> Interviewer at Endpoints: You plan to potentially launch a generic GLP-1 in Canada and Brazil in 2026.
Looking at the original interview on Endpoints, Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor says this about Brazil:
In Brazil, the biggest prescribers are dentists. Everyone says, “Why dentists?” They do aesthetic work, and then you have your Botox, and then you want a bikini body. It’s behaving like an OTC consumer brand. Imagine selling this, rather than $300, at $50. Anybody over the age of 40 in Brazil will probably want to be on that.
But he doesn't explain how they got around the patents. Another comment on HN says they expire in July 2026, but can anyone explain why the patents expire so soon in Brazil?
I think that loophole has closed. If I recall correctly, compounding pharmacies were only allowed to do that as the US gov put the drug on a special list due to shortages. I believe they have removed it from this list (or will do shortly) and that pipeline will stop.
In Brazil, medicines lose patent protection 20 years after the original filing date.
The filing date was in 2006, so the patent expires in 2026.
But note that the patent was only granted in 2019, it took 13 years. They went to court last year, but the justice (as far as I know) has continued to follow the precedent that the original filing date applies.
So they went to the federal government to try to change the law, but the government has refused so far.
The INPI (Brazilian Patent Office) used to take a VERY long time to register/grant patents. It's faster now (about 4 years on average), but it's still slow.
But I'm seeing here that in the US it was 2017. So not that different from 2019 anyway.
PS: Brazil also have several local labs focused on generics, and besides this, there's also state-owned lab, Fiocruz, who makes vaccines and medicines as well, several of them, to distribute though SUS.
In Brazil by the constitution, everyone has the right of health, so if the public health care (SUS) don't distribute, you can sue the governament and get the medicine. So there's a big incentive for the governament to make patents expire as soon as possible to have generics and include on SUS.
e.g Fiocruz manufacture PrEP, and started now PrEP injection (Cabotegravir).
Patrick Winston also wrote a book about presentation and communication: Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform. It was published a year after he passed away.
Several comments here mentioned shift work as a possible explanation.
The paper concedes that shift work is unhealthy[1] but claims that shift work doesn't explain their finding[2]. And their conclusion is "avoiding night light may be a promising approach for preventing cardiovascular diseases," but without telling us why. It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause heart disease.
[1] "Evidence demonstrates higher risks of adverse cardiovascular events, coronary heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and mortality due to cardiovascular disease in rotating shift workers."
[2] "Following separate adjustments for pre-existing diabetes, hypertension, high BMI, high cholesterol ratio, short, long, or inefficient sleep, and exclusion of shift workers, the relationships of night light with cardiovascular risks were attenuated but remained statistically significant for all outcomes except stroke."
> It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause heart disease.
I suspect everyone in the field already knows the top-level answer: light at night blunts the output of the circadian pacemaker (SCN), with all sorts of downstream effects including control of various hormones. So the levels will be different with light at night. "at night" means biological night. If someone consistently sleeps on some schedule with bright enough light during their awake time, and it's dark during their sleep time, it's fine.
I'm not in the field. I read up on it at one point at a shallow level and talked to some researchers about it informally.
There's a discoverability problem with this tool because I've never heard of Fakespot or Mozilla Review Checker until today.
> Mozilla integrated Fakespot's technology directly into Firefox as the "Mozilla Review Checker" feature, making it easier than ever for users to verify product reviews without installing separate extensions.
If it was integrated directly into Firefox, it's funny that I don't recall ever seeing it. I wonder if it gets disabled if you set your security and privacy settings too high, or if you use the Firefox ESR versions (Extended Support Release).
In case there are readers who don't know who Clifford Stoll is, he's the author of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, that was practically required reading if you were a programmer or hacker in the early 1990s.
I didn't understand how hijacking worked on Amazon until I read this lucid explanation. Clearly he's still a great writer.
He's on Hacker News as CliffStoll. This makes me wonder how Hacker News deals with someone registering a famous person's name if they are not that person? I'm guessing that it's not a big problem here on HN because there's nothing being sold.
Yep, I'm the same guy. Almost 40 years ago, I chased down those German hackers in my unix boxes; not knowing a thing about writing, I wrote Cuckoo's Egg. (a long story there - how to write a book)
Since then, I've lowered my periscope: my wife, Pat, and I decided to stay home together and raise two kids. They're now fledged - hooray! During that time, I started this micro-business of making Klein bottles - much fun!
Alas, but this past December, my wife left this vale of toil and tears. During the day, staying busy helps keep the grief under control; other times I'm in deep sadness, trying to find my way without her.
To all my friends & acquaintances on HN: my deep thanks for your kindness & support across decades. It's a joy to be considered a member of the tribe.
Great stuff! I always enjoy seeing websites from the 90s still being served to the public – even if they haven’t been updated in decades. Hedy Lamarr’s story was very interesting: https://britneyspears.ac/physics/intro/hedy.htm
The first time I lived in Italy, back in the mid nineties, with expensive phone service and no home internet connection... I had a copy of that book and I think I read it like 10 times.
I just saw him give a talk at Thotcon in Chicago about catching one of the first hackers and it was by far the best talk I've seen in quite a while. He's eccentric, animated, and an amazing storyteller.
This is amazing. I was literally reading the 3rd chapter of the book "Machine Beauty" in bed, saw the baby Clifford Stoll mentioned and looked it up because it sounded familiar. Of course I've seen the beautiful glass bottles here on HN before, so I went back to my book. After putting it down and hopping on HN, of course I see an article referencing this exact topic! Such a small world.
I think that was the book that I read on my Palm Pilot. But it's been a while.
I had the klein stein at one point, but got rid of it when downsizing. It was hard to clean, so not practical for drinking, and not as pretty on the shelf as a classic klein bottle. I'd recommend one of those if you're thinking of getting one.
When I was doing security training for the engineers at Relativity, I gave each attendee (ultimately all of engineering) the book.
I saw Cliff speak twice at the Dayton Hamvention. The first time was a retelling of his Cuckoo's Egg story, and the second time was about the joy of learning and all the marvelous things you could get at the flea market to build something.
Yes, Riffraff -- We did that film (yep, 16mm film) just a few months after I finished writing Cuckoo's Egg. At the time, the world was ignorant of words like "Internet" "Unix" and "e-mail", so I had to define each of these as I went along.
As a quick test of logical reasoning and basic Wikipedia-level knowledge, I asked Mistral AI the following question:
A Brazilian citizen is flying from Sao Paulo to Paris, with a connection in Lisbon. Does he need to clear immigration in Lisbon or in Paris or in both cities or in neither city?
Mistral AI said that "immigration control will only be cleared in Paris," which I think is wrong.
After I pointed it to the Wikipedia article on this topic[1], it corrected itself to say that "immigration control will be cleared in Lisbon, the first point of entry into the Schengen Area."
I tried the same question with Meta AI (Llama 4) and it did much worse: It said that the traveler "wouldn't need to clear immigration in either Lisbon or Paris, given the flight connections are within the Schengen Area", which is completely incorrect.
I'd be interested to hear if other LLMs give a correct answer.
Since both Portugal and France are part of the Schengen Area, and a Brazilian citizen generally does not need a visa for short stays (up to 90 days in any 180-day period) in the Schengen Area, here's how immigration will work:
Lisbon: The Brazilian citizen will need to clear immigration in Lisbon. This is because Lisbon is the first point of entry into the Schengen Area. At this point, their passport will be stamped, and they will be officially admitted into the Schengen Zone.
Paris: Once they have cleared immigration in Lisbon, their flight from Lisbon to Paris is considered a domestic flight within the Schengen Area. Therefore, they will not need to clear immigration again in Paris.
Important Note: While Brazilians currently enjoy visa-free travel, the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) is expected to become mandatory by late 2026. Once implemented, Brazilian citizens will need to obtain this electronic authorization before their trip to Europe, even for visa-free stays. However, this is a pre-travel authorization, not a visa in the traditional sense, and the immigration clearance process at the first point of entry would remain the same.
It looks like you're not sure of the answer yourself. That's really not a good way to test the LLMs. You'll just prefer the one that convinces you the most rather than the correct one.
Based on the Schengen Area rules for international travel:
Lisbon (Portugal) - Immigration clearance is required here. Since Lisbon is the first point of entry into the Schengen Area (and Brazil is outside Schengen), the passenger must clear immigration (passport control) in Lisbon. This is standard for all non-Schengen arrivals.
Paris (France) - No immigration clearance is needed. After clearing immigration in Lisbon, the onward flight to Paris is considered a domestic Schengen flight (no border checks within Schengen).
Sounds to me like "immigration in Lisbon or in Paris or in both cities or in neither city" is a trick question, because (on top of immigration in Lisbon as the Schengen entry point) surely the traveller also needs to clear immigration in Sao Paulo (as the Brazil / Mercosur exit point)?
I wonder if they adjusted it since reading this thread, or if you forgot to turn on reasoning or if you just got unlucky. For me, when I ask this it thinks for about 1.5 minutes and responds with
"The Brazilian citizen needs to clear immigration in Lisbon."
When I asked it to explain why, it said
"The Brazilian citizen needs to clear immigration in Lisbon because Lisbon is the first Schengen entry point when traveling from a non-Schengen country (Brazil) to a Schengen country (France via Portugal). According to Schengen rules, travelers must clear immigration at the first Schengen port of entry. Since Paris is also within the Schengen Area, no additional immigration checks are required upon arrival in Paris."
doing some reason.. uhh intuitioning i imagine brazil and portugal might have some sort of a visa-free deal going on in which case llama 4 might actually be right here?
AFAIK Schengen has a common visa policy, so there couldn't be such a deal between Brazil and Portugal. It'd also be extremely surprising if two countries not in a common travel area had a deal where you didn't have to clear customs at all, I suspect that doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
Brazilians don't need a visa for Portugal, France, or any Schengen country. But everybody has to pass through immigration control (at least a passport check even if you don't need a visa) when entering the Schengen zone. My question was which country would that happen in.
In the face of this AI-powered sales onslaught, customers will use AI-powered tools to analyze and evaluate all corporate products and services to make their purchasing decisions, without talking to anyone. Personal connections won’t be the solution to sales when customers trust their personal AI agents even more than real-life contacts.
It's already happening in HR and recruiting, but people still trust their network more. Their real network, not salespeople who sent a LinkedIn invite.
For this kind of product search, may I suggest Consumer Reports. It's one of the very few sites I'd consider unbiased since they (a) do testing with actual technicians and extensive laboratories, (b) anonymously buy all the products they test and they don't take gifts or manufacturers' sponsorships, (c) don't take advertising. They are funded by subscriptions, donations, and grants, and have been in existence for 89 years.
Specifically for robot vacuums, I looked just now and Consumer Reports has reviewed 46 different models from 14 manufacturers. (I knew about Roomba but had no idea that robot vacuums had become such a big category.) I'm putting the robot vacuum link below to give an overview. It's worth subscribing to evaluate options for a big purchase.
+1 for Consumer Reports. They're not expensive either, something like $5 per month. If they keep you from buying a bad fridge, it pays for itself!
Their recentish coverage of lead in foods is a bit embarrassing though, since they used a California standard for dosage limits that even the EU would blush at.
I love this response, and I agree 100% with your suggestion, but, isn't it obvious? They didn't want to pay for high quality information. Instead, they needed to wade through rubbish "unpaid"/"free" search results. Or in their own words: "Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search".
I thought that, too. It wasn’t really true, though.
Some papers pointed out that the models start failing after being trained with too much synthetic data. They also need tons of random, Internet data in the first place. Humans don’t have those failure modes. The AI’s also got smarter the more data we produced.
So, there’s some critical differences between what we’re doing and what they’re doing that keep it from being a neat flow like that. What many humans do in training other humans fits that, though.
> A talking Buzz Lightyear toy with one of those small language models that'll teach (human) infants to talk?
Great idea. I was thinking more like a plushie toy with sensors, it would react to touch, sight and speech. I would run the models locally from a computer, keep the toy just lightweight I/O.
Looking at the original interview on Endpoints, Sandoz CEO Richard Saynor says this about Brazil:
In Brazil, the biggest prescribers are dentists. Everyone says, “Why dentists?” They do aesthetic work, and then you have your Botox, and then you want a bikini body. It’s behaving like an OTC consumer brand. Imagine selling this, rather than $300, at $50. Anybody over the age of 40 in Brazil will probably want to be on that.
But he doesn't explain how they got around the patents. Another comment on HN says they expire in July 2026, but can anyone explain why the patents expire so soon in Brazil?