Not for human consumption | Hacker News Reader

Not for human consumption

vectorculture.substack.com

53 pointsashergill31 comments

Am I misreading this, or is this person actually implying somewhere in the middle of this unreadable mess of an article that they feed their DIY blood test results into an LLM and then order whatever drugs the machine hallucinates in response? If so, I hope sane society doesn't have to pay for the consequences of this willful self-destruction.

Weirdly enough, i know a guy who's worth half a billion bucks and he's doing exactly that.

So..? wealth ≠ intelligence

I believe that’s their point

Not sure about intelligence precisely, but i have a conviction that richest people are those who in general do things right. Which doesn't necessarily mean "in the smartest way", sometimes (effective) solutions they employ are quite dumb.

Seemed they were ingesting more than just weight loss drugs.

I propose to delete this article from hackernews

People reading two abstracts on PubMed and deciding they can manage their own hormonal pathways is terrifying. The regulatory state is slow and bureaucratic, yes, and its got its own problems, but it was built on a graveyard of people who took unverified compounds. When (not if) a bad batch kills a few dozen people in a telegram buying group, the crackdown will be draconian.

An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.

Yes and the fact that you have people looking for a cure to their ills will always draw unscrupulous parties to their money. The entire supplements industry is sort of a prototype for this with outrageous marketing often targeting vulnerable groups. I’d argue the professional marketing of unregulated substances makes the supplements industry a lot larger than it might organically be.

PCPs don’t have the capacity to follow all medical research either. They depend on a network of institutions and regulation to do their work. How do you propose to scale that without the bureaucracy?

I'm not in favour of getting rid of the bureaucracy, some of it is necessary, but we're way past the benefit.

I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit. At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.

All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!

Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.

I agreee with the caution. I am not endocrinologist enough to guess what may happen and when. Because of the level of variably in all that is being experimented with, my guess is there may be a slower burn rather than explosion of odd toxicities. It does feel like stuff will happen.

I'm partial to the idea that we should think of these people as heroic. No way in hell I'd ever do anything like this, but people choosing to do this to their own bodies and essentially absorbing all of the risk is arguably valuable.

Certainly more important than other definitely dangerous activities like wingsuits and motorcycles.

A family member was poisoned for life by taking tryptophan sold at GNC.

Was hen heroic? No, just gullible.

I’m glad there are this many early adopters. Thanks to them, in 3 to 5 years, all the side effects will be known, including the long-term effects, so I’ll be able to make an informed decision with the support of doctors rather than Claude. I’ll have access to regulated official compounds rather than underground lab compounds that can kill many people with one faulty batch. Please, continue doing what you’re doing, folks!

Will side effects for hormonal and gene therapy approaches be shaken out in just 3-5 years? For gene therapy, the rare blood cancers associated with car-t or bluebirdbio suggest maybe not. Maybe they remain rare, but as scale and flexibility of use increases, how that may evolve. Hormones are a whole different calculation. With the creative and dosing, combinations, and applications I’m not sure how many from conclusions will be available. I’m not judging good/bad here, I’m just thinking that this “democratization” of medicines (maybe otherwise not available to some) will increase access, with both risks and benefits.

> all the side effects will be known

I wish there were some good that came out of this. But these are completely unusable results. It's uncontrolled and not being studied.

Did their testicles fall off because of LLM drug 32, drug 34, drug 2, or a combination of all the drugs they took at the same time? Or maybe it's a combination of their genetic makeup and drug 4.

It'd be like trying to glean any useful medical information from any drug addict. Was the heart attack caused by meth, huffing paint, or one too many cheese burgers? Who knows.

You know there are regulated labs you can send samples to and serious sellers (like the one I use) attach a testing certificate you can authenticate with the lab. So you know for sure what is it you're getting and what purity etc.

On the actual efficacy and safety fair point. But we're all adults here (I hope). And as for "society's consequences" other people mention most of these compounds are taken is such tiny amounts it is very unlikely they are harmful once they have been out for a couple of years and people have been taking them(for example 250ug every second day for bpc-157 my favourite compound that is proven by research to improve necrotic wound healing in mice and significantly improve injury recovery in my personal experience).

As for modification of hormonal pathways. Retatrutide is in a middle of human trials. There is no indication so far it is harmful. Personally I've not taken it (despite my doc literally pitching ozempic to me a month ago, my bmi is 31 and I never seriously tried to diet in my life - I decided to try "the natural way" first - to be fair the doc was also interested in the improvement in the glucose metabolism not just weight loss in my case). But I might in next 6 months if I don't get the results I want.

I’m concerned you are overestimating the value of the certificate of authenticity you’re getting from your supplier. While you may be right that the compounds you intend to take can’t possibly be all that harmful, there’s a good chance what you’re getting may not be what you think, may not be entirely what you think, and likely contains other things that may be harmful, particularly over a longer period of time.

The community in question is https://x.com/frontiertower/status/1938258376913195251.

This is nothing new. Numerous “scenes” do the same. There’s the longevity scene connected to this one.

There’s the psychonaut scene. That’s a bit from the erowid/and misc scene of the early 2010s.

There’s the bodybuilding / gym scene which probably is the longest and oldest subset of members.

I’m not sure which niche communities I’m missing.

Maybe I’ve been gone from SF for too long but this just sounds like a cult. With a LLM generated pitch

It’s natural for these type of communities. It’s not really a cult in the traditional sense, there is enough evidence that some medication/chemicals are gatekeeped they are effective while there’s just enough evidence to prove how dangerous it can be.

It can be understood as hobby group that focuses on drugs instead of another topic. It’s a fine line between reckless and leading edge that most don’t follow imo but it’s a community with its own rules.

I'm glad there are alternative to DNP. There was always someone re-'discovering' DNP in the bodybuilding community (and probably other communities), and it's really best left buried.

Side-stepping regulatory process forgoes the benefit of a highly refined system for determining safety and efficacy, that is obvious - but it also forgoes seller liability. Which means you have no one to sue.

Also why risk permanently destroying yourself. We each only get one human mind and one human body - it’s irrational to do something with so much downside risk.

‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World

https://archive.is/Pu1y3

Maybe worth its own post since this one got flagged. It’s well written albeit scary.

[one day, she accidentally doubled her dose. “My hair started falling out after a month because I was malnourished,” Ms. Bowman said. “It made my heart rate go up 10 beats per minute at night.” Still, she plans to keep going.]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474456

Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465871

Wild, because 2010s tech-hype scene was just people trying to one up each other to see who has the lightest carbon fiber bike.

Oh don’t get me started. I have a friend who jumped on that scene…

Well, six years after he bought it the bike’s frame cracked in half as he was parking it. Somehow he avoided that happening in traffic.

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