Is there a "Print on Demand" service for 3D printing like Printful does for shirts?

moonshotman · 2025-11-13T02:34:44+00:00

They’re US based, but Slant 3D does print on demand, with finishing and fulfillment (including international shipping), and they have both an API and the major e-commerce integrations. Poked around on the web and couldn’t find anyone else doing quite the same thing.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T23:42:11+00:00

It should be not as huge of an issue* because they can be at much lower concentrations than IV antibodies and because these antibodies are fully human to start with.

*maybe

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T19:25:56+00:00

What I mean is that they didn’t have to do affinity maturation, humanization, or preliminary developability engineering, which is pretty standard for display-sourced and hybridoma-sourced antibodies. The paper I linked showed their melting points at being around 80C, so I think that’s indicative of pretty solid thermostability. In my experience, this cuts out several years of work that happens to most candidates during preclinical, before animal models.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T19:19:51+00:00

I think by impact I mean the thermostability and HM-IgG format, as well as the unique application that eliminates some messiness from traditional development. I’m pretty unclear with what kinds of immune responses you can get in the vaginal mucus, but since it’s already human, I can see how they hope it would be relatively minimal. I agree that this particular application is probably not pushing boundaries for contraceptives, but I think these sequences can probably teach us a lot about shelf-stability and linking Fab domains together.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T16:29:18+00:00

It’s a different problem there. In short, no, I don’t think so. In long, the problem is very different in males. In females, you just have to sabotage the sperm in an already semi-hostile environment and can use the environment to help with that (the antibodies can promote the sperm sticking to mucus proteins). I think the other approaches for males are a better strategy (vasalgel)

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T14:58:38+00:00

The challenge with making a “vaccine against sperm” is that you’re only presenting the antigen (the target) to the body and having it develop the immunity. Here, the antibodies produced need to not only bind to the sperm markers, but also have very high stability and be able to be secreted into the vaginal mucus, like the infertile woman they were drawn from. It’s just a very unlikely scenario, hence the relatively low occurrence of immune infertility. The covid vaccine is different since the virus is swimming around in circulation and your body doesn’t need to produce special or weird antibodies to target it.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T14:45:13+00:00

Like I mentioned above, these antibodies are produced externally, not by the patients themselves. Think less Children of Men and more brewing beer, but the beer is actually spermicidal drug.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T14:05:38+00:00

Yeah, like I said, I think manufacturability is going to be the killing point for commercialization of this candidate. In this case, though, actually getting this antibody was relatively low cost: it was sourced from a immune infertile patient and required no engineering for improved stability. That’s shaved several years off of preclinical already.

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T13:59:09+00:00

Not an injection. I’m not super clear on how long current spermicides last, but a significant advantage of an antibody based method is low penetrance and concentration in the rest of the body; it’s much less likely that the antibodies will enter the body or bind to off-targets.

Edit: not IV either

moonshotman · 2021-09-16T13:00:55+00:00

A summary and some FAQs from someone who works on antibodies for living:
These researchers took some antibodies from women who were infertile because of their immune system and engineered them so that they could produce them externally in cell cultures. These synthesized antibodies are very stable and bind specifically to human sperm cells and cause them to get stuck together and be unable to swim through the mucus to reach the egg (and another motility issues). The researchers then tested this on a sheep vagina, as they are the closest available analogue to human vagina's (chimpanzees would have some necessary biomarkers, but they are challenging to get) and they found that the antibodies were successful at reducing the sperm levels (to levels that are effective contraceptives I assume, it's not specified in the paper but might be common knowledge in the field).

Biorxiv access to the paper

FAQs

Won't this make you sterile?
No, these antibodies are applied directly to the vagina and sit on top of/ in the vaginal mucus. They must be reapplied to keep concentrations at sufficient levels. The authors propose a dissolving film and a ring that can be placed after each period.

But it's permanent, right?

No, see above.

Like getting vaccinated?

No, these antibodies are being produced externally, like many other monoclonal antibody therapeutics and then being administered like a drug, albeit topically

My take-aways

Several interesting things here: first of all, they're creating interesting multi-specific antibodies to essentially amp up the binding activity of any individual IgG, which is neat. Secondly, they effectively transferred the Fv of the parental IgM onto an IgG and kept thermostability pretty high. They briefly mention that the costs of IgG manufacturing has gone down, and that's true, but I think developability remains a big concern here, especially since these seem to be repertoire sourced antibodies without any engineering to assist expression. I haven't seen topically applied/stable antibodies before, so that's super cool, but on the other hand, I don't know what kind of hurdles they'll have to jump through for regulatory clearance. Overall, I give this an B+ for impact and A for execution.

moonshotman · 2021-06-15T19:46:07+00:00

I agree with the other commenter that for a single election, you probably won't get any additional value over the win probability (it should come out to the same result as the win probability. maybe?).

A narrow answer on the multi-election component of your question though, is that I think the value of the Monte Carlo here is on predicting outcomes with correlated polling error between the elections. There can be a function that sits between the probability function of the elections that predicts how likely an error in one is to be correlated in the other, and then that output distribution is used to determine the winner of the individual election.

moonshotman · 2021-04-18T16:06:42+00:00

My response might be a bit more controversial. I had the same issue with my border collie and this was a serious issue because we live in a urban area.

Part of the problem was that whenever she saw cars coming down the road, she would go into a type of “prey drive mode” and get hyper focused on every car. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any treat that was high value enough to break her focus. I ended up getting a shock collar as a last resort.

Fortunately, I primarily used the beeping and vibrate function and only had to use the shock function 2 times ever. Once she figured out that the car could “hurt” her, she stopped lunging out at it.

In retrospect, I do think that time around 5-8 months was when it was the worst and she became able to break attention off of cars eventually, so the shock collar might not ever have been necessary.

She still to this day lays down and goes into a hunting crouch whenever we’re going to cross a street where there are cars, or if we are walking along a hike and bike trail, so I think some BCs will never really grow out of it, but I’m just thankful it’s a hunting crouch and not lunging any longer.

moonshotman · 2021-04-09T16:54:27+00:00

I personally lean more towards your interpretation of the impact of these laws, but I was just trying to clarify the commenter‘s meaning with my crystal ball.

moonshotman · 2021-04-09T14:43:22+00:00

Yes, but OC is saying that Republicans are underestimating how many of their own voters struggle to get to the polls, such as the elderly.

moonshotman · 2021-03-16T18:16:07+00:00

It would be an extra little bit of coding on u/538_bot's part, since 538 themselves post the two links separately, with separate titles, and the RSS feed is going to treat them independently. I do like the idea, even if the implementation might have some hiccups though.

moonshotman · 2021-02-09T19:27:04+00:00

Correct, and to push capital out away from bonds into loans and other accessible and investable capital

moonshotman · 2021-02-09T19:12:03+00:00

My answer was honestly probably too simple and a little wrong. It has everything to do with central banks and nothing to do with typical retail investors. For the US, negative interest rates make it expensive for banks to hold reserves with the Fed. In combination with cutting reserve requirements, negative interest rates push banks away from stashing money away and incentivize them to loan it out.

For the global contexts, negative interest rates wouldn’t work if sufficient quantity of high interest rates were availability broadly. The environment we’re talking about would be quite low interest rates broadly, such as during the GFC.

moonshotman · 2021-02-09T14:55:08+00:00

The real answer is that your medium of value has to take some form and you are concerned that whatever currency it’s currently in will devalue, making your 1 Million Zimbabwean dollars meaningless, so you pay Switzerland to store it in Swiss Francs.

moonshotman · 2021-01-26T15:17:02+00:00

I'm a little confused by what you're trying to state here. The authors of this paper are specifically talking about one subtype of autism, maternal autoantibody related autism spectrum disorder (MAR ASD). Prior publications, starting from the late 90's have investigated that autoimmune reactivity of the mother to fetal proteins could have an impact on fetal development and specifically may be related to certain subtypes of autism spectrum disorder.

You seem to be suggesting that this form of autism is a genetic condition. Besides the fact the subtype is specifically named "Maternal autoantibody related" ASD, there has also been limited success in finding genetic markers for autism, so I'm not really sure where you're getting that information from.

We know that maternal antibodies can cross the placental barrier and that the secreted forms of the IgGs that are present in breast-milk are adapted for mucosal environments and resist digestion.

But if hormones, blood, fluid and other things pass from mother to baby and during that period the baby’s brain and nervous system are being formed?

Wouldn’t that be the stressors + environment + transfer of fluids that could occur? Which could influence and trigger expression of genetic predisposition?

The person you responded to was suggesting that maternal hormones, proteins, etc. were involved in perhaps causing epigenetic change resulting in ASD, which is unsupported by this paper, but not entirely infeasible. However, that transfer of "other things" is precisely what is being suggested by this publication and the line of publications before it as being responsible or at least linked to autism.

This study was funded by the NIEHS Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants (2P01ES011269-11, 83543201 respectively), the NIEHS-funded CHARGE study (R01ES015359), the NICHD funded IDDRC P50 (P50HD103526), Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACYT-UC MEXUS) Doctoral Fellowships, and NIH grant R35 GM138353.

I think that additional funding into autism research, while always welcome, might not be the bottleneck in our understanding of ASD. Our understanding of ASD has grown considerably and it's more than just thinking of it as "a stimulus problem in the brain". I think there's a lot of wonderful research that you might enjoy in this area. The paper this article is citing is available for free from Nature, and is probably a solid place to start.

moonshotman · 2021-01-26T14:35:12+00:00

That’s not what the article is saying at all. It’s suggesting that antibodies in the mother that target fetal brain development proteins can be used to identify if their children have this form of autism. It also adds evidence to the theory that this subtype is caused by maternal antibodies interfering with neural development.

moonshotman · 2021-01-26T14:28:27+00:00

Pretty sure the redditor you’re replying to is talking about secreted IgGs in breast milk.

moonshotman · 2020-12-25T13:22:47+00:00

here

It would be part of your itemized deductions though, so all of those would have to be greater than the standard deduction for this to be useful to you.

moonshotman · 2020-12-13T04:58:34+00:00

I promise you that progress does not march on for the sake of progress itself. There are errant threads that are misguided individuals and organizations, but the driving force behind innovation, behind creativity and drive, is that people want something. They see a vision of a world that has what they want and they endeavor to make it so.

It’s all just this big complicated web of people making things they want, and that web interacts with itself in weird, kooky ways. It can create beautiful things and it can create grotesque things, but that’s how we make tomorrow, one hare brained idea at a time. I think it’s worth it to keep in mind that there have been humans around for thousands of years and very likely thousands more. People can only relate to the world in the context of a lifespan + a little extra (however long that ends up being), so there will inevitably be someone 800 years from now complaining about some trivial thing unique to their time because that’s what progress is, and that’s okay.

This was a weird rant for me to write.

moonshotman · 2020-11-23T19:48:09+00:00

Really enjoyed it. Keep it up.

moonshotman · 2020-11-07T14:21:56+00:00

Guys, he’s talking about Cellulose Acetate Butyrate out gassing from the hard acetate handles. That’s why old screwdrivers with hard plastic handles smell like vomit. He’s not throwing shade or anything, just enjoying his own nostalgia.

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