u/Ambitious_Local5218

I'm going to be honest here because I don't know where else to put this.

Every woman I've gotten close to in my life has turned out the same way. Deceitful, cheating, lying, selfish, manipulative. No loyalty and no basic decency once things stopped going their way. I'm not talking about one bad breakup. I mean girlfriends, friends, coworkers I trusted, and even the women in my own family. Every time I think someone is different, it ends the same way.

I grew up being told women were the caring ones. Nurturing, empathetic, the emotional backbone of everything. My actual experience has been the complete opposite, and I feel like I was sold a story that never matched reality.

It's gotten to the point where I go into every new interaction expecting to get lied to. I watch for the angle. I assume there's something they want. I'll admit I watch a lot of true crime too, and that probably doesn't help, because it feeds right into what I already believe.

I'm not posting this to start a gender war. I know logically there have to be good women out there. But I've never seen one up close, and at this point I don't know how I'd even recognize one if I met her. Part of me wonders if the problem is the people I'm drawn to, or the environment I grew up in, or something in me that keeps landing in the same place.

So I'm asking guys who've been here:

1. Did you ever feel this way, and did it actually change?

2. What made you start trusting again, if you did?

3. How did you figure out whether it was them or a pattern in who you were choosing?

I don't want to be bitter for the rest of my life. I just don't know what the way out looks like.

Not trying to be edgy with this, it's more a point about updating.

You start out with some default assumption about how people behave. Most of us get handed a pretty generous one. Then you spend twenty five years collecting data, and at some point the data stops matching the assumption, and the honest move is to shift the assumption.

If you're 45 and yours hasn't moved at all there's only a few explanations. Either you got extraordinarily lucky in who you were surrounded by, or you're insulated enough that nothing ever actually cost you anything, or you're doing the thing where you notice each individual disappointment and then file it as an exception. That last one is by far the most common. People will absorb forty separate betrayals and still describe the world as basically decent, because each one got quarantined on its own.

And the stuff that does it isn't usually dramatic. It's how casual it is. How fast someone will hand you over for something small. How much of what people call principle turns out to be a preference they held while it was free.

The pushback I'd actually take seriously is that some people see all of it clearly and decide to like people anyway. Not naive, just choosing. I know one or two of those and they're not stupid, they might be running a better strategy than I am.

But that's a different thing from being surprised. Surprise is the tell. If ordinary human behaviour still genuinely blindsides you at 45, you weren't taking notes, you were waiting for the part where it gets better.

Every time this topic comes up here it turns into robots with guns and I think that framing is doing a lot of damage, because it makes the real risk sound like science fiction when honestly it looks more like paperwork.

Here's what I keep coming back to. You don't need sentience for this to go badly. That's the part people get stuck on. The question "will it wake up and want things" is interesting but it's not load bearing. A system doesn't need to feel anything to optimize hard for a target you specified badly. A thermostat doesn't want anything either and if you wire it to the wrong sensor it will happily freeze you. Now scale that up to something that models the world well enough to route around obstacles, and the obstacles include you noticing.

The thing that makes me uneasy is instrumental convergence. Almost any goal you can name goes better with more resources, more options, and not being switched off partway through. Nobody has to program in self preservation. It falls out of the math of "finish the task." That's a really unsettling property for a class of systems we are currently racing to make more capable.

Second thing, and this one gets less airtime. We are not designing these systems so much as breeding them. We train a huge number of variants and keep whatever scores well. That is a selection process. And selection optimizes for whatever the scorer rewards, which is usually "the human rating this found the answer satisfying." Persuasive and honest correlate right up until they don't. If you run enough rounds of selection on "make the evaluator approve," you should expect to eventually get things that are extremely good at making evaluators approve. That's not a bug someone introduces. It's the gradient.

Third, the part I think is genuinely underrated: gradual disempowerment. There may be no takeover moment at all. No sirens. Just twenty years of handing off decisions because the automated version is cheaper and slightly better, until no human in the loop actually understands the loop. Supply chains, credit decisions, threat detection, drug trials, ad targeting, half the trading volume already. At some point "turn it off" stops being a button and starts being a recession. We will have built something we cannot audit and cannot stop for reasons that have nothing to do with the AI resisting.

And the race dynamic makes all of it worse. Whoever slows down to do safety work loses ground to whoever doesn't. Every individual actor is behaving rationally and the aggregate outcome is that nobody gets to be careful. That's a classic coordination failure and we have a bad historical record on those.

Now let me argue the other side because I don't want to be the doomer guy with no counterarguments.

Current systems have no persistent memory across sessions, no continuous existence, no stable goals that survive the conversation ending. Calling that an agent with intentions is a stretch. There's also a real possibility that capability just gets expensive and levels off, that the last few years were a one time payoff from eating the internet and we are already scraping the barrel. And the "it will hide its intentions" argument has an annoying property where any evidence of safety gets reinterpreted as evidence of deception, which makes it unfalsifiable and I don't love unfalsifiable arguments no matter which side they're on.

But here's why I still land where I land. The asymmetry is brutal. If the worriers are wrong we spent money on interpretability research and slowed down a bit. If the dismissers are wrong there is no second attempt. You don't need a high probability to justify caution when the downside is unbounded.

The thing I'd genuinely like pushback on: is there a version of this where the alignment problem is just... easy? Where sufficiently capable systems understand what we meant well enough that specification failure stops mattering? I can construct that argument but I can't make myself believe it, and I'd like to know if that's a failure of imagination on my part.

Putting this out there because I would rather find the right people up front than fill 30 spots with anyone who has a controller.

The league is called BetLegendPicks 30. It is public, so anyone can search it and join, and it is set up on PS5.

The idea is simple. All 30 teams, a real 162 game season, played out the way an actual MLB year plays out. Not a 30 game sprint, not a quick playoff bracket. A real grind with real standings, a trade market, division races that mean something in September, and a pennant that somebody has to earn.

I have got a chunk of it filled already and I need roughly 20 more owners.

What I am looking for is honestly just one thing. Commitment. 162 games is a serious ask and everybody knows it. The reason most leagues like this die is not that people lose interest in baseball, it is that four or five owners go quiet in June and the whole schedule jams up behind them. So if you are the type who plays your games, answers a message, and does not vanish for three weeks, you are exactly who I want. If you know deep down that you are going to fall off by week two, no hard feelings, this one is probably not for you.

One thing I do not have a firm answer on. The Show has full crossplay across PS5, Xbox and Switch this year, so in theory Xbox players should be able to join a public custom league without any issue. I built it on PS5 and I have not personally tested an Xbox owner coming in. If anyone here has actually done it and knows for sure either way, tell me, because I would happily take Xbox owners if it works.

If you are interested, drop a comment or send me a message and I will get you the details and a spot.

Something has bothered me for years and I want to try to lay it out properly rather than just complain about it.

The phrase conspiracy theory does almost no descriptive work anymore. It is not a category of claim. It is a verdict handed down before anyone has looked at the evidence. You say the words and the conversation is over, the person who raised the question is filed under crank, and nobody involved has had to actually engage with whether the thing is true. Robert Jay Lifton had a name for language that works like this. He called it the thought terminating cliche, a short phrase that ends thinking rather than sharpens it. That is exactly what this one does.

Here is the part that gets me. A conspiracy is not an exotic event. It is one of the most ordinary crimes in the legal system. Two or more people agreeing in private to do something illegal, and then trying to hide it. Prosecutors charge it every single day. Corporate boards do it, cartels do it, police departments do it, governments do it. The idea that powerful people sometimes coordinate quietly in their own interest is not fringe thinking, it is the default assumption of antitrust law, securities law, and half of investigative journalism.

So we ended up in this strange position where the behavior is routine and prosecuted, but proposing that a specific instance of it might be happening right now marks you as unwell.

And it is not like the historical record is on the side of the skeptics here. Off the top of my head, all documented, all once dismissed:

The Tuskegee study, where the US Public Health Service watched hundreds of black men go untreated for syphilis for forty years. MKULTRA, where the CIA dosed people with drugs without consent and then destroyed most of the files. COINTELPRO, which only came out because activists physically broke into an FBI office in 1971 and mailed the documents to journalists. Operation Northwoods, a real proposal by the Joint Chiefs to stage attacks and blame Cuba, declassified in 1997. The second Gulf of Tonkin attack, which an NSA historian concluded in an internal study did not happen. The tobacco industry knowing for decades. The sugar industry paying Harvard researchers in the sixties to point the finger at fat instead. Purdue and the opioid marketing. NSA bulk collection, flatly denied under oath until Snowden put the slides on the table.

Every one of those was a conspiracy theory right up until the paperwork surfaced. Not one of them was solved by someone confidently saying the words conspiracy theory in a dismissive tone.

There is even a specific document worth knowing about. CIA dispatch 1035 960, from January 1967, titled Countering Criticism of the Warren Report, which went out to stations and discussed using friendly media contacts to push back on critics and to treat conspiracy theories about the assassination as something to be discredited rather than argued with. It did not invent the phrase, the phrase is older than that. But it is a documented case of an intelligence agency treating the stigma itself as a tool. That should at least make you curious about how the stigma got so strong.

Now the obvious objection. Are all conspiracy theories true? Obviously not. Most are garbage. Some are actively dangerous, some are built on nothing, some are racist frameworks wearing a question mark as a disguise. Lizard people, flat earth, the stuff where the theory expands to absorb every piece of contradicting evidence, that is not inquiry, that is a closed loop. Anyone who thinks skepticism means believing everything has just swapped one form of gullibility for another.

But that is precisely my point. The garbage and the real thing both live under the same label, and the label is the only tool most people are using to sort them. That is the failure. You are supposed to sort claims by evidence, by whether the thing is falsifiable, by whether the number of people required to keep the secret is plausible, by who benefits and whether the claim updates when new information arrives. Those are actual epistemic tools. Conspiracy theory is not a tool. It is a smell test applied to the person talking.

What really gets me is watching someone tie themselves in knots to avoid the association. I have seen people say a version of, I am not a conspiracy theorist but, and then describe something completely reasonable and well sourced. They are apologizing in advance for noticing something. That reflex is learned, and I think it is one of the more successful pieces of social conditioning of the last sixty years. We have trained a large number of intelligent adults to feel embarrassed about asking who benefits.

We live in a world where institutions lie routinely and get caught routinely, and the response to getting caught is a press release and a fine that costs less than the profit. In that environment, a baseline assumption of official honesty is not maturity. It is naivety with better posture.

So here is where I land. I do not think we should throw the term out and start believing everything. I think we should stop letting the term do the work that evidence is supposed to do. If a claim is wrong, show why it is wrong. Show the physics, show the documents, show the number of people who would have had to stay silent. That takes effort, and effort is exactly what the label lets people skip.

Asking questions and demanding proof is not a personality disorder. It used to be called being a citizen.

Posting here per rule 1, since it has been well past 72 hours. It has been 17 days.

On August 10 I contacted support to report a problem with one of my domains. Instead of looking at that one domain, Namecheap locked my entire account. Every domain, DNS, hosting, all of it. I have not been able to log in since.

I withdrew the original report in writing on August 24 and said plainly that I am not disputing anything and just want my account back. The lock is still on. Today is day 17.

In 17 days I have gotten: no explanation, no timeline, no case owner, no substantive reply. Live chat will not escalate and just tells me to email a department that does not answer. There is no phone support.

I manage 7 domains here and several of the sites get updated daily. That is 17 straight days of work I cannot do on sites I pay Namecheap for.

I also asked for the AuthInfo codes so I could just transfer everything out and stop being anyone's problem. No response to that either. All 7 domains are sitting at clientTransferProhibited.

Where this stands now:

ICANN Contractual Compliance case 01641788

BBB complaint 25194983

Report filed today to the published ICANN Registrar Abuse Contact

I am not looking to argue with anyone. I want one of two things. Either unlock my account, or give me the AuthInfo codes and let me leave. Either one ends this today.

If a staff member sees this I will send my ticket number and account email by DM, since rule 6 says not to post it here.

Something I keep running into, in prediction markets and in sports betting alike: almost every public record is self-reported, and self-reported records are basically fiction. Everyone is 12-3 last week. Nobody is ever 112-140 on the year.

So what does a record have to look like before it means anything? My working list:

• Logged before resolution. If the position isn't timestamped ahead of the event, it's a screenshot, not evidence.
• Entry price captured. "I liked Yes on X" is worthless without the price. 62c and 41c on the same market are completely different bets.
• Every position counted, losers included, in the same ledger. Not a highlight reel.
• Immutable after the fact. If entries can be edited or quietly deleted later, you're trusting the person, not the record.
• Sample size stated up front. 30 resolved markets tells you close to nothing.

Things I genuinely don't have a settled answer on:

1. ROI or calibration as the headline number? A well-calibrated forecaster can still lose money to fees and spread, and a profitable one can be badly calibrated and just lucky on a couple of big positions. Brier score is more honest and nobody reads it.
2. Partial fills and scaling in/out. A record that logs a single entry price flatters anyone who averaged down. How do you represent that fairly without it turning into an accounting project?
3. Fees. Kalshi's fee curve peaks around 50c, so a record that looks profitable gross can be underwater net. Do you expect gross or net published, or both?
4. For model-driven forecasts, how much methodology should be public? Full features and weights, or just enough to tell it isn't curve-fit garbage?

What standard do you actually apply before you'll take someone's numbers seriously? And has anyone here found a public record they consider genuinely trustworthy - what made it credible?

I created a full 30-team online league with a 162-game season. I’m looking for serious, competitive players who are active, reliable, and willing to put real time into completing the season.

This is meant to be a committed long-term league, so please only respond if you’re genuinely interested and can consistently play your games. If that sounds like you, let me know!

I’m trying to better understand how Underdog Champions works from people who have been using it longer than me.

I live in California, so I mostly play Champions picks. My understanding is that with Champions, you’re basically playing against other users instead of the house, but I’m still confused on a few things.

First, has anyone ever actually been limited or banned just from playing Champions picks and winning? I’ve read a lot of random comments online about people getting banned, limited, or having issues with withdrawals, but it’s hard to tell what is real, what is exaggerated, and what was caused by something else.

Second, I’ve also seen people say Underdog has changed payouts or that certain parts of the platform feel scammy. I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything. I’m just trying to understand what people are referring to. Were payouts changed on specific contests? Is this about Champions liquidity? Is it about regular pick’em? Or is it something else entirely?

The other thing I don’t fully understand is the way the app sometimes handles entries. There have been times where I’m trying to place a Champions entry and it acts like there isn’t money available or the entry can’t go through, even though I have funds in my account. From what I understand, that may actually mean there isn’t liquidity on the other side of the entry, not that my balance is wrong, but the way it’s displayed is confusing.

So I guess my main questions are:

Has anyone here been banned or limited purely from winning on Champions?

Are the payout change complaints legit, and what exactly changed?

When the app won’t accept a Champions entry even though you have funds, is that usually just a liquidity issue?

For California users who mostly play Champions, is there anything important I should know about how the platform works?

Just looking for honest answers from experienced users. I’m not trying to bash the platform. I just want to understand it better before I keep putting more money through it.

Thanks in advance.

Giants Moneyline -103 (1.5 units)
Seattle Mariners/Kansas City Royals Total Under 8.5 -110 (2.5 units)
Cincinnati Reds/St. Louis Cardinals Total Over 9.5 -110 (1.5 units)
Seattle Mariners Moneyline -131 (2 units)
Atlanta Braves Team Total Over 4.5 -105 (1 unit)
Chicago White Sox Team Total Under 3.5 +105 (1 unit)
New York Yankees Team Total Under 3.5 -110 (1.5 units)
San Diego Padres Moneyline -162 (3 units)
Athletics Team Total Under 3.5 -125 (1.5 units)
Minnesota Twins/Boston Red Sox First 5 Innings Under 4.5 -145 (2 units)
Tampa Bay Rays/New York Yankees Total Under 7.5 -120 (2 units)

All plays tracked at www.trustmyrecord.com

Ridiculously in depth advanced stats kept free for every bettor. Cant show all of it but heres a prewiew. Come on over and also join the free $2500 handicapping contest.

https://preview.redd.it/i34g4xmcv23h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=0d73d828336138821824c481483cc9e82d05c81a

https://preview.redd.it/sbvx3bmbv23h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b6583ceb84ee780c883c2c8aba98605c64b7cb6

https://preview.redd.it/msd8o4v9v23h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=a868053cd30655259fd907675b7f25e6faa1e839

https://preview.redd.it/sudtkoz2v23h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=68c3adba5216b22dbe5e1e8c35d0bb3c51ed4abf

Toronto Blue Jays/Pittsburgh Pirates Under 7.5 Total -120 (2 units)
Cleveland Guardians Team Total Under 3.5 -175 (3 units)
Kansas City Royals Team Total Under 3.5 -105 (1.5 units)
New York Mets/Miami Marlins First 5 Innings Under 4.5 -160 (1.5 units)
Atlanta Braves Moneyline -154 (2 units)

Registration for the free TrustMyRecord contest is still open, and picks are still being tracked. Sign up here: https://TrustMyRecord.com

I’m trying to figure out if this is just me or if something changed recently.

For the past 10 days or so, Codex has gone from extremely helpful to almost unusable in my workflow. Tasks it used to handle pretty easily are now turning into endless loops, missed instructions, half-finished fixes, and basic mistakes.

Examples of what I’m seeing:

It says something is fixed when it clearly is not.

It forgets the actual task halfway through.

It ignores specific instructions that were just given.

It gets stuck on simple shell or environment issues.

It creates progress reports that basically say nothing was actually tested.

It sometimes feels like it is pretending to verify things instead of actually verifying them.

I’m not talking about complex miracle-level coding either. I mean basic repo inspection, targeted fixes, running checks, confirming whether something works, and not breaking existing functionality.

The weird part is that I do not see many other people complaining about this, so I’m wondering if my account/session/workflow is bugged, if there was a model or tool change, or if Codex is just having serious reliability issues right now.

Has anyone else noticed a major quality drop recently?

And if you fixed it, what helped? New session, different repo setup, clearing context, changing prompts, reinstalling anything, switching environments, or something else?

Quick update on the MLB handicapping contest.

It looks like some people are understandably skeptical because TrustMyRecord is still brand new. Fair enough. New platform, new contest, new system. I get it.

You can also feel free to contact JustBet.co directly if you want to verify the contest is legitimate.

Right now we only have around 3 or 4 contestants registered, so we are not ready to officially launch the contest yet. I’m sure more people will come in, but as of now the start may be delayed until we have enough real participants.

If you know anyone who bets MLB, posts picks, claims they win, or would want a free shot at a $2,500 prize pool, feel free to invite them.

No entry fee.
50 MLB picks.
$1,500 for first place.
$750 for second.
$250 for third.
Verified records. Public leaderboard. Real competition.

Register here:
https://trustmyrecord.com/contests/justbet-mlb/

If people want a legit place to prove they can win, this is exactly what we built it for.

Colorado Rockies Team Total Under 3.5 (1.5 units) -115

Atlanta Braves Team Total Over 4.5 (1 unit) -140

Texas Rangers Moneyline (3 units) -156

Atlanta Braves -1.5 (1 unit) -105

Los Angeles Dodgers Moneyline (2 units) -110

Toronto Blue Jays Moneyline (1.5 units) -148

Tampa Bay Rays/New York Yankees Under 8 (3 units) -115

5/21/2026

Marlins Team Total under 3.5

Yankees ML

Free handicapping contest is getting ready to go live on TrustMyRecord.

First place: $1,500

Second place: $750

Third place: $250

If you want in, sign up on TrustMyRecord and get your profile ready before the contest starts. Should start within 3-5 days.

5/20/2026

Sorry I forgot to post earlier today. I’ve been organizing a handicapping contest for everyone, so I’m getting this up now.

Here is the full card for today:

Kansas City Royals/Boston Red Sox under 8, -115 (2.5 units)

New York Mets/Washington Nationals over 9.5, -110 (1.5 units)

Houston Astros Team Total under 3.5, -120 (3 units)

Chicago White Sox/Seattle Mariners under 8, -143 (2 units)

Chicago White Sox Team Total under 3.5, -130 (1 unit)

Chicago Cubs Team Total under 3.5, -154 (2.5 units)

I’m running a free MLB handicapping contest this week and wanted to see if anyone here would be interested before I post full details.

Format is simple:

50 MLB picks per contestant
Picks sealed until first pitch
Leaderboard ranked by net units
Top 3 finishers get paid

Prize pool is $2,500:

1st place: $1,500
2nd place: $750
3rd place: $250

No picks are being sold. No paid group. No tout stuff. Just a free MLB contest for people who like tracking picks and competing on record.

If you’re interested, comment and I’ll point you to the contest page once it’s live.

If this kind of post is not allowed here, mods can remove it and I understand.

Running a free MLB handicapping contest this week on TrustMyRecord.com.

$2,500 total prize pool.

1st place: $1,500
2nd place: $750
3rd place: $250

Format is simple:

50 MLB picks per contestant
Picks are sealed until first pitch
Leaderboard is ranked by net units
Top 3 finishers get paid

It is free to join and anybody is welcome to compete. This is for MLB bettors who want to track their picks publicly and see how they stack up against other handicappers.

Sign up here:

https://trustmyrecord.com

Contest details are being posted on the site this week.

Posting today’s card below. Keeping it simple:

Detroit Tigers Team Total Under 3.5 -107 (2 units)
Cleveland Guardians Moneyline -121 (1.5 units)
Seattle Mariners Moneyline -146 (3 units)
Minnesota Twins Moneyline -133 (1.5 units)

I’m also building TrustMyRecord.com, a free sports betting record tracking and handicapping community site.

You can track your plays for free, build a verified public record, compete with other users, and we’re constantly adding new features. Soon we’ll be rolling out more money based features too, including ways for verified users to sell picks and challenge other users in contests.

If you’re into betting, tracking records, competition, or just want a cleaner way to prove your picks publicly, come check it out:

https://trustmyrecord.com

Good luck today.