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cryzinger commented on FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs   fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/randycupertino
rootusrootus · 2 days ago
It's opaque, and limited. They buy the raws from China just like everyone else, then reconstitute them, fill vials, and drop them in the mail. They'll only provide a COA if you ask them to, and it will just be one basic mass/purity test most often.

In the gray market, there are multiple mass/purity tests for a batch (to look for variation in fill, mostly), as well as tests for endotoxins, sterility, heavy metals, and fentanyl. Rarely (maybe never; I have certainly never seen it) will a compounder do these additional tests and provide the results.

I think in general the well-known compounding pharmacies (e.g. Hallandale, BPI, couple others) are probably reputable enough to feel okay with. The mom & pop ones (or med spas) I'd be a lot more nervous about. Often ends up being someone who's just reconstituting vials in their living room, and maybe not with the quality controls you'd like to see.

cryzinger · 2 days ago
Good to know, and thanks for the info!
cryzinger commented on FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs   fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/randycupertino
rootusrootus · 2 days ago
After the first big crackdown on compound pharmacies, I have seen a lot of people go to gray market. Especially now that it has become pretty clear that the remaining compound pharmacies defying the FDA are getting their API from the same sources that we can buy it from directly, and their testing is way more suspect. On the gray market the batches of peptides are routinely subject to a battery of tests run by groups of volunteers, which is a lot more than what you can get from your chosen compound pharmacy (most will give you a COA, but that's already table stakes if you buy from a "research" vendor.)

I have noticed that the "research" vendors have started to tighten up their operations, especially the ones based in the US. A lot of people have seen the writing on the wall and expect it to become somewhat harder to get the peptides, and are stocking up. It's a running joke how many years worth of tirzepatide or retatrutide people have in the freezer. Once you've had the miracle drug, you won't risk being without it.

cryzinger · 2 days ago
What makes you say that compounding pharmacies' testing is way more suspect? Curious because I know people who are still using compounding pharmacies (specifically mom-and-pop joints that might be able to evade crackdowns for a while longer) but have considered going grey market... maybe this is the sign to switch?
cryzinger commented on Prism   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
SchemaLoad · 13 days ago
GenAI largely seems like a DDoS on free resources. The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to "create" it, so really what is the point of even submitting it, the reviewer could have generated it themself. Seeing it in software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real work to the PR review.

I'm not sure what the final state would be here but it seems we are going to find it increasingly difficult to find any real factual information on the internet going forward. Particularly as AI starts ingesting it's own generated fake content.

cryzinger · 13 days ago
More relevant than ever:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

cryzinger commented on The Writers Came at Night   metropolitanreview.org/p/... · Posted by u/ctoth
ofalkaed · 16 days ago
The hierarchy of writers you previously mentioned really suggests archetypes of writers, how do you feel about that last jab in that context? What about in context of the pretentious ass of AI? These are some of the things which I had issue with and things which I felt contributed to the general messiness of the story, that the author never considered the piece as a whole. If I dig into it and look closely instead of look at the whole and notice things like the unrealized metafiction, I would end up hating it, it would make it impossible for me to see the author as anything but a pretentious ass or pandering. At least in context of this one short story and generally I do not judge writers on short stories unless they are exclusively writers of short stories, there is a pragmatism required for the novelist writing a short story.

Beheading Altman could be made to work quite well if it had used the metafiction.

cryzinger · 16 days ago
Hmm, I guess I didn't see it as pandering, or I'm misunderstanding what you mean by pandering; if anything it I saw it as the opposite, since the author (a writer) is poking fun at writers. So instead of a story about a bunch of noble, intelligent, sexy writers who defeat the big bad AI, it's a story where these writers are regular, imperfect people with their own insecurities and selfish motivations. But even as imperfect people, their fears and goals are (to me!) sympathetic.

My perception here is probably colored by some of the circles I run in, too. I think a lot of writers and artists are concerned about AI, and will reassure themselves how their jobs are safe because AI can only produce crap, but then they'll also complain how a lot of popular human-produced art is also crap--which opens up a kind of dual insecurity of (1) why is that crap popular and not my own amazing, brilliant work and (2) if audiences already love crap then maybe AI really will take all of our jobs after all...

And I'm probably reading waaaaay deeper into the "I thought genre was beneath you" line than the author ever intended, but that's what it evokes to me. It makes the three writers in the story seem like jerks, which keeps the whole thing from feeling like a two-dimensional morality tale, but it also makes the AI really seem like a jerk for playing to their insecurities, which reminds me that I'm still rooting for those three jerks.

cryzinger commented on The Writers Came at Night   metropolitanreview.org/p/... · Posted by u/ctoth
ofalkaed · 16 days ago
What I meant by not being sure about the point was not that he was not clear in what platitudes he was trying to convey, just that I was not sure about what he was trying to say which includes what questions he was trying to raise. It provides the reader with something to think about primarily through the messiness that you noticed instead of raising questions and ideas which work off of each other; the ending simply undercuts any nuance of the AI failing to get their frustration instead building on it or changing our perspective on it.

For example, if it had ended a few sentences earlier and used that potential bit of metafiction it would be suggesting that the story we just read was or at least could be the story written by the AI for the novelist and now the AI does understand their frustration but represented itself as not understanding it. That gives us a great deal to think about and builds in a second perspective on the entire piece, the perspective of the AI. But as written that only works well with the conversation part of the story and those last few lines make it really not work at all.

Edit: I think you could make the case that the meta is utilized just as I outlined above, it kind of works with the general pretentious ass that ChatGPT is in the story, things like the mace and the general lack of preparedness of the writers kind of works with those last few lines in that context. But that raises other issues and likely has some rather ugly/messy ramifications on the whole, I think. Probably will reread it when I get home but on a quick check of a few things, strongly suspect my initial view is the the more accurate one and I am just having fun with analysis at this point.

cryzinger · 16 days ago
That's fair! I guess I didn't feel the same frustration with the last few lines because they did raise further questions, at least for me. The AI in the story is so bitter and cruel that it makes me wonder whether it does possess the capacity for human experience/emotion that they claim it doesn't have, and therefore might actually have a shot at replacing them. Without that final zinger I don't know I would've felt the same way. (And I did think it was a funny jab at the novelist's own elitism, especially since it adds another dimension of pitting him against other humans in addition to pitting him against the AI.)

Like, I don't think it's an amazing ending, but it did leave me on a contemplative note in a way that a "the AI wrote this all along" ending wouldn't have, at least for me personally. Although I would've still preferred that to an "and then they did, in fact, behead Sam Altman" ending :P

And I definitely respect having fun with analysis, lol. If nothing else I think the story was successful on that front... I don't think the successfully-beheading-Sam-Altman ending would've sparked this kind of discussion!

cryzinger commented on The Writers Came at Night   metropolitanreview.org/p/... · Posted by u/ctoth
ofalkaed · 16 days ago
I am not sure what the general point of this is; for a good chunk of their conversation it seems to show why AI will fail in the arts, it is incapable of understanding their frustration with the AI as demonstrated by the conversation, it misses the humanity of it and only states it and states it as a weird sort of concession. But at the end it seems to undercut that by making it all out as futile and the writers pretentious and/or the AI cruel, which leaves the whole rather thin. The final prompt to the AI had a great chance for a bit of recursive metafictional fun, but does not seem to be used; could be a hint to a subtle bit of indirect metafiction but I don't think it was.
cryzinger · 16 days ago
It spoke to me as someone who's not jazzed about LLMs but also not convinced by the "it's violating our precious copyright!" arguments against them.

I think there's something in there with the character hierarchy of screenwriter vs novelist vs poet; it seems like the screenwriter in the story writes to make a living, the novelist does it for prestige, and the poet does it largely for the love of the game. The screenwriter is on board with AI until he realizes it'll hurt him more than it'll help him--ironic since he had been excited about being able to use different actors' likenesses!--and the whole time he's looking down at the poet like "Oh, god, if all this takes off I'm going to be as poor and pathetic as that guy." (Which raises interesting questions about the poet's stake in all of this: he doesn't actually have much to lose here, considering how little money or recognition he gets in the first place, but he's helping the other two guys anyway.) The novelist is rallying against the AI, but he's also initially disappointed to find out that his work wasn't important enough to use in its training data... and then later gets a kind of twisted thrill when it does actually quote his own work back at him. I dunno. I think it's a messy story in the same way that the conversation about AI and the arts is itself messy, which I like. And I always appreciate a story that leaves me with questions to mull over instead of trying to dump a bunch of platitudes in my lap :P

cryzinger commented on Meet the Alaska Student Arrested for Eating an AI Art Exhibit   thenation.com/article/soc... · Posted by u/petethomas
MisterTea · 18 days ago
> Dwyer claims Granger’s act was akin to slashing someone’s tires to protest the oil industry.

Granger's protest was properly executed as you slash the tires of the oil trucks and oil execs - you strike the people peddling what you are protesting. So of course Dwyer is trying to downplay the significance.

cryzinger · 18 days ago
I don't know, on principle (and in matters of taste) I'm certainly not a fan of AI art, but I think Dwyer's work here was far from "peddling," and at least attempted to do something interesting with the format/medium:

> Shadow Searching: ChatGPT psychosis is a body of work made in collaboration with artificial intelligence which depicts a co-op between a human artist and AI that started as a thought experiment to produce a perfect partner based on one’s Jungian shadow. In the process of this goal a compounding relationship formed with the ai chat bot via recursive mirroring. The work explores identity, character narrative creation and crafting false memories of relationships in an interactive role digitally crafted before, during and after a state of AI psychosis. This highlights and embodies a growing trend that can be dangerous or unpredictable which you are not immune to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWy4UP-ti1s

The execution honestly doesn't impress me much--remember Loab? I would've loved to see the generic pretty girls devolve into something like that, lol--but I think AI psychosis and AI "companions" are relevant and potentially rich topics to explore. I respect it more than that "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" piece that made a splash a few years back.

cryzinger commented on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"   shreevatsa.net/post/dougl... · Posted by u/speckx
PeterWhittaker · 18 days ago
I'd argue that Coe is more than competent, just, you know, detached most of the time. Lamb always knows what needs be done, just never shares, and often lets things happen until what needs be done happens on its own or is inevitable.

Coe has extraordinarily high SA and makes decisions immediately. They might seem impulsive, but when he acts, it is always with forethought.

(Yeah, Coe is our favourite character.)

cryzinger · 18 days ago
Louisa too. Before Coe came along she was for sure the best agent of the bunch; between the two of them it's a tough call imo.

Although I think Standish might have a leg up on all of them, including (sometimes) Lamb... but I'm biased since she's my favorite :)

cryzinger commented on Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/voxadam
ronsor · 19 days ago
Unfortunately for Spotify, court orders are ineffective against foreign nationals sharing information. Copyright enforcement is as futile as the encryption "export restrictions" the US and other countries tried in the 90s and early 2000s.
cryzinger · 19 days ago
Yeah, but TFA notes how Anna's Archive is dependent on US-based infrastructure, including Cloudflare.

As much as I love Anna's Archive, I feel like this Spotify move was a misstep on their part. The music industry seems far scarier than the publishing industry when it comes to copyright suits, which means they have a lot to lose here by poking the bear, but there are already plenty of places to find pirated music, which means they also don't have much to gain.

cryzinger commented on Study: Minimal evidence links social media, gaming to teen mental health issues   manchester.ac.uk/about/ne... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
jadenpeterson · 21 days ago
This is tricky. Anecdotally, social media has made my cousin much stupider - seriously, he’s begging me for help with stuff as basic as calculus (admittedly, I can’t help him here since I’m not good at math, but still…)

I wish there were free online resources for adults with remedial math needs…

cryzinger · 21 days ago
> calculus

> remedial

?

u/cryzinger

KarmaCake day244February 23, 2025View Original