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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The deceased girl’s father insisted that measles helps build up a person’s immune system.

    So here’s the thing…and I know that everyone here knows this, but it doesn’t.

    Measles causes immune amnesia.

    It’s pretty sneaky - integrating into respiratory tract macrophages, and avoiding destructive phagocytosis by binding directly to certain membrane receptors, and then being transported to lymph nodes where B and T cells get infected by the measles virus too. These memory B and T cells contain the memory of past infections, and when they’re destroyed (because they’re infected), you no longer have the ability to quickly ramp up a response to past infections and you get to start all over from the start.

    So even if their other kids survived, their chances of dying from another infection goes up. It takes somewhere between 2.5 and 5 years for that risk to come back to baseline.

    The infection itself might not have been “that bad” (despite killing one of their children) but the mortality risk isn’t over by a long shot.



  • Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.

    On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.




  • To properly answer, we need to define what we mean as “airborne” which has gotten a bunch of people very upset recently. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the transmission model for respiratory viruses focussed on 3 distinct models of transmission:

    • Fomites are collections of excretions on surfaces containing live virus. An infectious person cough into their hand, pick their nose, or similar, then touch the doorknob. The next person touches the doorknob, then their mucus membrane (nose, eye, mouth) and they get infected.
    • Droplets are large collections of excretions that are transmitted during talking, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. They are ballistically expelled, but don’t remain in the air. An infected person expels these droplets, and must be in range of another person who is struck by these droplets in their mucus membranes to be infected.
    • Finally, airborne transmission occurs when micro droplets small enough to ride on air currents are expelled from infected people, and non infected people inhale them into their airways.

    COVID was presumed to only be transmitted through the first 2 methods. But weird things were observed, where transmission occurred when people (or ferret model experiments) were separated by barriers through which ballistic droplets couldn’t pass, like air ducts with multiple 90° bends. People also got sick after being in rooms many minutes after infected people had been present, long after ballistic droplets would have harmlessly fallen to the ground.

    In reality, droplet models were just close range transmission, and airborne long range transmission of bio-aerosols, or micro droplets created from breathing, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. The range was more a function of the transmissibility of the virus. Highly infective things can infect at low doses at long range. Less infective things occur with much higher doses, when people are quite close to one another. This folded in the prior models quite nicely. It was, however, not well accepted.

    If a disease is to be transmitted by bio-aerosols, the disease vector needs to be able to enter the body through the surfaces with which it will interact upon being “breathed in”. This doesn’t work well for the STI viruses or bacteria, nor the malarial parasite, as they aren’t actively expelled in the respiratory system, so don’t generate bio-aerosols, and require access to highly specific host cells not easily accessed through the respiratory system at the necessary volumes to create an infection.

    So, no, not really possible for non-respiratory viruses to become “airborne” in that sense.there would need to be a LOT of intermediate steps.

    But diseases that we used to consider to be transmitted by the now defunct ballistic droplet model can become “airborne” (instead of “droplet”) if their ability to infect a subject becomes more successful at lower doses of pathogen such that it can occur at longer range, and over longer times.













  • Infuse for Apple TV will do this. You can point it to any folder on your NAS as an SMB share. It’s how I play back my own Blu-ray Discs, 4K or otherwise. It doesn’t do menus that I remember, but you can select the title easily enough.

    Highly recommend also pointing it to your Jellyfin instance and using that as your front end for other files as it seems to me to have the best ability to do direct playback without transcoding, and the fewest hiccups for audio playback sync issues which can be annoying.

    While you can just point Infuse directly at your other folders, its metadata cache gets dumped frequently by the OS, and it has to get rebuilt which is slow and annoying when you just want to watch something. Pointing at Jellyfin also lets you use whatever custom Jellyfin posters you’ve selected which helps for keeping special versions/collections identifiable visually.


  • To give a non-snarky answer, it does AR with external cameras and an incredibly low lag such that those who have tried it have said makes it almost natural (the resolution apparently isn’t perfect, but there is no discernible input lag when looking around which happens on other similar devices). But you can dial up the opacity to wind up in a fully VR environment. So, it is in fact, both.

    Your question about software is a big one. Apple is advertising 1M apps available at launch (good) but these are iPad apps, which can run on Vision OS without any modifications by the developers (not so good). That does not mean it will be a good experience. I was listening to a podcast today where a developer clearly stated that after getting a chance to try their app on device at a lab, they totally stopped development because they missed the mark completely with their imagination and the simulator on how it should work. You’ll still be able to run their iPad app, but until they get their hands on their own hardware to iterate more rapidly, they’re giving up.

    All that to say it’s unclear how many apps will be natively designed to work with it on launch, and if these will be any good.

    Thankfully I don’t live in the US so I am immune to this particular reality distortion field. For now…