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Notes from the SF peptide scene

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Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#61

Post by pphysch »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #48
pphysch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, isn't the entire point of SF startup culture (for the last decade++) to build personal wealth through a successful exit rather than build a sustainable business that benefits society? It's a big speculative con game... Opposite of sincere. Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author…

A successful exit means you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it. Sure that gets twisted sometimes when borderline frauds (and actual frauds) sell companies through misrepresentation ... but there is similar fraud whenever and wherever money is involved! Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow. But ... it's also true t…

> you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it

"Useful" is quite the euphemism.

> Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.

This is an extraordinary claim.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#62

Post by rexpop »

adregan wrote: post #19

I’m not really understanding the notion that these people are so sincere. Perhaps we have different definitions of sincerity. To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.

> If a 14 year old says that they are going to change the world, they are being very sincere even if an ‘adult’ knows that the likelihood is low.

No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:

> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”

Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.

Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#64

Post by oceanplexian »

Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much.

Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#66

Post by balamatom »

reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #33
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:…

JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anym…

>I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed

Guess she's still your problem then.

Poor people.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#67

Post by alexjplant »

ambicapter wrote: post #4

I think this author has a very different conception of what “sincerity” is than I do, but I guess that’s the difference between the east coast and the west coast.

From TFA:

> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness — the AI doomerism, the cults, the hippies, the drug use, the polycules — is downstream of people saying things and other people taking them extremely seriously.

This is a perfectly reasonable usage - perhaps not the Hallmark greeting card one but it's certainly valid.

> the difference between the east coast and the west coast.

Having lived in and visited places on both sides of the US I can safely say that there is no single "difference" between them and that treating both as culturally monolithic (or their constituent places as broadly similar) is a massive category error. Boston is not Miami is not Atlanta just as San Francisco is not San Diego no matter how many people confuse them because they both start with "San".

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#68

Post by sroussey »

mh2266 wrote: post #50

WTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation? I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York) all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs

Wegovy/Ozempic (semaglutide), Zepbound/Monjourno (trizepitide), etc are the GPL-1 drugs sold today for diabetes and weight loss. Technically they are peptides. So if people you know have "finally" lost a lot of weight, they are likely on peptides.

Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.

Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.

Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#69

Post by trillic »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #46
iwontberude wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way did SF catch up? I don’t see how people taking all these peptides and transforming into accidental freaks is a step forward for anything but another reason for the state to get involved bc it’s going to be kids using next and it will create an uproar. People with legitimate medical needs will be left up a creek.

The state is already heavily involved, many gray market peptide suppliers were shut down this year, but demand just went to the black market. This would be harder to stop than the illicit drug market that the government has also consistently failed to stop. It’s so cheap that I’ve stockpiled many years supply so there is little worry about lack of availability for whoever needs it. I turned to peptides because of how…

What are the peptides you're using for hEDS?

Re: Notes from the SF peptide scene

#70

Post by rconti »

Aurornis wrote: post #55
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.

Actually from the author's description it sounds like he has lived in SF for longer than most of the people he's meeting.
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