[8bitbeep]

> We all know that custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique tools are always better than something factory made.

Right. We all know the best chips in the world are made by local artisan silicon-etchers. None of that TSMC pasteurized crap. You simply can't beat a 1nm brush and a steady hand. We all know this industrial revolution thing was a mistake.

[toast0]

Sounds like my artisinal Certificate Authority, all signatures are hand multiplied by human computers!

[scarecrowbob]

To be fair, for the last few years of my career as a developer and ops worker I had a boss who was convinced that Let's Encrypt certs were inferior for "reasons".

It's pretty trivial to generate a long list of technologies which are deemed "better" only because they are built by a large commercial enterprise.

[ryao]

Do you use lava lamps to generate your random numbers?

[toast0]

Too hard for humans. 16-sided dice and dice towers.

[namuol]

I don't think this analogy resonates particularly well with the drug manufacturing process.

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.

[8bitbeep]

True, it’s just that the original quote is hard swallow. Try melting sand and polishing your own lenses and compare that to a US$ 5 glass.

[dredmorbius]

Or ... a US$1,000 pair of Luxottica spectacles.

[bsder]

> 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.

Ever watch a non-chef bake a cake? If you have, that experience should give you great concern about people playing with drug recipes.

In addition, most drugs do not have a "nice" synthesis that doesn't leave a whole bunch of glop in the afterproducts. Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time.

[ryao]

People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs. The cooking analogy would be studying at a culinary school prior to preparing pufferfish without a license.

[bsder]

> People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs.

The girl who needs mifepristone will not be an organic chemist. The trans-person who needs their hormones will not be an organic chemist. etc.

What part of: "Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time." did you miss?

We know what happens when drugs are made illegal--they wind up adulterated with god knows what--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The "solution" is making sure that these drugs are legal and available. The solution is social and political--we need people to put in as much effort into the politics as they do into dubious "tech" solutions.

[ryao]

Your comparison of ethanol distillation to drug synthesis assumes that recipes for drug synthesis are public like instructions for distillation. Recipes for drug synthesis are trade secrets, not public knowledge.

If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMaTrgUKC1w

He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.

Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.

[miki123211]

> I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D

Not just its R&D, but also the R&D of the 10 other drugs which looked promising, had a lot of money invested in them, but didn't end up working out in the end.

You could very easily pass a law invalidating all drug patents, and making generics for any drug easily available. This would make all drug prices go down drastically. It would definitely work, there's no question about it. The anti-capitalists are very much right about this.

What they're missing, though, is that this law would completely remove the incentive to make any new drugs. The progress of medicine would instantly slow down to a halt. All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.

[ben_w]

> All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.

Unless there's government funding.

Also consider that for both patents and government funding, there are other jurisdictions which won't do what your government does, so there's a Nash equilibrium problem where every country has people who want to defect (delete patents) to get free stuff whose research was paid for by the profit margin in the jurisdiction which keeps the patents.

[ryao]

The linked page is the one that said:

> We all know that custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique tools are always better than something factory made.

This is wrong and he debunked it.

[portaouflop]

Sure if you apply enough mental gymnastics you can invalidate any claim.

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

[NeutralCrane]

Given that the application here is molecular chemistry aimed at targeting human biology, one of the few problems equally complex as computer chips, I would say their analogy is far more appropriate than a hammer.

[portaouflop]

Creating a medicine such as the ones mentioned in the talk is FAR more simple than creating microchips - as a starter you don’t need a billion dollar worth clean room and equipment as they clearly demonstrate.

So yea human biology is as complex if not more complex I agree - creating medicine after a proven recipe is not.

[ryao]

You do not need “a billion dollar worth clean room and equipment” to make chips. You just need a garage and a bunch of old equipment. Even high school students can make microchips:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-high-school-student-whos-build...

As your “creating medicine after a proven recipe” remark, that is not how things work. The way it usually works is that you study organic chemistry in college and then you work out a recipe yourself based on the chemical formula. You do not follow a recipe from someone else because recipes are often trade secrets. At least, that is what I took away from studying organic chemistry in college. Well, that and a remark by the professor that those making illicit drugs take that course before getting started.

[scarecrowbob]

This is an interesting comment, because before you mentioned it I did not even consider DIY chip fab was a possibility.

In the context of access to cheap mass production, it would of course be silly to use the DIY product of that professionally.

In the context of "having zero access" to the technology, then the hand-produced products can be better than nothing, especially if the "no access" alternative is heinous or deadly in its own right.

It's kind of a micro-scale version of the larger discussion, perhaps?

[fumeux_fume]

That specific sentence is making an analogy using handmade tools. A hammer is an ideal example of a tool. You would expect to find a hammer in a toolbox. A computer chip is not an ideal example of a tool. You would not expect to find a computer chip in a toolbox.

[fragmede]

Laser level, boroscope, camera stud-finder, thermal camera, laser tape measure, multimeter, battery management system on a lithum-something battery pack for power tools; those are all gonna have IC chips in them and it wouldn't be unreasonable to find them in a professional's toolbox.

[timon999]

If someone claims that X is "always"(!) the case, then giving just one example where X is not the case counts as a refutation. The statement that the GP quoted is just obviously false and there is nothing "bad faith" about pointing that out.

[wlesieutre]

There’s not even much argument for it being true in most cases.

Artisan made tools compared to high end tools from a factory are more like a mechanical watch compared to an electronic one. It might be a cool mechanism and a more unique statement piece than an Apple Watch, but it sure won’t keep better time.

[mistermann]

One some topics this is realized and praised on HN.

On other topics, the cognition flips.

This is the nature of evolved, culturally conditioned consciousness (one of the things most HN'ers like talking about from an abstract perspective, but really don't like talking about at the object level during discussions of certain controversial ideas, when heuristics have taken control of the mind).

For fun: observe the nature of comments in this thread from a meta perspective of a curious alien observer.

[fragmede]

Most of the people here aren't biochemists, hence q "biochemistry = scary untouchable magic" POV. But for those that have done the chemistry in a university setting before and gone on to being professionals in the field, know the plant-based history of the field, as well as the history of synthesizing "stuff" and ingesting it, by certain individuals in the field.

it's important to get the chemistry right, but if you know the failure modes, it's far less of a black box and thus less scary.

[mistermann]

Sure, but most people here have technical backgrounds and well above average skills in logic. But prompt them with specific topics, and skill in logic vanishes.

I think this phenomenon itself is very interesting and a huge deal (cognitive ability is what makes us the most dominant species, and is required just to maintain living standards), but also the secondary effect is interesting: the mind does not allow focus to be placed on it.

If you ask me, it is about as close to magic as you can get.

[ryao]

My college chemistry professor said never to ingest anything made in a lab. Thus far, I have followed this rule and I have been fine, not that I have been around any chemistry labs since college.

A chemist broke this rule on YouTube by turning styrofoam into cinnamon candy that he ate himself, but he went through an extreme amount of effort to make it safe:

https://youtu.be/zMaTrgUKC1w

[fragmede]

Yeah! I love NileRed (and blue). To be clear, it's not safe for someone without a lot of training to ingest a chemistry project and even then. Hopefully it didn't read like I was endorsing anyone to do so. Just that there's a history of that which we've walked away from (for good reason!) and that we wouldn't be here without some brave chemists to do the insane thing.

[portaouflop]

The question if there is such a thing as “truth” (an universally true statement) is probably the hardest philosophical problem in humanities history- of course that is not what we were discussing and for that reason your argument here is also in bad faith

[timon999]

I don't see why the nature of truth is relevant here, unless you are claiming that we can't make deductive arguments about anything ever (I never used the word "truth" in my comment anyway). Also, constant accusations of "bad faith", i.e. dishonesty, are poor debate etiquette and just give the impression that you have no point to make on the object level.

[portaouflop]

My point was that when one talks about examples of hand-made, artisan tools __microchips__ are not a good example for a handcrafted tool.

I don’t get why that is so controversial. Microchips are definitely not what I have in mind when I talk about a “tool” at all.

You say that this is a good enough example to completely refute the OPs point which I disagree with.

[mistermann]

Live by the sword die by the sword.

[cess11]

It's a good day to die.