Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Procinsh – A 3D Linux process inspector

github.com

63 pointsa_kawashiro26 comments

I built procinsh, a 3D Linux process inspector inspired by Ghost in the Shell.

It visualizes running processes and their relationships in a 3D UI. Process activity, memory maps, file I/O, and socket communication are reflected in real time.

The backend is written in Rust and uses procfs, eBPF, ptrace, and process_vm_readv to collect information from the system.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rnWvN8ej2A

More details about the motivation and implementation: https://akawashiro.com/articles/procinsh-en

This is beautiful! I'm so excited to see more and more projects finally move into the third dimension for visualization of runtime and static data. I'm curious if you've played with rendering memory at all - textual bits, that is. I've been working on that end, a high performance text renderer that focuses on 3D blitted glyphs in the hundreds of millions, and I can absolutely see that sitting on top of these process towers and grids to see running memory and executing code! Any chance you're open to a side chat in some Discord or email chain?

Thank you for your comment! Sorry for the late reply — I was asleep.

I just created a Discord server: https://discord.gg/aQuNSczpw

> I'm curious if you've played with rendering memory at all - textual bits, that is.

This is a very interesting idea. I actually considered visualizing memory contents, but for now I decided not to render all memory contents and access because of the amount of data that would need to be transferred from the backend to the browser.

That said, it is definitely something I would like to explore. Your 3D text renderer sounds especially interesting for visualizing memory contents inside the process towers.

I'd be very happy to discuss this more on Discord!

"It's a UNIX system!"

https://youtu.be/dFUlAQZB9Ng

Irix to be more specific ;)

> AGENTS.md

You didn't build a thing, dude. You had a machine build it for you.

> You didn't build a thing, dude. You had a machine build it for you.

But when agents hack another company, it's not the LLM that did it but the guy who asked it to.

Strange contradiction.

There's a meaningful difference between crediting an author with his work, and engaging in reckless and negligent behavior. Yes, OP prompted an LLM to build something for him. He did not engage in a creative act or solve engineering problems. He should not feel pride for pulling the lever on the slop machine just because it paid out.

LLM companies set their bots loose on a task and failed to secure the environment. I haven't met anyone who suggests they are brilliant hackers that put Kevin Mitnick to shame. I have heard (and happen to agree with) arguments that they created conditions, either willfully or unwittingly, in which their systems breeched others. The argument is that they acted with gross negligence when using a dangerous tool, and may or may not be liable for such. If the US ever makes crime illegal again, the courts will decide.

I just find the apparent hypocrisy amusing.

I hear an endless stream of anti-AI nonsense daily - and this appears to be yet another example of it.

The "apparent" hypocrisy dissappears the moment you think about it at all though, as I explained above.

But if you're not capable of moving beyond a superficial reading of a statement, I can see how you might easily dismiss as "nonsense" the very real environmental, economic, technical, ethical, social, and cognitive issues introduced by the way LLMs have been forced into our lives.

> LLMs have been forced into our lives

Anyone who hasn't had his head in the sand has seen this coming for the last 60 years. Why do you think Turing created his test?

At this point the stubborn refusal to see it has become laughable.

> The "apparent" hypocrisy dissappears the moment you think about it at all though, as I explained above.

Yeah... I think we'll just need to agree to disagree, friend.

If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.

this looks something pulled straight from a hacker tv show that I would have thought fake as hell

Looks like the gibson in the movie Hackers.

now I can finally live my dream of saying "it's a unix system I know this" in front of my family and non-technical friends while pulling this thing up and inspecting my bloated tmux processes running 20 claude code instances

"Its the Gibson - it's finding us too fast!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4&t=63s

I haven't seen Hackers yet. Thanks for the reference!

Excellent! Strap on your rollerblades and get ready for a good time!

You could do that before, because that scene was actually a file manager written for UNIX called fsn. But there have been ports / reimplementations of it since such as fsv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

It’s probably the only time in cinema history that a “hacker” visual effect was actually UNIX.

These visualizations appear to so similar to the ones in the movie Hackers 1995. Is there a pool at the rooftop? :)

Over 20 years ago we had a doom in which your processes were represented by monsters and killing them sent the kill signal. :)

Did a procfs scraper once, handling pids vanishing mid-read took me ages.

Obligatory reference to psDoom [1]. There’s something quite fun about killing the monster labeled “init” and poof! Your whole system is now dead.

[1] https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

I didn't know about this game! This is exactly the kind of feature I want to implement in the future. Thank you so much!

beautiful

Look at that FPS!! Now we need another inspector to monitor Procinsh.

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