dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
I'm just going to say it, I think the interest in "peptides" is a category error.
"Peptide" is a chemical class, not a mechanism. Insulin is a peptide, so is vancomycin. Saying "I'm on peptides" is about as informative as saying "I'm on molecules".
I'm not only complaining about semantics though.
You almost certainly mean "exciting peptides synthesized in China sold on gray market sites" that appeal to bro scientists, which, fine.
The one case where the bro scientists are genuinely ahead of orthodoxy is Retatrutide: real phase 3 data, ~28% weight loss, and the only way to get it is by constituting your own freeze dried vials you ordered for "research purposes only" from a gray market supplier.
But that's the exception. The rest of the peptides being sold on gray market (that aren't already FDA approved drugs available cheaper than pharma out of pocket/gatekept by insurance) are very unfounded. They're coasting off the legitimacy of GLP-1s.
Sorry to be a negative nancy but the clinical evidence for BPC-157 is eyebrow raising in a bad way. The best that can be said about it is that it's apparently harmless and that some athletic associations are concerned enough about it to ban it.
But the evidence base for it comes entirely from one lab which also happens to hold the patent on it, and the only pre-registered trial for BPC-157 that was actually done has never published results. This is an extremely low bar of evidence and may as well be interpreted as anti-evidence. They've been investigating BPC-157 since at least 1989!
On the other hand, peptides like Semaglutide, Tirzepatide and Retatrutide have FDA trials that prove their efficacy (though Reta is not officially approved yet). But the gray market sites will sell you a bunch of other peptides while you're there and the rest of them are not nearly as well established.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Keep in mind that I'm only going off of second-hand forum posting, but from what I've read, people whom have been taking GLP-1 agonists have had to, for whatever reason, stop taking them for a month or so - and when they got back on, they noticed they started loosing more weight compared to before.
Interesting. I wonder what mechanism could explain that.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Agreed! Anyone who has actually lost weight through diet and or exercise knows full. well you also regain the weight when you stop doing it. So I don't consider this a knock against the drugs either, they are miracle drugs because they are infinitely easier to tolerate and, I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I've lost substantial amounts of weight from dieting and exercise, I feel fucking hungry all the time and really tired and miserable. There's no "maintaining" that isn't suffering. whereas I just don't on GLPs
What do you mean by letting their body rest from taking semaglutide? Is that a real thing or what.
I'm on tirzepatide and expect to be on it for the rest of my life, or until something better and more permanent comes along. Which is totally fine with me because the results have been a godsend.
I understand a non-trivial number of people don't regain 100% of their weight when they discontinue, but I have so much anxiety over my weight (and associated worsening health indicators that correlate with higher weight) that I do not want to fuck around with the thing that's actually, finally working.
My own progression on tirzepatide was that running and lifting was harder to do while I was actively losing weight but once I stabilized at certain weight at a certain dose I was able to rack up PR again. That seems under-observed and it makes me wonder if people worry that the bit of sluggishness that comes from going on them will be a permanent thing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
That is arguably a good first line approach.
But what if you're the person suffering from this kind of body dysphoria and you've tried a number of psychological interventions, nothing works, and you also have bouts of self harm because of how upsetting it is and you're pretty damn sure if you could just have it removed you'd feel a lot better about yourself and there's countless reports on Internet forums from people like you who went through the same thing and life got way better for them?
You know there's a risk it might not help but you're willing to try because you just find yourself wishing you could die with increasing frequency?
I don't understand the implication of a medical right in this context. For instance, you don't need a medical right to buy a plane ticket and pay out of pocket for whatever cosmetic surgery you want.
I mean doctors will give you the sex change hormones or surgeries you ask for if you pay them their fee.
Are you okay with laws banning these trans medical practices or are you okay with consenting adults doing these things?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
I appreciate this argument but I would also like to push back a bit.
How do you feel about women whose breasts grow grotesquely huge after childbirth and they have breast reductions so they can regain range of motion and feel less bad about how they look? Most insurance actually covers this.
What about dudes who feel very scrawny and not manly enough who take steroids and hit the gym and get swole? Doctors will never prescribe steroids for this even out of pocket and even if the guy feels suicidal.
What if trans rights groups stopped at simply demanding the medical right to have access to hormones and trans surgeries but didn't demand health insurance or social medical plans cover it. Is that okay?
Let's talk about your penis. How do you feel about it on a scale from 1 to 10 where
1 is "An appendage I associate with great fun and joy especially when it's very hard and having an orgasm and ejaculating inside of a female"
and 10 is more like "A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it"
Do you find yourself flip flopping much between those? Do you think you should trust your belief less if you are firmly at #1 rather than scoring your penis a more even and sober #5?
There are a lot of narcissistic tourists to trans stuff that cloudy the discourse considerably but there are honest to goodness people that are at #10 and have been for as long as they can remember.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
You say fantastical global regulatory regimes and I hear big kid threatening to blow up the Three Gorges Dam if they don't comply.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.
My steelman of @sarker is: yeah LLMs are cool but the real advances come from RL which is narrow and special and difficult to do in non-easily verifiable contexts. General superintelligence is therefore not coming soon.
My counter is something like: just from pre training alone we see huge leaps towards general intelligence and some glimmers of superintelligence. LLMs even in GPT4 era are surprisingly good at chess despite no specific training in chess, for example.
We may not need RL across every possible domain to get general superintelligence, just poking at enough diverse points in the frontier may solve the whole.
And there's lots of room to poke at it through RL approaches: revisiting the DeepMind stuff for example, build a bot that can kick ass at every video game with the same training set. Including building a robot hand that can operate a controller and robot eye that sees what's going on by watching the TV. (Despite all of the hype DeepMind was nowhere close to any of this). I have a hard time believing that nailing that narrow seeming RL problem can't generalize widely.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Such as?
This already seems like such a skeptic's lens that any example I provide will be dismissed as "but it was in the training data lolol".
I meant to use "warehouse" to de-hand wave "an academy". Like just put robots in a big space far away from people and give them diverse tasks to train on. I did not mean to literally imply we'd put them to work in a warehouse and simulate them.
The aim is not directly "build better box stacking robots", it's "we're reaching limits on what we can teach by training on words/code/math so maybe we can get the rest of the way there by doing enough different real world tasks and just from having robots amble about in an environment that we unlock general intelligence".
Training on words on the internet has limits so next lets train agents embodied in spaces, virtual and physical.
I would say Fable is already superhuman at software in general. It's much faster than I am at writing and debugging code and exhibits a high degree of decent taste. The only problem is I run out of tokens so fast. The writing code part is impressive enough but the way it can just look at buggy programs and bang out 50 line test scripts to isolate bugs and test hypotheses is something else entirely. I just watch in astonishment as it does debug cycles that would take me 1-3 hours at a time (plus one coffee) that it does in a minute or two. This is all from my weak user reports like "it doesn't work when I do thing X".
If I were an employer I would definitely pay something like $500-1000/day to arm a senior developer with Fable than I would hire a second senior developer.
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Perhaps we only need to RL them in a few more domains to clinch the rest of generalized superintelligence. E.g. you can have them pilot robots and put them in virtual environments and RL fast them there, or real environments like an academy (a warehouse) a bit less fast.
Partly this is a sample efficiency question - there simply might not be enough data for them to learn this stuff to human level, and architectural advances that improve sample efficiency may lead to huge gains in quality. But it's not clear to me why people expect this to happen.
I agree the sample efficiency is terrible and a large limiter and it falls back to RL and we need at least one more architectural breakthrough. But in 2026 I certainly wouldn't bet against AI labs with armies of Fable agents at their disposal and seemingly infinite investment dollars sorting this out.
"Temporary self-control" implies it gives me discipline or something. It doesn't. The best way I can describe it is it's 9:30am and I just finished my morning standup meeting or whatever and although the idea of going out for a latte and having a croissant may pop into my head just the same, but there's no hit of dopamine that makes me put my shoes on and head out the front door unless I exert an enormous amount of willpower to stop it. Instead the thought is just an idea with no urgency.
It's not even a struggle. Quite the opposite. It would actually be a struggle to go out and eat despite, since the thought of eating when I'm not actively hungry is so boring.
I would love to believe this is reprogramming me, but I wouldn't be surprised if I missing a few weeks of doses brings the urgency behind those intrusive food thoughts back.
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