) differs from a regular pipe (e.g.some-command | grep pattern
) in the following ways:- it has a name
- it's on the filesystem (i.e. persistent)
- allows for two-way communication
- allows for access control