Article
Reddit is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between August 02, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “My only real source of information is this Reddit post”; “reddit thread on MacAskill”; “The linked Reddit answer names a factory in Switzerland”. It most often appears alongside Amazon, America, FDA.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: August 02, 2021
- Last seen: March 03, 2026
Appears In
- 21
- Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
- The Compounding Loophole
- Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
Related Pages
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Robin Hanson (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 2024 US election (1 shared issues)
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- 2026 elections (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- Adderall (1 shared issues)
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- Agent Economy Of The Future (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AgroAlpha (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I’m not really impressed with their publicity effort (my browser insists their website is a security hazard and won’t let me access it). My only real source of information is this Reddit post by another charter city enthusiast, who writes:
Inline links: this Reddit post
Stealing my own comment from a related reddit thread on MacAskill: "The thing I took away from [his profile in the New Yorker] is that contrary to "near-termist" views, longtermism has no effective feedback mechanism for when it's gone off the rails.
They say it’s through the same factories that make the official version for Big Pharma. If I understand the situation, nameless Chinese factories1 make the chemical itself, and Novo Nordisk (the pharmaceutical company that owns the official patent) does some fancy encapsulation work at their own plants. But they have a permanent capacity problem because of logistical and regulatory issues, so the nameless Chinese factories sell the extra to the compounding pharmacies on the side.
The other safety concern is the salt form. FDA-approved semaglutide is the free base2 (ie the semaglutide molecule not attached to anything). Some suppliers sell the salt version (ie semaglutide attached to an ion like sodium). The FDA has issued warnings saying that the salt version isn’t approved, that any supplier caught using the salt will be shut down, and that you should avoid compounding pharmacies because you can never be sure they’re not offering the dreaded salt form. The commentary I’ve read from chemists is that none of this matters because the salt form dissolves into the free base as soon as it’s in water (which it always is before you inject it), although other people point out that maybe there could still be some theoretical concerns about shelf life and stability. Still, the FDA is legally allowed to shut down anyone offering the salt, and all the compounding pharmacies have switched to the free base.
I’m less convinced by any of this than I am by the existence of several big online communities of compounded GLP-1 drug users (eg r/compoundedsemaglutide) who overall seem pretty happy and don’t report any unusual side effects.
Inline links: r/compoundedsemaglutide
This could have been a mixed blessing - Anthropic was previously trying to stand out as a B2B company while letting OpenAI have the dubious honor of producing consumerslop. But early signs suggest they might be winning over some companies too. From a Reddit thread on the topic:
Inline links: a Reddit thread