Cryptography nerd

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Most early vaccines were less dangerous viruses related to more dangerous ones and which provided cross-immunity once the immune system had learned it.

    Then there’s been plenty of vaccines with dead virus particles, as well as modified live viruses (dangerous viruses which was weakened, neutralized, or sterilized, or even mild viruses equipped with recognizable but harmless proteins from dangerous viruses) to more safely expose you directly to the pathogen.

    Then mRNA and protein subunits and some other types drops the full virus part and provides methods to expose you to only small pieces

    It’s generally speaking risky to try to create custom infectious viruses. A significant factor is that triggering the mechanisms for mass production of virus particles in the body can be enough to trigger harmful reactions (immune dysregulation, cell death, etc). Stuff like this is why even viruses you think are harmless still kills people every flu season













  • It’s not necessarily impossible to target prions but it doesn’t seem trivial. The reason they’re dangerous is specifically the incorrect shape because that shape changes interaction behavior with other biological molecules, and immune cells could theoretically test for that change in interaction. But that’s more complicated than regular molecule recognition which immune cells normally do. There’s probably research in trying to make immune cells handle that too, but I haven’t seen any articles about it.




  • Atprotocol.

    Mastodon and activitypub is very much like social media implemented in the form of public email lists implemented over HTTP (push massages between servers).

    Bluesky uses content addressing (think magnet links for torrents, but for linking to post data) and pull mechanism with notifications, plus public shared archive nodes (CDN-like servers).

    The main difference is that you’re much more independent of individual servers and can easily move your account around, since your account ID is tied to a cryptographic key belonging to your account which you bring with you along with your post archive, and your handle can be based on a domain name you own (also works as a verification mechanism you don’t have to pay extra for).