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.)
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
Thanks. The ending where he goes "how would I deal with company patent lawyers? Well flips them off" is a bit annoying as well. I heard some make diy E makers and distributers were jailed already. So setting up some assistance system for that would be nice (esp after you made it worse by making it easier for the courts to call them terrorists, sure the term has degraded but law wise this has consequences. I really hope he at least got some trans people involved before he started this (and i also really hope im wrong about the risks here, as trans people should get all the meds they want)).
he's already easily covered under personal/research nonprofit use so he doesn't have to care about any patents, it's even opposite, he can use all patents all he wants np as long as there's no profits associated with it. he takes donations tho and idk if it qualifies. not that copyright is the biggest problem here
i don't think that whatever he's doing will help transfolk cause too much, there already is some hormone supply and all he's doing is bringing unwanted attention. i hope i'm wrong on this one
I took the question to be a vit more broad than just be about patents, like sure that might not be a problem re a lawsuit you can lose, vut just fighting the lawsuits will be bad for people, and will the 4 vinegars offer any help for people who do this and get in trouble. This feels a bit centralize the fame and decentralize all the risk. Which will usually not end great for the people who have less privileges than the phd educated cis guy. I hope they thought more about this than just flipping people off (or worse, "if somebody gets in legal trouble we can use that to promote our cause"). But i tend to be a bit more paranoid than most.
wouldn't surprise me, but this would require them to have something workable in the first place. otoh even martin shkhreli didn't do that