Why Vampires Live Forever
machielreyneke.com169 points by machielrey 3 hours ago
169 points by machielrey 3 hours ago
> The Suspects Peter Thiel
Has anyone tried garlic on him?
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
I think we're witnessing a schism within the vampire community. By the end of the article, the author is less than subtle about being Dracula, and is trying to use the respect his name no doubt commands among vampires to get the unruly youth(relatively speaking) to get their shit together. This article is a warning to Thiel and Johnson. Dracula sees you, and he does not approve of what he sees.
Hope the author has some garlic silverware lying around after such a revealing article
I realize now that I might be in trouble. Thanks everyone
Cute. But I saw through your thin veil Mr Tepes. The irony of bragging about your opsec and revealing your true identity for leverage in the same sentence is considerable.
Anyway, I hope your son, Adrian, is doing ok. I fondly remember hunting your horrors of the night with him
-T.B.
This is a fun story from the early 18th century if you haven't read about it
And I don't want to add fuel to a strange fire, but in 1764 when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a letter to Beaumont regarding the absurdity of belief despite evidence, he used this as an example:
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
Completely OT: In the link “what the longevity experts don’t tell you”[1] I found this:
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble).
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...
I knew plenty of Midwestern Baptists that didn't participate in the triple crown of no-nos: dancing, drinking, and gambling. And cards aren't necessarily gambling, but cards are the bricks that pave the road to such evil. It's guilt-by-association (and some will tell you, wrongly, that playing cards are an outgrowth of tarot cards and the like), but there ya go. Oddly, I knew plenty of Baptists that played Yahtzee, which involves dice, and that seemed acceptable. Never minding that the Roman soldiers cast lots ("dice") for Jesus' clothing. :-)
This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.
Consider some writing contemporary to Rockefeller (there is a section on cards): https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/social.amusements.willis....
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
> Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God?
My favorite example of this is the string of fishing line around Manhattan.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
>They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
Are there any reasons for this to work on non-vampires? :D
That was my thought as well. At least naively, it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits. A typical donation is half a liter, and a person has about 5 liters of blood, so donating should in theory remove about 10% of the crap you've got circulating, right?
Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ignoring the natural increase over time).
Yeah, that is donating, now I wonder donating AND receiving (from a healthy individual). :D
Why do you think Gavin Belson had a blood bag? This has been a trope for a while. They even had blood bags in the Fury Road movie, but that was more of a continuous supply than just trying to refresh like Gavin. I don't think using movie tropes in a discussion on vampires is out of line here
Fun read but I stopped after detecting AI:
"The young blood doesn’t add youth. It removes age."
"Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis."
Etc. Why is LLM so enamored with the "Its not x, its Y" idiom? Its so ridiculously overused its almost comical
The flaw in trying to detect AI by its use of particular idioms is that it would have learned these idioms from its training corpus, which consists of writings from actual human beings.
In other words, some people actually write like this.
It’s not that people don’t write like this, it’s the over-usage and general tone.
It's not that “I can detect AI” posts sound more templated than the writing they’re critiquing, it's the clankers are learning from it and adapting.
its not that i cant detect your AI detection, its just that i cant watch you quietly do it.
You're absolutely right!
I have a friend that has used ems all his professional life and is livid that they're now a telltale for AI. So yeah, false positives.
Key word here being “some” people. Not nearly at high enough frequency that this way of talking was noticeable before. AI uses this pattern CONSTANTLY and it’s very fucking irritating.
I was hoping he would provide some insight about why they avoid the sun. From observation, thiel looks like he is getting too much sun, or at least his skin has been reengineered like Alucard. While Johnson is just cake [0].
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
> Here’s what’s genuinely interesting.
That's my current AI detector smell.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
> You know what else is far-seeing? A creature that has been alive for centuries.
Well, hello there!
Early chatgpt really did not like it when I asked if Peter Thiel was a vampire.
It got very "mad" at me. It was funniest thing all day.
Thanks for the recommended chuckle.
> Increased sun exposure was associated with an older appearance and accelerated with age (p 0.015), as was a history of outdoor activities and lack of sunscreen use.
Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf
Interesting that the author didn't mention anything about stem cell injections. Those have been in vogue among the elite for decades (millennia?).
How could it be millenia? Have we been able to isolate stem cells that long, or are you suggesting feasting on placenta as suitable?
I'm not really sure if the author (i.e. generative language model) is being serious or being sarcastic...
Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).
Why am I reading this in Freddie Mercury's signing voice?
Although better known for his singing voice, it's true that the voice he used when cryptographically signing private messages was also impressive.
>The public begins to associate blood transfusion with eccentric billionaires rather than with undead predators. This is a critical narrative shift.
Not much of a shift...
You misunderstand. Coming out as vampires is meant to improve their reputation.
I hope the old vampire Dons give some fashion advice to the new guys, e.g. “A vampire doesn’t wear Arc’teryx“.
Time to break the Masquerade it seems.
Flawless logic!
I have a spoiler-tastic fan theory about the movie Marty Supreme that is apropos here.
The article misses the simplest technique:
Just donate blood as often as possible. This results in a loss of cholesterol, other bad lipoproteins, excess iron in those who have it, and PFAS toxins. It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Whole blood donation avoids the plastic lining of plasma donations, with the latter undesirably transferring unwanted microplastics into the body.
For those with sufficient spare money, instead of donating blood, just get various blood tests every other week, additively comparable to a donation if the tests are substantial.
Granted, this is antithetical to being a vampire, but you will still have to make up for it by supplementing sufficient healthy nutrients, e.g. electrolytes, ferric pyrophosphate, protein, etc. to allow your body to quickly restore the lost blood.
As a disclaimer, do not ever donate blood if you use narcotics, disallowed drugs, injectable drugs, or have unsafe intimate practices, or might have chagas or TB or even long Covid.
>It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Paper where more frequent cycles in women correlate to longer lifetimes? That would have to be true if this were true.
I'm assuming you're referring to blood loss from menstruation? That's typically only 30-40 mL (1-1.5 fluid ounces, about a shot glass).
Nowhere close to the amount given during a donation.
Is there any evidence?
Let me google that for you https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-there-any-evidence-that-...
does this imply that you're just giving shitty blood to people that need life saving procedures?
Bad blood is better than no blood!
Also, I'm not certain how much they treat blood, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a purification system sort of similar to Dialysis where you rely on an external machine for removing impurities.
> does this imply that you're just giving shitty blood...
2 questions: is there any other kind? If there were, ate people requiring transfusion in a position to make demands to the donors (not vendors)
Fantastic. Several halloweens ago I wore vampire fangs and told a beautiful girl at a concert that I worked at the local blood bank. She said "yeah?" and I followed up with, "would you like to make a donation?"
Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
It's not nonsense, it's satire. I was laughing most of the way through both of these articles.
The Rockefeller one literally points out that the guy did all this weird stuff and then his son, who didn't, outlived him.
Also weird it didn't mention Peter Attia's connection to Epstein outright. It did this weird tongue-in-cheek thing for a few paragraphs referencing Epstein only in the foot notes. I still can't tell whether what I read was actually praising these guys or extremely subtly sardonic.
Big if true :P
> Appears to not age but also to never have been young
/me snorts
If interested in rejuvenation, I would suggest investigating LEVF's Robust Mouse Rejuvenation.
RMR1 done and shows promise, RMR2 started recently.
very entertaining writing style
Now this is the kind of content I come to Hacker News for.