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Discussion (58 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
* Use pangram for catching AI slop
* Be good at spotting AI slop
* Beware of website built for AI crawlers only
* Do not buy stuff from China
* Do not consume peptide supplements
* Peptides are good but buy local
* Do not live in SF
The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection? To that I say, to each their own but I'll wait for the pharma industry to catch up. I'm not that bored.
People don't seem to be regularly dying from peptides, at least not now.
Life out of balance, indeed.
(Yes, eating healthy and exercising would probably help most people, but many remain)
on one hand: no, absolutely not, hell no.
on the other hand: these people are voluntarily doing human sperimentation. things like this are going to happen anyway so we might as well collect the data (samples, effect etc). it's not much different from the safe needles initiatives.
If you artificially inject the correct protein into your body to mimic a naturally producing one, it would do the job and in that way peptides works. However, most of peptides injected by people are hardly human tested for long term effects. Human body is remarkable at adjusting and maintaining a baseline and we don’t know what would be the unintended side effects of these peptides because the body would try to counterbalance it. At best it could be just a mild headache or stomachache and at worst it could be cancer
Anyone talking about "taking peptides" as a meaningful sentence is absolutely dismissible in the same way someone talking about "taking chemicals" is dismissible.
Injecting poorly-studied grey market peptides seems like a bad idea.
From what I've read there is some real risks associated with using them. Sounds a bit like the marketing of steroids in the 70s.
The drugs (coincidentally of shape "peptide") that have been through clinical trials are obviously measured against placebo, and they (like the approved GLP-related set of drugs) are outrageously effective beyond placebo. And have very little downsides compared to the downsides of being obese, which are far more immense than people appreciate.
50 years ago it was cocaine, 40 years ago there was crack, 30 years ago it was heroin, 20 years ago we had bath salts, 10 years ago it was gas station drugs and meth, 5 years ago it was Ivermectin, this year it's SF techies doing their own research into peptides and taking some. Taking the latest drug (or peptide in 2026) is its own benefit.
As with any substance, there can be use, and abuse. If you would have told people 30 years ago you use creatine, you would be stared at as if you inject steroids or growth hormone. Today it is in the supermarket, literally next to the protein bars. Throwing Ivermectin on the same pile as crack and heroin though.. :D
I am sure there are dozens (dozens!) of idiots who inject whatever they think it is for whatever reason, valid or not. Peptides is a craze, and it is also emerging here in the Netherlands, but as people have pointed out, lots of things are peptides, and lots of them seem to have significant health benefits, when used properly. Give it another 30 years... they will be next to the protein bars as well, once someone has figured out how to capture the profits.
>"The trained eye, weary of vibe coded designs, will see Claude Code’s aesthetic fingerprint all over this. "
yeah, everyone is re-doing old interfaces with LLMs.
>"They're hosted on AlexHost"
yeah, they're selling grey market pharma.
Now, I have no problems saying that the whole thing is a bot driven scam -- it probably is , grey market web is filled with scams -- but there was no evidence given; just an ad for a magic tool that detects AI... somehow.
...which makes me feel like an asshole for putting in the time looking for the anchor and hoping it wasn't an advertisement.
No, they don't, it's a very Silicon Valley specific thing and I never heard about them here in France. People need to stop thinking their experience generalizes by default
Not every aspect of american culture makes it overseas and much less does now than used to 20-30 years ago.
I think peptides (and medicating yourself out of a hole in general) are a pretty uniquely american thing.
Also, I'd add that gym bros definitely have heard of them, especially if they are familiar with steroids.
The GLP-1 drugs are probably the main cause of this. We have this amazing class of compounds that work really well, But are priced pretty high, at least considering lower UK wages.
So there is a big incentive to look at getting these much cheaper from China. You hear about this happening, and then you see the fact that these companies have big catalogues full of other peptides that are a crypto payment and a click away.
Maybe a US thing
https://pro.inserm.fr/press_synth/peptides-les-autorites-ale...
it's not a sv-only thing.
The blog post rightly points out we should get good at spotting all this but this is not the scary part, the scary part is that the audience for these ecosystems is not even humans, it's the big AI players like Gemini and ChatGPT, and those are places that a lot of people are going to get information and advice on things.
I use Gemini quite a lot and lately I've already noticed it's very quick to give me a broad spectrum vibe on some issue or topic and not good at all at backing it up with reputable sources. So I think this is potentially a very ominous development of the entire web itself becomes a giant poisoned cauldron of untrustworthy AI maliciously influencing "trustworthy" AIs.
Update: i fed this comment into Gemini and asked "what is Google doing about this?" and it produced a very long, detailed answer, leading off with tagging this as the so-called "internet ouroboros" problem. For those who don't feel like doing the same, I can distill it's answer as follows: "Yo. Chill. We got this, bro. Lol" so we're good!