My gym forced a social media down my throat. So I reverse-engineered its app
shayon.work
shayon.work
It's just not interesting to me. I'm sure most of us here have fixed little annoyances in our lives with AI at this point. I could write a post about how I forked newpipe to add features I wanted but I doubt anyone would care because they can just do that too.
I know the world is different now. I'm just crying about it is all.
"DeepSeek, write a technical report about how you cracked the app. Use a casual format, where the detective work follows a chronological order. Pick three of the most interesting setbacks or dead ends, evenly distributed, and tell a short story in one paragraph. Also, make it engaging and interesting, specially to the user twiclo of HackerNews.
Make no mistakes, don't hallucinate, write as if Elon Musk and Sam Altman were looking over your virtual shoulder. I will drown a baby monkey for every mistake I find. Don't bother me until you're finished, I'll be away from the computer."
Jokes aside, I have the exact same feeling. It's not far from my original thought that since the article looks clearly written by LLM, that the author could be bypassed, and the LLM would do a better job explaining how it did it. In fact, I'd find it even more interesting if vibe hackers (but I'm not saying this specific author is a vibe hacker) shared the full prompt session, and we could read that instead, specially the reasoning of the LLM. Even better if it was a format you could import in your own LLM.
We're just counting down to being unable to exist without a smartphone on your person at all times. What a dystopia.
I posted about it yesterday, I think.
Right?
Unfortunately, I think it's already impossible to attend major events without a phone, at least if it's a major event at a stadium. Smaller venues still send out emails with QR codes we can just print out.
The difference is in that the phone is infinitely more useful and potentially useful; and the dystopia only arises from the fact that it has been used against me in accordance to the surveillance state.
The phone, and the carrying of it, is not really the issue.
At a couple other gyms (these were some 20 years ago), you gave your name when you came in, they pulled up your photo, and checked if it was close enough. Again, no need to carry anything.
That requires staff, which is expensive, but my point is to highlight there are options where you don't need to carry anything. Those sound like the world I would prefer.
While a phone may often be more useful, it's not infinitely more useful than other options. When I used to regularly swim at neighborhood pool, which is in walking distance, I had an RFID card to get in. The card could fit in my swim trunks. When the weather was warm enough I could walk to the pool carrying only card, towel, and body wash. I didn't bother getting a locker. A phone would have been less convenient and therefore less useful.
I used to have a ring of like 2-3 dozen keys. Now the only key I need to carry is for my car.
Even homeless people need smart phones these days in order to interact with the agencies that help them.
plenty of places to charge, and lots of free wifi.
its a good thing. they can communicate, call for help, or just stay busy -- you have a lot of free time when you're homeless and jobless, and being able to scroll the internet keeps you in sync w/ the world.
probelm is getting them the phone, and making sure they don't lose it.
You speak as if this is a group of "others" that need controlling, rather than a (temporary) situation anyone can find themselves in. Nor do you recognize the reasons why people end up homeless. You suggest that pushing people to doom scroll all day is a good thing.
Have you considered that being homeless you'd have no money? At risk of theft? That many sell anything worth something to feed themselves or addictions? That you'd get kicked out of places where it's warm with wifi? That you'd have to carry a charger around too? Or that people often refuse to communicate and ignore you? Or that you'd desperately need help and long term support already, which isn't there? Probably struggling with mental health or abuse and trauma?
Tying our lives to a digital devices in order to exist is already dystopian. What you suggest in such a tone and attitude is detached from reality.
Don't Vibe Code in Between Sets
Keep your rest time for recovery, not React components.
Please refrain from writing code, checking commits, or prompting Al during your workout.
Be present. Lift harder. Ship later.
I similarly reject apps and QR menus in restaurants, airlines, etc. If you can't be bothered to give me a paper menu, I can't be bothered to eat in your establishment.
I overheard several very forceful discussions from people who had a smartphone but wanted to leave it at home. The staff - likely on orders from the gym chain - refused to budge.
You’re telling a business to change their login requirements (big inconvenience for them) so you don’t have to use an app (small inconvenience for you) and if they don’t you’ll quit (big inconvenience for you, small inconvenience for them). That’s almost never going to work.
But the calculation isn't as simple as you suggest. Smartphones save them money over the older system, which used RFID cards. That meant they needed local staff to handle lost cards. Now if you lost your phone, it's all up to you, and they can deal with other issues over the phone or in-app chat.
The older system allowed booking group classes on the app, online and on a computer in the gym. There was an RFID scanner in the group rooms to check in, with a printed receipt to show the instructor.
The new system got rid of the online and local booking options, and the scanner and printer, which saves them money.
If they figure 1% of the members might leave, but they get more profits from the remaining 99%, then they'll just shrugs at you cancelling your membership over it.
[1] The breaking point for me was the worsening group dynamics. It used to be people would chat to each other before a group class started. It turned into a bunch of people staring at their phones while waiting. It used to be that people would take a short rest between sets. That became a moment to pull out the phone, get distracted, and block others from using the machine or bench. I liked to see and say hello to the staff when I came in, but they reduced staffing, making the gym feel more isolating.
That's why we've collectively stopped using fossil fuel, stopped buying clothes made with sweatshop labor (so garment workers in Bangladesh have no need to protest over minimum wage), stopped eating chocolate made with child labor, and stopped buying electronic devices with cobalt from "artisanal miners" in the DRC. /s
They have a model of the demand curve across market segments. They expect people to drop out when things change, because they know the customer is not king, as drnick1 comments. Profits are.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/why-people-c...
This generally gets me a workaround. I do even have a company phone with locked down applications... it's just not my only phone.
Update: It was hard to find because it was titled, "I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer"
I love being able to do things like this and rip out the crap being forced down our throats.
The person at the front desk was absolutely no help and could have been replaced with a sign that said, "you can do everything in the app."
The AI companies are trying to convince dentists offices they need Claude. The truth is regular people don't care. There's always only going to be a subset of the population that wants to build things.
why do I need to burn tokens to do this?
They review video and deal with friends sharing a keyfob pretty harshly. Membership revoked.
This is the real strength of LLMs. Not that they write the most sophisticated code; it's the brute force element. The "I wouldn't have spent the time on it," aspect.
Being negative gives people something to talk about.
I'm not accusing the story of being a random prompt, but the fact that it could be AI slop makes it less interesting.
For the last part, it’s maybe not the best idea to put a link "GitHub & CV" at the bottom then ;)
The idea that a gym is a place where you will likely meet fit, attractive people is something that I think has a broader appeal as long as it remains subtle and unspoken. As soon as you make it explicit with social media it seems like it kills the vibe pretty fast. Or maybe I'm just old and the youngs will just take it in stride like the rest of the world that software has eaten.
An excellent portal to accept a fictionalized ai slop version of "your" experience. Make it long, and maybe put a recipe at the bottom.
I think a story of how you saw a dude drying off his gluteal cleft with the hand dryers in the locker rooms would be an appropriate "experience" if the payment is nothing.
The heuristic "don't hand roll your crypto" is just that – a heuristic. Understand why it exists and you get to decide if it makes sense in your scenario or not.
I know the effect is negligible but isn’t that just stealing
It would be theft if the user was bypassing payment-gated credentials, but that is not the case here.
No. They pay for a gym membership, there is literally nothing to steal from the social media feed in the door-unlocking app.
Is it just me or are people getting too stuck in a Manichean mindset about this kind of thing? This reads like an alcoholic complaining about a work happy hour or something. Just, don't use the social media stuff.
>For the longest time, my LinkedIn bio was “I HATE LINKEDIN.”
OP kind of just seems insufferable. Touch grass.
I hate the "ubiquity" of social media. For me, it's not social media conceptually that's the issue, it's that Meta and others are not good companies. They exist by doing their best to get me addicted to their feeds. It's not healthy. Whether or not there's a non-harmful way to do social media is unknown (by me, at least).