Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there
update: it’s out and recorded https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/relive/316 also update on intentionally bricked trains story from year ago https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/relive/336
update 2: oh no. oh no no no no
I look forward to your reactions why this is all quite a bad idea (and not just a bit cringe).
so i figured out what their naloxone synthesis is, it’s based on this paper https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/adsc.201300284 they say it’s two step, it’s not two step, it’s 6 steps in two critical one-pot sequences. paper starts with oxymorphone and they start with oxycodone for some reason, that’s one step extra. that transformation requires handling BBr3 which is nasty but clean or NaSEt which is also nasty but safer, but also requires column chromatography for purification. it still can fail in a way that gives products of activity opposite than intended. requires hard to get and rather more on expensive side reagents like vinylmagnesium bromide and burgess reagent, both require strictly anhydrous conditions to work. vinylmagnesium bromide and even solvent used with it (THF) will destroy that shitty PLA lid. final purification in paper requires column chromatography as well. not to mention elephant in the room, that if counterfeit oxy pills are used that contain fentanyl instead it gets you either nothing or fentanyl
what is in paper
what they have shown
this synthesis is fucking garbled and it’s only one of many steps
same with cabotegravir
they’re also using advanced intermediates that could be very hard to source, because this kind of stuff is made internally in company only, particularly that pyridone on left
and that’s just naloxone. nothing particularly hard if you know what are you doing and have right starting materials. commercial synthesis is entirely different btw, and this is partially to make purifications easier and to use robust, high yielding chemistry using cheaper starting materials. they also want to make cabotegravir, mifepristone and fucking gene therapy, and diy hrt (they never cared about it before??) which was already a thing wayy before they got to it, it involved shipping steroids out of Ukraine iirc and it worked because no garage synthesis was involved at all. at least they admitted that making monoclonal antibodies is probably out of their reach, how merciful of them. and that’s just first 15min
it looks like they’re desperately pivoting for attention left and right, i see there nothing but grift
when you have to consider what this arduino jar is even capable of, just taking a look at that naloxone synthesis makes it absolutely fucking useless. it can’t replace sep funnel, rotovap, chromatographic column; it can’t provide inert atmosphere, required in steps 3 and 5 of original paper, it can’t survive refluxing THF because lid will dissolve or melt and cave in, required in step 6 and whatever refluxing solvent is used in step giving oxymorphone from oxycodone, because they neglected to show it, and even if it did, there’s no condenser on top. it really is juicero of backyard chemistry
update: yeah nah what the fuck laminar flow fumehood is wildly out of reach of normal people, making sterile injectables in a garage is not a safe option for 99.99% of people
update 2: analytical techniques included: homemade raman, melting point measurement, dancesafe drug test suite. and fucking taste test, going all the way to 1890s best practices i see. none of these are good at detecting impurities, it will only be good to detect if chinese vendor sent you wrong stuff and it’s only if it was pure
update 3: WE’RE MAKING HRT! looks inside: we’re buying APIs from India/China and compounding them in garage with zero real qc, also we’ll solve HRT with garage gene therapy, promise, maybe, some years from now, donate in meantime
Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health. Despite the fact that for most of human history bodily autonomy, and self-managed health was the norm, it is now required that most aspects of your health must be mediated by an institution deputized by the state.
JFC
go back 200 years before the “gubmint” got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
Yeah, as somebody in the USA, I think that both you and @gerikson@awful.systems are pearl-clutching over laboratory conditions while ignoring the other, more serious safety problems being addressed; the presentation was not exaggerating when they were talking about the lifesaving impact of gender-affirming therapy. Last thread, you sheepishly admitted that part of the synthesis is complicated by criminalization and over-regulation; this thread, I’d like a sheepish admission that about a third of the USA (by population) suffers from restrictions on their reproductive rights.
Like, yes, you shouldn’t brew your own high-proof alcohol at home, because you can go blind from methanol poisoning. But also, there was a time in the USA when high-proof alcohol was over-regulated, and it incentivized a lot of people to homebrew.
The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. “Raw milk” pushers are cut from the same cloth.
never heard of them before. from skimming their wikipedia, it seems their grift is glossing over the details in the “science” part?
From what I heard: Skimming over science, best practices, risks of contamination, risk of producing horror chemicals, problems of sourcing materials, storing materials, storing the final product etc etc.
Here is a bsky thread from the last time they were in the publics eye (more here if you dont have an account) (the latter articles are clearly working on a diff definition of capitalism than I use so I chose not to be too annoyed with the weird digs about that).
This should be a very big red flag: “Mixæl Swan Laufer worked in mathematics and high energy physics until he decided to use his background in science to tackle problems of global health and human rights.” (Ignoring all the other smaller red flags btw, I think I could point one out ever paragraph, if I had not heard about these people before, the final red pill reference would have made me think they were trolling).
interesting read, thanks. the red pill reference also had me rolling my eyes. i guess it’s more virtue signalling than actually making a change.
i’ve complained about them previously https://awful.systems/comment/2754222
why they even are there
(from observation over some years) congress orga more than occasionally fucks up on paradox of tolerance by letting shit like this through
it’s been a thing I’ve noticed and have wanted to actually discuss with some folks, but never really gotten to yet on account of life stuff
there were also the much, much less grey-area instances a couple of years back where they were far too open to a number of abusers (this was around the time the appelbaum shit hit wide daylight), so there is a possibility that the issue runs deeper (in a structural sense, at best; personal sense, at worst) too but I possess insufficient information to know one way or the other what exactly may constitute the problem here
I don’t wanna pull national stereotypes here but aren’t Germans really quite open about stuff like homeopathy? “be your own pharmacist” sounds like right up that alley
Theres a long rich history of German alt med. also (postwar) witch trials, if I can find the book I read on all this I’ll try to post.
Edit: think it was this one https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/128/2/1015/7204469?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
Yes, I can confirm this is true. Homeopathy is really accepted here and is even covered by most health insurances.
There is even a passage in the pharmaceutical law that specifically excludes homeopathic shit from having to prove its effectiveness (they only have to prove it’s not hurting anyone, and the rules for that are much laxer than for other medicine). It’s absolutely baffling.
I haven’t really got enough information about that side of it, the details I have to go on are mostly about things particularly around the values CCC has tried to hold/build (and even there I am absolutely not intimately familiar, for reasons of distance and exposure and such)