His point is that the goal of this site is to skew the knowledge of future models, to which this is a relevant point (though.i agree not smoking gun alone)

> The robots.txt is the real story.

Ironically that reads to me like a typical claudeism

I mean, are you fooled by these websites?

Training corpuses (corpii?) have always had lies, propaganda, derangement, you name it.

Given that AI companies are buying up tons of old books and scanning them destructively… I'd bet that the Internet has already become relatively useless as a source of new training material.

For model training, maybe, but the concern of this article is web search, including AI summaries and search as an assistant tool to agents, gets infected with this. You can see it searching virtually any technical troubleshooting topic these days. You've got at least a 50/50 chance the infamous "oneuptime" blog, which once posted over 20,000 posts in the span of a single minute, will be in both the top five links and a reference for the summary.

I read a prediction back in 2023 about there being some epoch date, where any data after it is untrustworthy for training, as it might result in a sort of fixed point, with LLMs training on LLM-generated content rather than human-generated content.

In truth, I don't think that's quite how it works, but I wouldn't be surprised if teams who scrape data for training apply weights in favor of data that is known to be generated prior to the GPT-3 era.

My guess is that a llm would swallow a slop site like this raw.

Look at what companies like Telus or ScaleAi are doing. There are probably tens of thousands contractors at the moment sitting carefully tuning LLMs with quality, vetted, question answers.

What the author did in the article, AI companies can do it too, in particular he used pangram, an automatic AI detector, there is no reason AI companies can't use something like this.

It is even simpler because AI companies don't need to be that precise, just a classifier that can tell roughly what is slop and what is not, missing some of the non-slop is no big deal, and having having a bit of slop get through is not going to change things much. LLMs are relatively robust, otherwise considering the amount of bullshit we find online, they would be completely useless.

To be fair the internet also had huge amounts of slop before the advent of chatGPT

The battle between black-hat SEO and search engines has been going on for a long time. They may or may not "got this," exactly, but they definitely know a lot about it. I'd wager if a blogger can sniff this out, the search engines at least stand a chance.

Before reading the article this is exactly what I was expecting it to be about. There's been a real boom of people taking highly questionable peptides with evidence about as thin as an old wives tail. It would be entirely unsurprising if they were just throwing any old chain together and trying it out.

One sec let me ask an LLM..

There are some peptides which have been abandoned by the pharmaceutical industry before completing phase 3 trials and which can be sold through an FDA exception by compounding pharmacies.

That being said, there’s usually a reason they were abandoned by the pharmaceutical industry; they were ineffective or had a worse side effect profile compared to other drugs already in the pipeline. Good example of this is the “Barbie drug” melanotan II which was abandoned in favor of bremelanotide for treating hypoactive sexual desire because the latter targeted fewer receptors and was less likely to cause hyperpigmentation and other side effects.

Ultimately, most people should probably just stick to pharmaceuticals that have been FDA approved.

ESL here, apparently this phrase has multiple meanings. The first result was "broke", and "stay broke" definitely doesn't sound right. The second one was "having a gun", which I assume is metaphorical for staying on your toes in the context of an increasingly hostile socioeconomic environment.

> was any evidence ever given?

Try browsing through the offtopic forum [1] if you're not convinced. About half of the threads lead with a post which uses the phrase "food noise" (often "the food noise came back"), even in topics like "Pet photos thread" or "TV shows to binge while on the treadmill" [2] where that content is completely inappropriate.

Or, along the same lines: try reading the "welcome thread" [3]. No one actually introduces themselves; all of the replies immediately start treating the thread as if it's a discussion of some vague topic. "Admin" even comes back several times to "close the loop on my own question" and to return "with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one" [4].

In short: all the simulated user behavior on the forum is wildly unnatural. It doesn't stand up to any close examination.

[1]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/forums/offtopic/

[2]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t29681/, https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t31154/

[3]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774/

[4]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-10/#post-47, https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-20/#post-98

So the latest grift to separate fools from their money? Noted.

It's all over in Norway too. Anecdotally it is definitely more common than steroids already. I can only find statistics on the legal ones, but they show that 10% of all women in their 50's are prescribed the ones for weight reduction <https://www.fhi.no/he/fr/folkehelserapporten/samfunn/legemid...> (Fig 13).

-- more gym that boulangerie now. --

haha, good one! ++1

While I doubt, actually, just for the reason that a) a boulangerie is much cheaper to open and that there are in general b) more people who need a boulangerie more necessarily than a gym?

:-))

Outside the gym bro bubble I would be surprised if people had a clue.

This person does talk about it and actually uses them: https://shorturl.at/KdH1z

The only reason I know it is because I keep seeing spam for it on reddit.

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.

Yeah, France should try to export its culture sometime!

As someone from the UK, Techy, nerdy people can know, but normies don't.

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.

Not really spamming, just in need of a solution. I've spend decades researching different literature for the many issues that I have. Not afraid to admit that I suffer from many issues, most of which are painful, uncomfortable, and limit my productivity as well as ability to make a living. Employers, it turns out, are clearly very hesitant to hire somebody with medical conditions. Suffice to say, that reading about a possible solution, new medications, treatment, has yielded little results, most things only promise pain management, no cures, at least for me hence my lack of patience with reading mainstream medical, journals that don't seem to cure anything, thus my preference for AI-based research, to the dismay of many here.

I have tried many forms of snake oil, have yet to find one that totally cures my pain. Oddly enough, I have found no modern medicine that totally heals my issues thus my reasons to focus on holistic solutions and non-traditional methods. Native Americans used natural remedies to heal and alleviate conditions. Who's to say their remedies are not effective. Same deal with acupuncture. Chinese have used it for centuries. I personally tried it a few years ago, when I had the money and it helped me. I find that holistic, non-traditional methods are helpful, especially when compared to opioids, pill-popping, etc.

Interestingly, snake oil gets it's reputation not because it is itself ineffective, but, it was because so many counterfeiters piled in selling cheapfakes, while simultaneously inflating cure-all claims. (citation, Smithsonian Magazine on Stanley Clark). Snake medicines are still used commonly in various types of Chinese medicine.

My take on the peptides craze is it’s like random people started injected insulin because they have a hazy idea of it being helpful for something or other based on the word on the street but they aren’t sure about dose and also can’t be sure what they’re injecting is actually insulin or uncontaminated. They also aren’t diabetic.

> 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?

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.

BPC-157 was discovered in the late 80s, not really novel. As opposed to mRNA shots that everyone was taking happily.

So, chemical pollution and the destruction of our microbiome with excessive antibiotics cause a global obesity problem, and we pump more chemicals into the body to try to solve it.

Life out of balance, indeed.

"peptide" is just a category of chemical. Some of them do good things, some do bad things, some do nothing at all.

Anyone talking about "taking peptides" as a meaningful sentence is absolutely dismissible in the same way someone talking about "taking chemicals" is dismissible.

You also wouldn't want to randomly inject yourself with insulin outside of medical supervision, because it can kill you pretty quick.

Injecting poorly-studied grey market peptides seems like a bad idea.

How is insulin a peptide? Insulin is a giant folded protein

peptides seemed to have popped up about 10 years ago.... now we've got probably over 100 common peptides that are used for various things, here is a sample:

1) PT-141 is a peptide that releases sex hormone into the blood and literally makes you horny, and its primary use is for premenopausal women that have low sex drive.

2) PNC-27 is a peptide that supposedly attaches to the cell membrane of tumor cells and performs cell lysis (death) of the tumor cell, and it's supposedly affects many different kinds of tumor cells: breast, pancreatic, lung, colon, ovarian, cervical, and leukemia

3) Epithalon is a peptide that is noted for extending telomers on chromosomes, leading to longevity benefits.

4) MOTS-c is it peptide that in animal studies is shown to boost physical endurance and mimic molecular changes associated with training/exercise.

I guess "feeling like", sounds like a placebo.

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.

I'm not sure I'd agree that a "bay area peptide party" has any real, useful social benefit. Sounds like hell.

> All those people huffing Whey powder

Please tell me you're kidding.

Ah yes... Ivermectin, very much like the crack epidemic. "It's for horses!!1!" "They do their own research!"

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.