Edit: Oh wait she responded

They said I can't do handstands because of "liability," but I'm better at walking on my hands than some of the members are at walking on their feet.

Like, they don't kick out people with Parkinson's or people doing physical rehab or paraplegics for liability, but they'll kick me out for doing handstands? Blatant discrimination.

Gymnasts ought to be a protected class, I've had enough. "You can't do a handstand on that statue;" "No walking on your hands through the fountain;" "No climbing the monument"- it's fucking bullshit.

Basically it comes down to this- if you'll let disabled people be there, you should have to let me climb stuff. We need an AAA to complement the ADA- the Americans with Abilities Act.

Be part of the change and sign the petition today!

https://www.change.org/p/make-planet-fitness-let-me-climb-on-the-equipment

#stopgymscrimidation

Edit: Somebody reported my petition and got it taken down this discrimination is too pervasive I will be taking this directly to the mayor

My best friend, who I'll call Derek, had been spending an unhealthy amount of time with his fiance (Evan). Every time I tried to tell him I was worried, he acted like I was jealous instead of listening to someone who has known him far longer than his fiance has. He ignored my feelings and even scoffed when I said this was unfair to me.

I eventually got him to come boxing with me after he kept cancelling (I had to pull the "I don't feel safe being alone right now" card 🙄). He came away with some bruises, which I didn't intend, but I honestly thought it might help people see what I’d been seeing- that he wasn’t safe- so I took advantage of the opportunity.

I reported his fiance because he was obviously being emotionally abusive, preventing Derek from hanging out with me. I may have emphasized certain things, but only because nobody takes emotional abuse seriously unless there’s evidence they can actually see.

When nothing happened, I called for help from Derek's phone, pretending to be him. I know that sounds bad, but I was scared he’d minimize it or protect Evan, like victims do.

Now Evan is in jail, and Derek is drinking again and crying all the time and saying he feels crazy (he doesn't know I reported Evan). This isn't what I wanted. I don't want to take care of him. I want to play Halo.

I keep wondering whether I made things worse. But what was I supposed to do- just watch him throw his life away and then pretend I didn’t notice? I'm not even Catholic so I don't understand why I'm feeling this way.

Edit: Solved!

Edit 2: uh oh, I asked my mom and she said I went to a catholic preschool... This might go deeper than I thought.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/46082903

In fairness, the argument that AI is a cult/false religion/false god has been made many times before, however I believe that AI and the AI community most closely aligns with a cult, and here’s why:

Indoctrination techniques:

Generally, techniques that indoctrinate users into the cult tend to follow similar trends, which are notable in many of the AI models having similar effects on the users who subsequently become frequent users of the technology. Broken down, I’d say it’s something like this:

-Innocuous beginnings: Cults are notorious for beginning the indoctrination process with something simple and seemingly harmless on the surface (I.e. conferences, videos, films, games, etc.) these are all real techniques that various cults have used in the past, to somewhat success. Likewise, AI chatbots, image and video generators present just this: an invitation to engage with something fun and seemingly harmless, something that engages the audience and draws their attention.

-Love bombing: Perhaps the most notorious hook of cults is love bombing — giving heaps of praise and complements to the joining members. Likewise, AI chatbots constantly tell you how good your point is or how you’re always on the right track (“you’ve hit the nail on the head”, “that is an amazing point” are but a few I have read of Gemini) This is undoubtedly a form of love bombing.

-Promise of more: Cults often work by enticing their audience with something good, but promising something great (something better) later. Likewise, AI tech companies are always promising more, more, more if you subscribe/follow their work. What better reward for AI users can there be but the promise of bigger and better AI? This is exactly how both cults and AI operate.

Beyond the indoctrination similarities, there are also many, many peripheral similarities (by which I mean subtle, not less important similarities) which include:

-reach and scope: historical cults have often managed to expand their reach across multiple countries around the world. Need I explain how this is similar to the reach and scope of AI?

-withholding/hiding information

-leaders who turn out to be crooks/criminals

-leaders who amass fortunes

And many more.

What do you think? Are the similarities superficial, or could AI actually be a worldwide cult hidden in plain sight?

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)