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Notes from the SF peptide scene

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Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#51

Post by randallsquared »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #6

This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place. The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:…

They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.…

> I’ve been doing AI for decades

Considering that "AI" before 2016 or so was, in terms of results, a whole different category, this may not be the flex you intend it to be. ;)

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#52

Post by cjbgkagh »

randallsquared wrote: post #51
cjbgkagh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.…

> I’ve been doing AI for decades Considering that "AI" before 2016 or so was, in terms of results, a whole different category, this may not be the flex you intend it to be. ;)

I started doing deep learning in 2011 after a visit from Andrew Ng, prior to that I was doing old school neural nets (RBMs), random forests, Bayesian nets, information retrieval (search engines), symbolic AI, and expert systems. It’s really only the transformer class (2017) that kept on scaling (didn’t plateau) but I think it took to 2019 before that was really widely known. I got some really good results out of squeeze and excitation in 2017 and knew then attention models were the future. I guess how long I’ve been doing it depends on your definition of AI, I think the future of AI will probably work alongside solvers and ontological reasoners which I worked on at university in 2003 though the tech goes back much further.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#53

Post by disposablehn »

Good to see the vibe hasn't changed. At least since I lived there in the 1990s, parties with heavy drugs and crazy sex have always been linked with a faction of the tech scene.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after graduation to work a corporate job in the valley but quit shortly after meeting a group of eccentrics that ran a small business setting up networks for commercial clients and joined their gig. I was making startup money before the word "startup" had any significant meaning. The skillset wasn't AI any kind of coding, but pure network admin. Companies paid obscene amounts of money for us to jumpstart their IT.

I moved into an 8 bedroom mcmansion (location omitted) with a rotating occupancy of about 10-20 people at any one time. We didn't do peptides, we did X and crystal, but it was near constant. The jargon was similar. And there were several houses like this from Oakland to Novato (to LA). It was just constant drugs, sex, partying and a little bit of work to cash a huge check. People moved through houses like they owned them, showing up and crashing, then going to another house, then flying down to LA and doing the same.

I burned out after 5 years of the lifestyle but kept in touch with the rolling scene that still had the same vibe through the startup madness of the late 90's (which unfortunately I missed out on due to years-long medical issues), but I've visited every few decades and it seems nothing has changed except we're greyer and fatter, and the houses are still monstrous, but cleaner and people wear clothing more often.

So when I hear stories like this, I'm glad to hear the culture hasn't changed and the torch has been passed.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#54

Post by arjie »

This is one of those things where someone writes a fun blog post about their lives and everyone concludes it's a story about San Francisco or New York or whatever. I have to say that most of my closest friends are startup executives and we've lived in San Francisco for over a decade and while I've somehow met Curtis Yarvin and Cremieux and all these people I haven't actually been to a peptide party or whatever. I have used retatrutide quite effectively for weight loss[0], so it's not like I'm unfamiliar.

People live so many parallel lives, even in a small town like San Francisco, that you can take so many paths through the scene without even going through the same points.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672926

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#55

Post by Aurornis »

Analemma_ wrote: post #2

Note that this post isn't just about peptides, it's more an overview of the SF social scene in general and what has changed in just the last year. So it includes things like "Tesla FSD actually works now" and "the right is uncool again and nobody talks about e.g. Curtis Yarvin anymore" (both true, IME).

> it's more an overview of the SF social scene in genera

It tries to be, but the person writing it isn’t an SF person. They said they visited SF and went to a party and now they’re lecturing us on SF social scenes from that experience.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#56

Post by edmundsauto »

AstroBen wrote: post #43
Aurornis wrote: post #6

This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place. The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:…

> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see. To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has.…

Ahh but intent to harm doesn’t mean thy aren’t doing harm. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#57

Post by Havoc »

Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse.

Like black market steroids except with less track record

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#58

Post by 650REDHAIR »

Havoc wrote: post #57

Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse. Like black market steroids except with less track record

It’s wild, but unsurprising to me. Coke, “noots”, and psilocybins were big a decade ago and the same argument could be made about their provenance and origin.

I was close to a name brand pre-workout company and the FDA would play whack-a-mole with their formulas and they were on store shelves in every US city.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#59

Post by rdiddly »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place. The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:…

You're claiming laziness because a writer gives explicit testimony to what he saw, heard and thought, without sufficient moralizing layered over the top about how "drugs are bad m'kaay?" I wish more writing was this lazy.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#60

Post by operatingthetan »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place. The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:…

>Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.

The peptides and nootropics are the mildest things on the list, and yet here being compared to illegal stimulants and steroids? Those are not the same crowds at all.

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