The questions you're asking are not really coherent. mRNA vaccines are pretty well understood. The vaccine delivers a payload to your own cells which cause them to produce viral proteins. These proteins in turn cause an immune response and help you fight off any future infection because immune cells have memory and leverage information from the vaccine proteins to fight off the real virus.
mRNA vaccines are essentially a form of genetic engineering but their safety record is better than basically all other forms of immunization so if you've already had 3 boosters and no negative side-effects then getting another one isn't going to hurt you any more than the previous shots.
You should also quit smoking and start exercising since that's better than whatever else you could do for your health and general well-being.
What does well understood mean in this context?
The mRNA enters the cell because of some addition to it, which seems to be the key here. What is exactly coded in front of that spike protein to enter a cell and what happens with it inside the cell?
Is this part required to enter the cell just discarded?
The cell starts production of viral protein by copying the mRNA again and keeps doing so for while. Then it somehow stops...
What exactly stops this process, except for heat shock?
Are the cells injected with the mRNA gobbled up by the immun system or does it stop on its own to produce the viral protein?
How does the viral protein leave the cell after it is produced inside of it?
For a production of a virus it would stay inside until the virus is fully assembled.
Is there a trick to the mRNA stuff, that makes the cell produce the viral particles outside of itself so the immun system can get to it?
Or is the cell bursting at some point when it is completely overloaded with viral protein?
I explained what happens at a level of abstraction that makes sense for what was being asked. If you want more details then get in touch with a real biologist or geneticist. I'm not the person to answer your questions.
The mRNA is misinformation that tells the cell to produce the spike protein of coronavirus on its cell membrane. Those membranes are how cells interact with their environment. Later immune cells interact with those same spike proteins to identify the right antibodies to fight off the foreign, spike proteins. All without ever actually exposing the patient to coronavirus.
Thankyou for the respectful response, this is the stuff I need to see. Unfortunately I seem to be caught up in a spiral of sorts and the only information I am receiving is from either extremely partisan media outlets and or algorithms that are pushing "Red Pill" narratives my way. I try to watch the other media sources but find them so disingenuous I can't make it more than a few minutes before retreating back into my right wing echo chambers!
PS: Sorry for baiting my questions with anti Justin rhetoric but I think it will trigger the right...or wrong individuals for answering my question honestly!
I don't know what "Justin rhetoric" is but if you want more accurate information then you won't find it in the usual places. Wikipedia articles are usually a good starting point for most things because they contain a list of references and first-hand sources. That's how I learned about mRNA vaccines and it was better than whatever was being blasted on social media and mainstream news outlets.
Thankyou for the tip, IDK why I have not visited Wikipedia. Probably a combination of negative feedback from times I used it as a source and personal laziness.
What's obvious here is that these people are drunk with power. Most of the conversations revolve around social engineering or extracting as much money as possible from Twitter. Paints a really bleak picture of everyone involved. The only one that appears sane is Jack, everyone else is pushing some agenda that has nothing to do with the product itself or its participants.
It's pretty obvious none of these people care about anything other than money, power, and their personal amusement. Jack is right, Twitter needs to be a protocol. It's a mess because it is centralized and there are private and state actors trying to run influence operations on it.
Didn't seem like that to me. Mostly seemed pretty mundane.
There's this weird thing I'm seeing at the moment where every second comment about Musk (here, on Twitter, wherever) is calling him a psychopath or worse (so much name calling), but when you read what he actually writes, or watch him on video, he seems pretty sane. He's got money and Aspergers, so he's not 'normal', but he seems sane and not-evil to me.
I'm beginning to think that anyone who resorts to name-calling is not worth listening to.
> He's got money and Aspergers, so he's not 'normal', but he seems sane and not-evil to me.
It's very easy to underestimate by 1000x the number of people who have an irrational hatred of Asperger's/other ND people. Only ND are in a position to really notice (for the same reason a white person in the US saying "I just don't see much racism" means nothing) but ND are uniquely deficient in identifying who has such a hatred for them.
With 30 yrs experience I have determined that at least 2% of my casual acquaintances casually harbor this particular brand of bigotry. This is likely an underestimate for the aforementioned reason. I have no idea where this stands relative to racism, etc. but it seems pretty significant.
Case in point: sibling comment asserts that Elon is "cruel, psychotic, and childish" when in fact he exhibits nothing but perfectly harmless ND-typical behavior.
He’s responsible for his behavior and the image he puts out in public. The fact that he acts cruel, psychotic, and childish in public and somewhat normal to other billionaires in private says a lot about him, and it’s not good.
That's not their problem. Their problem is an oppressive government and people who can't get organized enough to make a difference, very similar to the US.
No one outside of Iran can solve their problems for them, just like no one outside of the US can solve US problems.
> Their problem is an oppressive government and people who can't get organized enough to make a difference, very similar to the US.
Thanks for bringing the parallels in the US to my attention. Really, I had no idea that the US was so similar to Iran. You are doing this this topic a great service by not using hyperbole.
Suppose that there was an American handball player who was incarcerated unfairly, say, for bringing Schedule 1 drugs for personal use into the United States, how exactly would/should anyone outside of the United States apply public pressure to secure their release?
Yea, I don’t know what I would think about that. Perhaps if the scenario was someone bringing illegal drugs into a country, knowingly violating that countries laws, having been to that country before and been told what was illegal, and then to top it off that person had publicly mocked and criticized the free country they had come from previously - I‘m not sure I could muster the will to care if they are released or not.
I wouldn’t have empathy for someone knowingly breaking any foreign country laws with arrogance.
The US, or Israel, or Saudi could probably negotiate a prisoner release. However, the price could be releasing some Iranian who's imprisoned there, at the very least.
I don't think ad-tech is going away anytime soon. It would be nice but it's not gonna happen because the fundamental problem is not the ads but the fact that most social networks are not sustainable without advertising so the platform participants end up being treated like cash cows that are milked for all they're worth.
If Twitter was paid for by its participants then they would not have to put up with advertisers. Right now the advertisers subsidize the operational costs so they get to dictate what features are developed and what kind of invasive access they have to behavioral data for optimizing their marketing campaigns.
And the worst part. I think there are a lot of us who would be willing to pay for being on a good social network without ads, but I don't think there is enough of us. Too many people have been trained via myspace, facebook and twitter that social media is just "free." It it is going to be hard to change the masses on that.
As long as somebody has friends who can't afford say $10 per month for social media, the network effect takes over and the result will inevitably be ad-ridden crap.
I might be willing to pay to turn off ads and tracking on such a platform, but if all the middle-class+ people pay to turn off ads, which advertisers would want to spend money targeting "poor" people and people too cheap to pay a couple dollars for using social media?
Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs what it does and there is no way to rewrite the software at this point to reduce hardware costs and still maintain backward compatibility with the existing Twitter functionality (no matter how minimal the feature set seems to be for external observers).
So either this article is a lie or Elon is just making nonsensical statement to focus attention on what it costs to run Twitter at such a scale. If people don't pay then the functionality will continue to degrade and it's looking like there aren't enough willing buyers for $8/month. The only way Twitter can continue to operate is if the people that actively use the service start paying for it, every other financing option is now closed off and if Elon can't turn it around then I doubt anyone else can.
I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale.
So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned the size and cost of their ML models? That their model evaluation infra is fully saturated?
Storage is cheap. I believe they are on AWS, so hardware costs are already taken out of the equation. If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily.
You should sit down and perform the storage calculation instead of struggling to find something correct in what I said because that will be a better use of your limited time.
> I believe they are on AWS, so hardware costs are already taken out of the equation. If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily.
They already run their own datacenters (not uncommon for companies started in that era). They have moved partially into the cloud for data science stuff - GCP, not AWS, according to their engineering blog.
So… odds are that there isn’t nearly as much waste as everyone wants to believe.
I think what really irks me is this meme that “obviously they have massive infrastructure waste.”
Does anyone have credible evidence that there is enormous waste in Twitter’s infrastructure? Just because Musk says “cut $1b in infra spending” doesn’t mean that there is $1b of things to cut, just lying about being wasted. Some of the smartest minds in our industry work/worked at Twitter. Are they that bad at their jobs?
What is actually going to happen is this: they’ll turn off all of their data warehousing stuff, blinding the business. They’ll cut their redundancies and backups, reducing the probability that they can do effective DR. They’ll reduce spending on observability so far that they won’t even know what’s going wrong (it’s surprisingly expensive). And that’ll get them to the $1b in cuts - by flying blind (both in a business sense, and a technical sense), and just hoping they don’t need to recover from a disaster.
> If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily
Except you can't wave a magic wand and shift the entire distributed infrastructure for one of the five most visited sites on earth on-prem. Twitter has two DCs. Running their infra on-prem somewhere would require reworking the entire company from the ground up in a way that would take years and cost substantially more than $1b.
If they laid off 3700 people, assuming 200,000 dollars each, that's 75% of the way there.
edit: oh, I suppose you wouldn't consider personnel "infrastructure". I'll keep this up despite how off topic I am, it's interesting to compare the reduced cost in labor to the stated goal in reducing infrastructure costs. A billion here, a billion there... Soon we're talking about real money.
I'm sure he can keep firing people and just keep the platform on life support but that's the same as admitting Twitter is going the way of Digg and all other social networks that tried to execute a pivot. The people that think he'll be able to turn it around don't really understand the scale of the problem.
There’s always a way to reduce costs. For storage specifically one could spend engineering time compressing data, storing it in a colder way, etc. The question is whether the trade offs, short term or long term, are worth it.
I'm pretty certain that Twitter's code is essentially append-only. It's possible to add new features and keep the old stuff running but there is no way to re-architect it to reduce costs. They are already compressing the data so there is no improvement to be gained there. As for cold storage, re-engineering backups and other forms of redundancy will reduce long-term costs but it won't reduce their yearly operating requirements for storage and compute (storage fundamentally being the main limiting factor).
So either enough people pay to subsidize Twitter's operating costs for everyone else or it continues to get worse over time. There really isn't a 3rd option with better engineered software because there are no software engineers that can work on software of Twitter's scale and make it meaningfully more efficient in terms of storage and compute requirements.
Presumably we are on the brink of AGI, so maybe Elon knows something everyone else doesn't and he's just gonna use AGI to rewrite all of Twitter in assembly. /s
I should add, we are hysterically bad at predicting innovation (or predictions in general). We seem to repeatedly do things that the far most experts in that field would have angrily rejected for sounding preposterous. Perhaps not often enough but we do see those things regularly on the HN front page.
It means other parts of the economy must shrink. Population is no longer increasing which means every percentage of growth in one sector is offset by losses in another. There are only finitely many people and each person can only be in one sector at a time vs the previous regime where population growth meant every sector could grow concurrently by hiring from a growing population.
Modern capitalism requires an infinite supply of people to maintain economic growth. The model is entirely busted because it is at odds with physical constraints and dynamics of a finite planet. I personally consider the whole thing a collective delusion because infinite growth on a finite planet is a logical and physical impossibility. Unless everyone decides to live in VR where nothing matters then the economic models must at some point make a connection with reality and at that point it becomes obvious that the capitalist model of infinite growth is untenable unless there is a supply of people growing at a faster rate than whatever economic metrics are used to measure the real economy.
Do you think the economy is zero sum? Go back 50k years, all the current wealth must have been distributed among a mere 50k cavemen. Were they all billionaires? Quality of life must have been amazing for them.
When you go into the woods and stack rocks into a house, you created value. What part of the economy shrank?
How many jobs do you have? Like as a professional in some sector of the economy, how many sectors do you personally occupy? Are you a farmer that also writes iOS software? No, obviously not. Whatever job you do is fixed and it contributes a finite amount of economic value. Since the population is now decreasing there are fewer people, which means if all the economic value from everyone is added up then the total contribution will be less than another population with more people.
It doesn't make sense to talk about zero-sum economics because economics is always a positive sum arrangement of work and specializations. The number of workers is the main limiting factor in any productive economy, every other measure is essentially an approximate proxy of that.
The financial sector on the other hand is indeed a zero-sum system. If someone is making money then someone else must be losing it because there is a finite supply of dollars in the economy at any given moment so if the supply is fixed then the monetary economy is a zero-sum game.
All of this is derivable from first principles but for some reason most people are constantly parroting some nonsense about wealth and zero-sums.
Even finance isn’t zero sum. The money supply is literally something that is managed. When you take a loan, the bank has created money, since the deposits are still on the books. When you buy insurance, you are getting security, insurance company is getting a premium, and you are both happy.
When you take a loan and start a business, the bank makes money on the interest, and you (hopefully) make money because your business is providing more value than it was. You bought a new machine and make widgets 10x faster, etc.
Also, people confuse money and wealth. One is bandwidth, the other is data. You use bandwidth to transfer data, which is what you care about, and its possibility for creation is basically limitless.
You probably should spend some more time thinking about how that all fits together because saying that the bank creates money from interest rates means that the central bank sets the rate according to what economic growth they're expecting. If the rate is decoupled then it stops tracking real economic productivity as I've defined it. The obvious logical conclusion is that raising rates will lead to a recession because economic productivity has been stagnant for some time now. So if the rate is above actual economic productivity then that will reduce the total money supply and this seems to be their main goal. There is no way to reduce inflation without destroying money.
> There is no way to reduce inflation without destroying money.
Of course there is. When inflation is caused by supply restrictions, increasing supply will reduce the rate of inflation. Inflation is about prices, it's not about the money supply per se.
You've been making some weird personal attacks and telling people they need to "spend some more time thinking" and you should really stop doing that.
> If someone is making money then someone else must be losing it because there is a finite supply of dollars in the economy at any given moment so if the supply is fixed then the monetary economy is a zero-sum game.
That is simply untrue. The money supply is not fixed.
In a sense it is if it's tied to value, you can print trillions of empty dollars but the ratio will be the same if there will be no growth behind it, now instead of 1$ you will pay 10$ for something, so maybe amount is not fixed but representation or ratio or how you want to call it seems to be.
People conflate money and value / wealth. We can individually create things of value: food, art, services, inventions, shelter. There is no practical upper bound. Money is a medium of exchange from one to another. Having more money in the system means it’s easier to get bandwidth to transfer that data between interested parties. Without it, you are inefficiently bartering to exchange value.
Value existed long before money, and its potential for creation is not dependent on it.
This is entirely mistaken. Wealth creation is not zero-sum. Per-worker productivity is not static. The carrying capacity of the planet is not static either.
Have you personally done any work to increase the planet's carrying capacity? More specifically, what is its current capacity and how is it calculated? Seems like you would know this based on what you have stated.
mRNA vaccines are essentially a form of genetic engineering but their safety record is better than basically all other forms of immunization so if you've already had 3 boosters and no negative side-effects then getting another one isn't going to hurt you any more than the previous shots.
You should also quit smoking and start exercising since that's better than whatever else you could do for your health and general well-being.