It can't do everything, but those cherry-picked examples are still pretty dramatic. Saving $80k to cure your Hep.C is pretty practical. Getting an abortion while living under increasingly emboldened christofascists is pretty practical. Managing your own transgender HRT is pretty practical. Lets not perfect be the enemy of good, it's a pretty solid start.

Before the 2017 “general ban” on psychoactive substances in the UK there was a thriving industry where “entrepreneurs” with the contacts for such labs would hire chemists to find them a new candidate analogue/derivative of say, a stimulant or hallucinogen or whatever, knock together a synthesis route, see if it works, and then have it manufactured in bulk for resale to head shops.

A small number of people got incredibly rich off this, some got busted when their product got banned and they didn’t dump the stock fast enough, but most made fucking phenomenal amounts of money.

The same “trade” carries on in some other European countries to this day, with “new” LSD derivatives cropping up every few months when one is invariably banned.

I vaguely recall there was even a few articles about this whole thing back in the day by some journalists, maybe at Vice or something? They had an interview with one of the chemists.

However, I think everyone should be in charge of their own decisions, including taking not approved drugs, without being considered criminals or similar, under their strict own responsibility.

That's neither cherry picking nor misleading.

For the last thirty or so years ccc has mainly been a place for people to lie or exaggerate on stage in order to promote their security consulting firm or other freelance project.

So this is to be expected.

If replication in psychology is a crisis, the replication of results from hacker conference talks is an extinction-level apocalypse.

Can you quote that part?

I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D, not manufacture. The cost of manufacture probably varies wildly (with the most expensive being bespoke treatments), but as the talk shows, there have been many examples where a (relatively) simple-to-manufacture drug is kept from those who need it due to prices that do not reflect the cost of manufacture.

Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.

Good faith reading of his argument would be that a custom, artisan crafted hammer is better than a factory made one. I can’t say if that is true or not but using chips as an example- probably the most complex man made thing- is bad faith argumentation

Phage are interesting, but they're ignored because they're worse than antibiotics by nearly every measure. They're _very_ narrow spectrum. They're immunogenic. Phage have found ex vivo applications, such as treating meat to prevent listeria.

Source: worked in an evolutionary bio lab for two years culturing and cloning phage.

Idk, in the example "a built racecar engine" one could imagine that instead of running CNC machines all day long to make pistons, replacing tools for wear periodically, a machinist could take a brand new end mill, make some initial test cuts and validate the dimensions, then make the final part and look it all over with the CMM or other tools. You could, by paying extra attention to each part, make a more precise part than something being made on an assembly line where things are not double checked quite so meticulously, for basic efficiency reasons.

Like I assume that by the same definition of "hand made" as the racecar engine, we would consider NASA rovers to be hand made. And they are made to a very high precision. We could consider whether SpaceX Engines have ever been "hand made" and how the quality of those relates to production engines (tho in this case, production engines must have rigorous validation of basically every component I would imagine, so the factory perhaps meets or could even exceed hand production runs in quality).

But I would not say it needs to be a hard and fast rule.

Also, custom PCB's are getting easier and easier, it seems like there's a ton of YouTube videos sponsored by and about doing custom PCB's for projects in 2024. Heck, I have an Air gradient in my house, and while it's not a custom CPU, it is a custom, relatively low volume PCB designed by (as far as I can tell) a single person, almost like an artist...

I'm not trying to add a lot to the conversation, just suggest that even chips are moving towards customisation and artisanship.

Sure the factory guitar may sound "perfect", but the only guitar that sounds like this handmade guitar is this handmade guitar.

Isn't a CPU kind of one of the most complex thing humanity has ever created in hardware terms? Like the scales involved are so different, compared to the examples of a guitar, chisel or knife. It requires so tiny tolerances and measurements, that I guess we're past it's even possible to "make a CPU by hand" that comes close to our current CPUs. Sure, you can always use old CPU designs from back in the day, but a knife today can be the same as it was 2000 years ago, it just has to be sharp and comfortable, so really hard to compare.

> I have seen this sentiment expressed, but I have yet to see any real evidence for it.

Have you gone searching for evidence? The examples being guitars, chisels, knifes, suit and shoes, sounds simple to search how the top-of-the-line stuff is made. I'd bet on that high quality things from those categories are in fact typically hand-made.

For these items in particular, there is generally no extant factory automation that will get you a better result than a human craftsman. You'd be a fool to pick extant mass produced alternatives, all else being equal.

A CPU is a pretty poor analogy here, since it's not only precision that makes handmade examples of the above items superior, but it's essentially the only thing that matters for a CPU (or something like an iPhone, etc). You likely could design a superior factory for many of those items, taking into account materials variance, bespoke details for individual customers, etc., but it would not be economical in the markets where these items are sold.

edit: I also think these items are a bad analogy for medicine, where precision is paramount. So I probably agree with you there.

This boils down to the definition of what "better" means, and for items like those listed that's actually quite easy! "Better" means "the way I want it". Customized to my individual needs. Factory produced can never give you that.

If I want a Gyuto style knife with an octagonal handle made from carbon fibre and blade in CPM-10V alloy, I'm not going to find it at Ikea.

If I want a suit or a leather boot that fits my particular body perfectly, it needs to be custom made.

If I want a built K20 turbo engine, it will need to be very different if it goes in a circuit racing car or a time attack car, and both need to be very different from the factory engine.

The factory needs to optimize for the average person. It needs to satisfy regulators, beancounters, shareholders. The artisan does not.

>> For all of the things listed, I would rather have factory made versions.

I think people believe this who haven't ever experienced truly custom hand-made things. The process of creating an actual "custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique" shoe will involve first creating a custom "last" - a wooden mold to build the shoe around.

This last isn't literally a mold of your foot, it is a custom-sculpted shape that is specific to both your foot and the particular shoe style. The shoemaker will keep all of their customer's lasts in a large library, so once your last is customized properly for you (in-person), you don't have to return to order more of that type of shoe - you can place future orders in different colors/materials and the shoe will be created around that same wooden last, ensuring a very specific fit that is most comfortable for you.

A factory cannot do this.

The point of hand-made things is customization that goes far beyond what a factory could ever do. If you're buying hand-made things that aren't truly customized for you, then you're largely missing the point.

Your commit is dangerous to Wikipedia, therefore seen as "borderline vandalism". I'm sure the mod didn't want to go into greater detail than that because the reasoning is not fun for anybody.

Safety first, unfortunately.

For medications (and anything where artificial scarcity is created with IP), it can be cheaper to create the product at home instead of buying it. If homemade quality is 'good enough', that's a reasonable option.

For comparison, I make my own sauerkraut. The stuff at Walmart is fine, but it's cheaper and higher quality to make at home.

The same logic applies to lots of software.

Gotta love the USA!

In a healthier society there'd be a smooth gradient between the layman and the professional such that B.S. prohibitions would be identified and removed by informed subsets of the population. But instead we have this very crisp boundary between the in-the-know and the clueless, and to be in-the-know is so expensive that one can't afford to be in-the-know while also not being on somebody's payroll--those tend to be the same somebody's who have a monopoly to protect, so the clueless stay clueless and the capable stay under control.

There's a lot of criticism in adjacent threads for these guys having cherry-picked the easy examples, but given the circumstances I think that that's precisely what we ought to be doing: Identify the cases where taking control of your drugs is relatively easy, teach people to do it, and level up gradually until that set of cases starts growing.

We may never get to the point where we're making everything at home, but if we don't at least take a shot at the easy ones then we'll never know where the reasonable equilibrium point lies (i.e. the point beyond which you should leave it to a corporation). As it stands we're letting that point be decided by people who have a conflict of interest in doing so.

There are many countries - for example Cuba - that can’t rely on these systems - they need to cook their own.

Is your proposal to rely on the government really realistic in those scenarios?

Then do it- that's the point of the art piece, in a very literal way. Everybody fixates on the aesthetics around this kind of thing, but if it moves you to action than it's working.

So let it work, learn what you need to learn to help folks in the ways that you feel this project fails.

And then you won't have the cynical feeling that you don't like.

I've been having this thought a lot lately. Do you have any thoughts about which field you might transition to, if you did this?

I've been considering bioinformatics, so far the classes have been pretty fun, but I haven't yet gotten close enough to the day-to-day work to know if it's any less toxic or just toxic in new and unpleasant ways.

I'd be all over home production or brew-kits for users or compounding pharmacists to save lives or quality of life. But damn, the more complex synthesis pathways have potential for insanely serious 'bugs', and the consequences aren't just a software crash, they can be life-altering or life-ending. With fully informed consent, still works for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

hacking is a way to provide dignity to people in how they relate to systems. be warey of the ones who object to that.

This reminds me very much of the comments on HN when Dropbox first launched, swearing that nobody would ever need it because everyone can just do what they’ve already always done.

> The people who believe this stuff when they hear it will not be persuaded, because I'm obviously a Big Pharma Shill.

Pre-empting any counterpoint to his arguments by saying they'll unfairly dismiss him. A rather smug approach to the "little guy", but possibly warranted. But his previous post on the subject has this gem:

> What I'm getting at is that people like Four Thieves Vinegar are not developing drugs. They're trying to find cheap, easily replicable ways to make and distribute drugs that other people have already spent the time and money to develop. If the capitalists of the world hadn't ponied up the at-risk funding to find those drugs in the first place, there would be nothing for anarcho-hacker pharma collectives to do. Speaking for the Big Evil Pharma Industry, if I may, you Vinegar Thieves are living in our basement and subsisting on what we provide.

First of all: we've been hearing for over century the line about superhero-capitalist John Galts deserving to billionaires because they were the ones who "ponied up the at-risk funding", and it's extremely shaky, if not outright bullshit. Especially in the pharma industry, where X% of "discoveries" come straight from government funding, not private capital (with X being an endlessly argued number, but almost certainly above 50). Secondly: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective don't appear to be claiming any discoveries, so what exactly is he arguing here? Couldn't he levy the same complaint against every generic drug manufacturer, that they're "living in the basement" of the Big Smart Important Guys like him? These statements are pretty close to what you'd expect from a "Big Pharma Shill" that he's pre-emptively trying to immunize himself from being accused of.

It's not? Elsevier finally relented when universities could finally cancel their subscriptions because librarians could direct people to Sci-Hub.

Is this how you think about everything? Do you go to a restaurant with nice chairs and think, "The food here must suck, they spend too much money on the furniture"?

Also, purposely making your website look less "well crafted" strikes me as quite cynical (and almost certainly counterproductive).

> The actual aim seems closer to marketing or perhaps influencing public discourse on the subject

A worthy aim, no?

... How much do giant drug corps spend on marketing? Last I remember, it was more than they spend on drug development; in the tens of billions of dollars annually. In this context, quibbling that a website seems too nice seems remarkably misguided.

Finally, considering how much effort has been put into helping people actually make these things - far more than anyone else! - I think trying to redefine their aim to be just marketing is deeply unfair.