"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
They are pretty big in Australia, and have spread through TikTok, Snapchat and IG. I doubt there's many people here who are across all of these circles and I only found out when it was mainstream news
They might have been too hyperbolic with the "living under a rock" comment, but at least in the US they're very much the latest health thing (among those with the money/access to get them). Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. touts them.
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).
I'd make a distinction between Semaglutide/Tirzepatide and other GLP-1 agonists that are available through the regulated pharmaceutical system with strong evidence for particular uses, and ordering unregulated peptides from China based on a subreddit's recommendation.
I used to be on a biohacking/nootropics discord a decade ago. People were trying to treat their depression by ordering research chemicals from Russian labs or synthesizing them themselves. Huge difference between that and going to the GP and getting a Prozac prescription, with semi-regulated supplements being in the middle. That's analogous to ordering peptides from sketchy suppliers, getting a GLP-1 prescribed by a doctor, and getting a peptide facial from a medspa.
I would assume that an order of magnitude more people are getting prescription GLP-1s than are ordering other peptides from online suppliers and injecting them.
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?
I've been buying peptides for over 10 years and know all about them becoming popular in the news. I live in Asia. Living in Europe isn't an excuse. You're indeed under a rock. I've never been to silicon valley.
You've never heard of Ozempic? It's not a silicon valley thing, it's made by Novo Nordisk, Denmark's second biggest company, and Ozempic is partly why they're so big.
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.
I strongly suspect that peptide use is more common amongst the botox/filler crowd than techies in the UK. Most aesthetics clinics have been pushing peptide-based skincare for years, so it was only a small step into injectables for them.
And, as you say, the gym performance / sports crowd.
The BBC and the Guardian have covered it fairly neutrally, but the likes of the Daily Mail and gossip mags have been both more frequent and more breathless.
Not just clinics, but mainstream skincare and cosmetics companies have been doing topical peptide products for the past 10 years. You can get a peptide serum from a drugstore for ~$30.
Shame. I'm on the $20/mo Gemini Pro plan because the 5tb of cloud storage and the youtube premium lite were good enough perks, and my coding complexity needs were light enough for me to overlook Claude or Codex. But Antigravity is working better than Jules and it's basically giving me a taste of what I'm missing and it's harder to justify not trying out the competitors.
That's an interesting point and I agree it makes some kind of sense, but is there a source for it?
I live in Montpellier France and all transit has become free 2 years ago. I didn't notice any change in people's behavior at all. Transit is also free in Talinn IIRC and I wonder if they saw something there?
Then they'll shift the goalpost: it's not free, someone is paying for it, which is every taxpayer.
Then you'll ask for receipts of what they pay to use the roads and they'll be out.
Regarding free transit, I think part of the reason it can fail is the socioeconomic situation.
In places that rewards the rich and abandon the less fortunate, it's deemed to fail.
But also, I think that when people have to pay to use transit, they'll be less willing to act as a warden, so if they see someone doing something negative, they'll keep out, thinking that it's the responsibility of whoever is taking their money.
Meanwhile, when we see public transit as a common good, we are more willing to act to keep it great.
Glad to see my city of Montpellier, France in first place on the list! I really think it's under appreciated. You have the same great weather and openness culture as California, lots of great nature easily accessible and very close, you can go to Paris, Marseille or Toulouse very fast by train, even to Barcelona and Madrid!
It's a spectrum. I don't think that they will be able to sell t-shirts using a drawing you've uploaded. But it will probably allow them to defend themselves a bit better if they get sued for selling the data for LLM training.
You can't give up the right to sign your work with your name. But you can definitely share rights to reproduce your work etc — although perhaps not in a clickable EULA.
In Austria and Germany, you just cannot transfer the copyright ("Urheberrecht"). You can only transfer - meaning sell - the right of use ("Nutzungsrecht"). The only exception I know of is with employments, where the employer is the rightful copyright holder. The US, Switzerland, and maybe other legislations allow for the transfer of copyright.
I discovered that recently, it's a very fun way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, and the UI is really well-done, it's totally beginner friendly!
I wish there was a way to do more than labeling though, like add simple roads and footpaths
I have used it one (1) time in my life, ans it was my first experience with OpenStreetMap in general. It was pretty fun!
It's very intuitive and makes you learn just how detailed and specific map data can be. Can't say much about missing features since I don't event know what can be done.
Recommended experience, it's like playing Pokemon Go without the evil part :)
Then again you produce public open-source data when you contribute to OSM, and nothing prevents the military from using it for morally questionable purposes... at the end of the day the only difference is the intermediary that could make a profit selling the data, no?
No, the huge difference is creating the good part. Where is the open data for the general public created from Pokemon GO? You can't stop the military using open data but that is on them. The evil is them getting your private data to have an exclusive advantage people have no control or transparency over.
I was talking about a difference for the bad outcome in this case... if Pokemon Go was open souce and public, the military could have done the same, for that matter the might be doing the same with OSM data to some extend right now and it would be harder to know about it.
Open-source software and data are obviously public goods I support. I was just pointing out that the only "evil" parts here are rent seekers reselling this data and the military... not the people assembling the data (players).
You have no idea what they are selling though. You can ask to get bad things removed from Open Street Maps. It isn't just the money making aspect it's the secrecy too.
Street complete does load width - it can be quite useful for example for the fire fighters. They can try to plot some routes based on OSM data, then check if the narrow places are actually there and reach out to the city to address them, so their fire engines can get through.
That's a fair use for the data, but it would be hilarious if StreetComplete asked users to get a trundle wheel and measure the width of roads around embassies or seats of government...
I was questioning the qualification of Pokemon Go being "evil" here, it's the data broker and the military who are evil in this case in my opinion. (Making it open-source also doesn't help, as I said we'd only short-circuit the intermediary who sold this data).
Maybe it's a useless nuance, but I don't think Pokemon Go gamers should feel/evil or even that they should be careful the next time they try to entertain themselves.
Usually if I need to add a footpath I use the "Create new track recording" feature to trace out the path with GPS, then come back to it later on desktop. Adding paths is pretty awkward to do on mobile, especially since there's no satellite overlay.
Strava doesn't have complete coverage, especially on newer trails, but more importantly: doing the trace via Street Complete attaches it to an OSM note with an optional (but encouraged) photo. This additional context makes it a lot more useful for editors than an ordinary trace, which can just as easily be an actual trail, a desire path, or someone deciding to improvise a shortcut through some brush. Even if the note just contains the word "trail", that helps us (though more detail is greatly appreciated, of course).
Though if you like StreetComplete and want aerial/satellite, there's SCEE, a fork of StreetComplete. I tried both Vespucci and EveryDoor, but neither is nearly as easy to use in my opinion.
I have my mapping spells where I do OSM mapping for a week or a month and then I might not map for a year or two. For mobile mapping I have all those you mentioned installed. They all are useful for something, except perhaps StreetComplete which is just a crippled version of SCEE for me. I also have OSMFocus Reborn installed which I use if I want to inspect ways and nodes in an area when I'm not in the middle of editing/adding anything with one of those other apps. That app is good for quickly checking some things out.
I think adding things, instead of updating existing things with missing data is where you get into needing a more serious app. I keep Vespucci for when I want to initiate an edit, and StreetComplete for fun filling in missing information tasks.
I love the app idea but I don't think it's beginner friendly - for example it starts zoomed out of the globe and there is no button to zoom to the location; also it's unclear what the hatched lines until one zooms in.
Yeah it seems crazy to me that this is news. Here in France the government officially recommends to avoid screens at all costs for under 3 years omds and as much as possible under 6. There are tons of studies showing it hinders their development.
I'm surprised, isn't it forbidden to use the Max plan as part of a company? Just curious, as I thought it was forbidden by the ToS but I'm not sure if I have a good understanding of it
There is nothing in the TOS last time I checked forbidding it's use with Claude code. It's only forbidden to utilize it in the running of the business.
So getting Claude code subscriptions for developers should be permissable and not be against anything... However, if you created a rest endpoint to eg run a preconfigured prompt as part of your platform, that'd be against it
Yeah, that would end that really quickly. I use Pro for personal stuff. If $200 is not allowed for companies I don't think anyone would use it, at all.
Most companies forbid it though, since you're not covered by any legal protection - for example, Anthropic can use your data or code to train new models and more.
Any references on this? I hear this argument a lot. In fact, in a talk on AI last week I heard someone say:
"If you click the thumbs up button to rate a chat, the AI provider will use the contents for training, so our company's policy is never to click the thumbs up button"
That seemed so farcical I had a hard time taking this person seriously. Enterprise plans must give some strong guarantees around data usage, right?
Obviously I can speak only from my personal experience but just me I have 5 examples of companies that were “no AI, IP and all that” that are now full-on “every developer must use CC, Cursor…”
How many conpanes today don’t have “AI strategy” and are fearing will be left behind etc? In my small circle we went from “most are not using AI” to “none are not using AI” in somewhat short period of time
Microsoft already has all their business data in the form of handing document storage and emails. Trusting another of their services to also not use that data for Microsoft's own purposes is reasonable.
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