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The Sloppification of Peptides
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 25d agoBut, what actually are the benefits of all this peptide ingestion ? Does it replace, Good Food, Sleep and an exercise ?
- fl0id 25d agoYou can feel like you have control of your life and body, without doing anything about sleep, exercise or food. If you like that control.
- bamboozled 25d agoI 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.
- victorbjorklund 25d agoInsulin is a peptide. Not sure if it is really a placebo when a diabetic needs insulin.
- inigyou 25d agoPeptides aren't all insulin.
- victorbjorklund 25d agoexactly my point. That it is dumb to dismiss all peptides as useless when at least some are necessary for survival for some people.
- bamboozled 25d agoClearly I’m not talking about insulin , people aren’t having insulin injecting parties.
- estearum 25d agoHormones control a lot of what you describe as "feeling like." The drugs (coincidentally of shape "peptide") that have been through clinical trials are obviously measured against placebo, and they (like the approved GLP-related set of drugs) are outrageously effective beyond placebo. And have very little downsides compared to the downsides of being obese, which are far more immense than people appreciate.
- TFNA 25d agoI have seen so much talk of Bay Area "peptide parties", so at least there is some social benefit?
- bamboozled 25d agoI'm not sure I'd agree that a "bay area peptide party" has any real, useful social benefit. Sounds like hell.
- phoghed 25d agoJust because you wouldn’t like it doesn’t mean no social benefit. Going to mar a lago and watching the president put ketchup on a well done steak doesn’t sound fun for me, but could be very socially beneficial for a lot of people.
- bamboozled 25d agoI mean both things sound like hell, has the USA ran out of ideas?
- phoghed 25d agoYes, those are the only two things that happen here
- bamboozled 25d agoAnd the Super Bowl
- ElProlactin 25d agoAnd the $15 acai bowl
- zemvpferreira 25d agoOzempic and Mounjaro are peptides. They are a silver bullet for obesity and orders of magnitude more effective than anything up to a gastric band surgery. Insulin is a peptide and keeps some 50 million people alive globally. You could go on and on. 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? To that I say, to each their own but I'll wait for the pharma industry to catch up. I'm not that bored.
- mint5 25d agoMy 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.
- Legend2440 25d agoMost peptides don't seem nearly as dangerous as insulin, luckily. Injecting insulin without medical supervision is a good way to give yourself hypoglycemia and die - blood sugar regulation is not something you want to mess with! People don't seem to be regularly dying from peptides, at least not now.
- zemvpferreira 25d agoI'd love to be able to make that statement with such confidence, but you just don't know. Literally no one has any clue what the long-term effect of injecting BPC-157 or what ever stupid well-marketed bullshit is the flavour of the week is, is.
- BenzeneDream 25d agoIt is true. Because the short-term effects of incorrectly injecting insulin are far greater and known risks. I agree that the long term effects are unknown but considering you could basically kill yourself quite easily with insulin... its clearly far more dangerous.
- victorbjorklund 25d agoClearly they have effects. Heck insulin is a peptide. And pretty sure it has a benefit for those with diabetes. Dismissing peptides outright is just as silly as thinking peptides are the solution to everything
- timcobb 25d agoHow is insulin a peptide? Insulin is a giant folded protein
- Ekaros 25d agoSeems like it is very much on the edge of categories thus fits both. And it really is not a giant as proteins go and instead is on smaller end.
- andsoitis 25d agoInsulin is a peptide hormone. It is a small protein made of 51 amino acids in two chains linked by disulfide bonds.
- victorbjorklund 25d agoProbably better people to explain it. First sentence on wiki ” Insulin (/ˈɪn.sjʊ.lɪn/ ⓘ;[5][6] from Latin insula 'island') is a peptide hormone produced by beta cells of the pancreatic islets encoded in humans by the insulin (INS) gene.”
- twic 25d agoThe terminology is all a bit loose. Proteins are peptides, but we don't usually call them that. But when a hormone is a protein, rather than a small molecule, then we call it a "peptide hormone". I suppose because we're making a chemical point, that the hormone is in the family of peptides rather than steroids or eicosanoids or whatever? As you say, insulin is a fully fledged protein, albeit a small one, and i wouldn't call it a peptide myself. But then, insulin is 51 residues, whereas tirzepatide (Mounjaro) is 39; is that such a big difference? FWIW i think a lot of other "peptides" are even smaller, eg CJC-1295 is about 30 residues.
- zzgo 25d ago> what actually are the benefits of all this peptide ingestion ? 50 years ago it was cocaine, 40 years ago there was crack, 30 years ago it was heroin, 20 years ago we had bath salts, 10 years ago it was gas station drugs and meth, 5 years ago it was Ivermectin, this year it's SF techies doing their own research into peptides and taking some. Taking the latest drug (or peptide in 2026) is its own benefit.
- mvdwoord 25d agoAh 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.
- iberator 24d agoIts the same as Ketamine?
- sajithdilshan 25d agoPeptides are basically protein chains. Proteins are instructions to certain things in our bodies, proteins can activate/deactivate certain processes in our bodies among many other things. If you artificially inject the correct protein into your body to mimic a naturally producing one, it would do the job and in that way peptides works. However, most of peptides injected by people are hardly human tested for long term effects. Human body is remarkable at adjusting and maintaining a baseline and we don’t know what would be the unintended side effects of these peptides because the body would try to counterbalance it. At best it could be just a mild headache or stomachache and at worst it could be cancer
- MPSimmons 25d agoIngestion, like eating?
- ggm 24d agoSometimes it IS good food. Protein is peptides. Collagen is peptides. Eat hearty beef stew, Salmon and you're eating .. peptides. Unfortunately many peptides break down in the GI tract. However there is some reason to believe eating protein, like collagen in meat does produce an outcome in terms of muscle mass and skin condition. I guess because those breakdown products make their way through the blood/lymph system to where they're needed. All those people huffing Whey powder after Gym? peptides! Just enjoy a low sugar yoghourt at lunchtime guys. same-same
- akoboldfrying 24d ago> All those people huffing Whey powder Please tell me you're kidding.
- ggm 24d agoHuffing was kidding.
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- elliotec 25d agoA robots.txt explicitly allowing LLMs has nothing to do with whether it was made for humans or not and is generally the right move assuming you want your site picked up and recommended by AI tools. No different than allowing search engine crawlers to pick it up and the authors focus on that is bizarre when the rest of the evidence is so stark.
- xyzelement 25d agoHis 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)
- geysersam 24d ago> The robots.txt is the real story. Ironically that reads to me like a typical claudeism
- debone 24d agoIt was a quote from Claude.
- aweb 25d ago"Anyone who’s not been living under a rock knows that we’re in full peptide mania." No, they don't, it's a very Silicon Valley specific thing and I never heard about them here in France. People need to stop thinking their experience generalizes by default
- inigyou 25d agoOne of America's biggest exports is culture - but primarily in English. I bet the UK knows it.
- PessimalDecimal 25d agoYeah, France should try to export its culture sometime!
- Integrape 24d ago"Omelette du fromage"
- ggm 24d ago"Ils sont fous, ces Anglais!"
- pseudohadamard 24d agoYou've never heard of Asterix comics? Of which I think the other reply to your comment is a reference.
- KellyCriterion 24d agoa "global brand" (tm) :-)
- ShinyLeftPad 24d agoHe said, eating a croissant...
- holbrad 25d ago
- zzzeek 25d agoThis article is not so much about peptides it's about entirely AI generated ecosystems. The goal is to promote questionably scammy commercial interests, or obviously political interests as I'm sure is happening also, by creating whole webs of semi convincing looking portals, discussion boards, review sites, community activity, etc, all fake. The blog post rightly points out we should get good at spotting all this but this is not the scary part, the scary part is that the audience for these ecosystems is not even humans, it's the big AI players like Gemini and ChatGPT, and those are places that a lot of people are going to get information and advice on things. I use Gemini quite a lot and lately I've already noticed it's very quick to give me a broad spectrum vibe on some issue or topic and not good at all at backing it up with reputable sources. So I think this is potentially a very ominous development of the entire web itself becomes a giant poisoned cauldron of untrustworthy AI maliciously influencing "trustworthy" AIs. Update: i fed this comment into Gemini and asked "what is Google doing about this?" and it produced a very long, detailed answer, leading off with tagging this as the so-called "internet ouroboros" problem. For those who don't feel like doing the same, I can distill it's answer as follows: "Yo. Chill. We got this, bro. Lol" so we're good!
- billyp-rva 25d agoThe 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.
- igor47 24d agoBack when I still used Google, in the dark old days of mid-late 2025, it sure seemed like the SEO was winning. Once you got to page 3, where the ads ran out, you would then smoothly transition into total scam. A common one was where they'd show you scraped SO (remember that one?) content which somehow placed higher in the rankings than actual SO, and there'd be like 3 of those in various skins. I assumed they wanted to show me more ads, though those were much more easily handled with an ad blocker, unlike Google's search results. I assume it's continued to deteriorate from there, does anyone know?
- HtmlProgrammer 25d ago“stay strapped” is a fantastic sign off.
- andai 24d agoESL 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.
- derektank 24d agoYes, it’s the second one. “Strapped” alone generally means “broke” or “in a bind”, but native English speakers would rarely if ever use it in the imperative.
- pseudohadamard 24d agoThere's also another meaning when it's spoken by someone in black leather whom you have to address as "Mistress".
- sebastiennight 24d agoESL as well ; I was assuming that this sign-off was referring to the kind of tourniquet you'll see drug users strap on before an injection.
- cure_42 25d agoIs this an ad for "pangram"? Reads like one to me. Not much of anything related to peptides was actually communicated, which makes the insult about your reader's potential ignorance of peptides even more unnecessary.
- serf 25d agowas any evidence ever given? >"The trained eye, weary of vibe coded designs, will see Claude Code’s aesthetic fingerprint all over this. " yeah, everyone is re-doing old interfaces with LLMs. >"They're hosted on AlexHost" yeah, they're selling grey market pharma. Now, I have no problems saying that the whole thing is a bot driven scam -- it probably is , grey market web is filled with scams -- but there was no evidence given; just an ad for a magic tool that detects AI... somehow. ...which makes me feel like an asshole for putting in the time looking for the anchor and hoping it wasn't an advertisement.
- duskwuff 24d ago> 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/ https://www.compoundtalk.com/forums/offtopic/ [2]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t29681/ https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t29681/, https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t31154/ https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t31154/ [3]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774/ https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774/ [4]: https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-10/#post-47 https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-10/#post-47, https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-20/#post-98 https://www.compoundtalk.com/threads/t34774-page-20/#post-98
- zkmon 25d agoI'm struggling to get the point. Which one these? * Use pangram for catching AI slop * Be good at spotting AI slop * Beware of website built for AI crawlers only * Do not buy stuff from China * Do not consume peptide supplements * Peptides are good but buy local * Do not live in SF
- MPSimmons 25d agoI do like the Potemkin Village metaphor for things like the website in question. Given how little effort something like this takes, I imagine there are a lot more of them than I've considered before, and given the way search engines operate and index, and LLMs scrape relatively indiscriminately, it seems to have implications that go beyond Google's stupid summarized answers at the top of the results page.
- brookst 24d agoI mean, are you fooled by these websites? Training corpuses (corpii?) have always had lies, propaganda, derangement, you name it.
- dlenski 24d ago> corpuses (corpii)? The Latin plural of corpus is corpora. It gets used a lot in linguistics articles, perhaps other fields as well.
- eru 24d agoIndeed, and I've come across it even in pre-AI times. However given that in English we don't care eg about Latin cases, I don't think we should care all that much about Latin plurals. So corpuses is fine by me.
- jfengel 24d agoBoth "corpora" and "corpuses" are correct. Sometimes we import the plural as an irregular plural in English; sometimes we don't. "Corpora" is common enough that you're not wrong to use it. "Corpuses" (the regularized English plural) gets enough use that it's valid. "Corpi" gets used as a hypercorrection, but it's deprecated in favor of the two previous. "Corpii", as suggested above, is right out.
- eru 24d agoOr, my suggestion to use corpuses instead of corpora was pure prescriptivism, yes. I often use corpora, because it's what's common enough. And I sometimes use nonsense plurals like octopodes just to be silly.
- maxglute 25d agoInteresting what athletes get popped for a few years ago = what optimize bros will inject into heir body, from test to peptides. Honestly lowkey glad Muricans willing to guinea pig when it comes to "performance". Asians have passed west in doing stupid beauty regimes, I like that US has big enough athletic culture to focus on performance. Hopefully Hegseth diverts billions into testosterone research, actual good use of department funds.
- Levitating 24d agoI wonder if AI companies already have a good way of filtering out these generated sites, or if the internet has just become worthless for training.
- dlenski 24d agoGiven 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.
- chvid 24d agoMy 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.
- chao- 24d agoI 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.
- eru 24d ago
- andai 24d agoHey, could be worse. At least the amino acid chains themselves aren't LLM-generated. Right..?
- cgyvbunji 24d agoOne sec let me ask an LLM..
- Traster 24d agoBefore 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.
- jijji 24d agoThe problem with certain peptides (the Eli Lilly patented ones like Tirzepatide and Retatrutide) is that when you carefully look at whats going on, you'll notice that they are recently filing lawsuits for anyone who mentions those words on their website, even med spa's and compounding pharmacies [0]. It is legal to sell research only peptides that are not FDA approved, but as soon you talk about efficacy and human use, you also become a target for the FDA warning letters. [1] [2] [3]. Anyone selling these peptides who are indexed by search engines face increase scrutiny immediately, especially if you're going to try to sell the patented ones, because then you're a Target of not just the FDA but also Eli Lilly... peptides are big business but it's big risk if you do it wrong.... Eli Lily wants people spending $1,000 per month to use these peptides. I think the trick about selling peptides to people is to probably do it word of mouth, no indexing by google, no ads, double gated website with invite only structure. [0] https://www.npr.org/2026/08/13/g-s1-138594/eli-lilly-files-6-lawsuits-against-businesses-selling-black-market-obesity-drug https://www.npr.org/2026/08/13/g-s1-138594/eli-lilly-files-6... [1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters/gram-peptides-721806-03312026 https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c... [2] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters/prime-sciences-721805-03312026 https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c... [3] https://www.raps.org/resource/fda-warning-letters-target-marketers-of-unapproved-weight-loss-drugs.html https://www.raps.org/resource/fda-warning-letters-target-mar...
- derektank 24d agoThere 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.
- SilentM68 24d agoI was researching this topic to see if any peptides existed that were isolated from Ratfish-aka Chimaera monstrosa- Liver to help rejuvinate the pineal gland via decalcification. As I understand it, ratfish liver oil is a lipid-based supplement though I've read that bioactive peptides could theoretically be isolated from the liver tissue itself (the solid matter left after oil extraction) through enzymatic hydrolysis. Thus far, I've researched a couple of sites that carry peptides but don't see any Ratfish Liver-based products. Ratfish liver oil is hard to come by, expensive due to the fish being endangered.
- anon48293 24d agoHave you tried contacting your nearest snake oil salesman?
- zenapollo 24d agoInterestingly, 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.
- anon48293 24d agoYes, Chinese medicine indeed contains a lot of nonsense. What disease does snake oil cure exactly according to you?
- SilentM68 23d agoKeep in mind that the term "Snake Oil Salesman," was a twisting of the truth. Yes, it originated with Chinese immigrants from the 1800s. Among the items the Chinese railroad workers brought with them to the States were various medicines, including snake oil. Made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form really was effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The workers would rub the oil, used for centuries in China, on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marveled at the effects. It is these American counterparts that dissembled the truth by creating ineffective variations of the formulas hence the twisting of the term, "Snake Oil Salesmen." NRP Article on History of Snake oil Salesmen https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377/a-history-of-snake-oil-salesmen https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/26/215761377...
- bbor 24d agoThis was fascinating right up until the confident use of an AI detector extension of some kind, as if that was a valid investigation of the matter. Sadly, my view on the AI literacy of people who gleefully use 'slop' stays steady... which is a shame. Cause we're all on the same side, in the end.
- scotty79 24d agoIf you base your trust towards a thing you intent to inject into your body on the niceness of some website and clumps of letters that appear on it, you should think long and hard about your life because you must have made at least five grave mistakes sometime earlier that led you to this point.
- aw3glp1app 21d ago[flagged]
- glp1app_nvylc 20d ago[flagged]