__blockcipher__

I have downvoted you because you seem to believe that if there were no anti-vaccine sentiment, SARS-2 would not exist, which is patently absurd

Masking has never been sufficiently proven to be effective against the spread of respiratory viruses. For SARS-2 specifically we have one randomized controlled trial, DANMASK, which showed no effect of masking (note the primary endpoint was self-infection not community transmission, but self-infection is a decent proxy, and furthermore community transmission is incredibly difficult to study, which is why it is so evil to me that the public health establishment convinced people that "my mask protects you, but not me" when there's actually never been evidence that it protects others as evidenced by the utter lack of studies on that part specifically)

For the pre-2020 studies, they were more or less in agreement that masks didn't help, even in healthcare workers, who tend to be better trained and more compliant with masking protocols. Indeed Macintyre et al provides strong evidence of the risks of cloth mask wearing; while this study compared cloth masking to standard practice, not no-masking, it at a minimum establishes the very real risks of cloth mask wearing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/

> Numbers in Provincetown have fallen and there were no reports of major outbreaks when vaccinated people returned home. So it would seem like you could have vaccinated-to-unvaccinated spread in some cases, but vaxed-to-vaxed is multiples less likely.

I think time will show this to be false. A shockingly high number of the vaccinated have actually already had COVID (some of them explicitly knew they had it yet chose to get vaccinated anyway, sometimes at the advice of their doctors, which is horrifying to me insofar as it reveals fundamental ignorance about natural immunity), but of those who haven't been exposed to real SARS-2, a strain capable of readily infecting them will just as easily pass to their vaccinated friend, given the "strategy" of the virus is to acquire point mutations on the S2 subunit that render the vaccines (which protect ONLY against the spike protein) ineffective

For those decrying the fact that this study is about a highly deadly virus, note that mathematically speaking, the same effect would be expected to be observed for a much less obviously lethal virus, if the effect were occurring across billions of hosts, such as what we're currently pushing for globally with the mass COVID vaccination campaign

I mean, I agree. I have serious concerns about the potential for over-sensitizing the adaptive immune system, even with the current vaccines. I also fundamentally disagree with vaccinating just against the spike protein rather than the whole virus (particularly given how immunogenic and therefore pathogenic the spike is; we're injecting [genetic material that codes for] the most dangerous part of the virus with these vaccines IMO)

I'm just pointing out how effective the vaccines would have to be for this strategy to make sense (and that's ignoring the whole matter of people that refuse to get vaccinated against COVID, like me).

Simply put the whole strategy doesn't make sense on utilitarian grounds. I don't need to invoke any libertarian principles to argue against why this is so insane.

Side tangent: Unfortunately many who are on my side of the fence as far as skepticism of mass vaccination, believe equally absurd things like the notion that we can eradicate SARS-2 by having the whole world all take ivermectin at the same time. This idea was non-ironically advocated for by Bret Weinstein...

Ah, I see.

I touched on this a bit in another comment but there's more factors than lethality at play. If a virus makes you sufficiently symptomatic you're much more likely to isolate. Conversely if it remains completely asymptomatic you will spread very little. So they're targeting a sweet spot of symptomaticity. You can very easily imagine a strain that would lead to the sweet spot of symptomaticity in a vaccinated person, which therefore would tend to "overshoot" and be excessively pathogenic in an equivalent unvaccinated individual.

In fact, this is a bit of a tangent, but I suspect part of the reason the vaccinated are spreading Delta so much, is that it causes normal cold symptoms in them (which btw the original SARS-2 did too despite how people would act like it's way different); and imo because the media and the "expert" class has so sufficiently scared them that SARS-2 is this scary supervirus, they assume their run-of-the-mill cold symptoms can't be COVID and keep engaging in society without getting tested or anything *

As very circumstantial evidence of the above hypothesis, I would point to https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787. This was before vaccination but it's a case report of people who actually had SARS-2 (if we can trust PCR; given the symptoms I think in this case they really did have it), and indeed had COVID (+ pre-existing risk factors) bad enough that they ended up developing strokes. And yet even though these were actual covid patients who eventually developed strokes:

> "Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic."

So my interpretation of the above (this is me reading between the lines) is that even though they felt like shit, they thought actual COVID was even worse than that and thus avoided going to the hospital so they wouldn't catch COVID, not knowing that they already had it...

* Note I don't necessarily think this (unintentional spread) is even a bad thing, I am firmly on the side of "SARS-CoV-2 will propagate through the population no matter what we do and the more we flail about and needlessly damage ourselves the worse it will be". But from the perspective of the average vaccinated person, they are probably very against the concept of spreading it and thus if they were aware that their "cold" was really SARS-2 they'd act way differently

It's not as simple as lethality. Generally a pathogen needs to cause some sort of symptom in the host to spread well, but the more severe the symptoms the more aggressively the person would isolate. Insofar as the vaccines mostly worked upon their initial release, you can imagine a new strain that is much more virulent (replicates significantly faster, etc); such a strain could cause a vaccinated individual who would normally be completely asymptomatic and therefore not infectious [hopefully we all accept by now that there is pre-symptomatic spread but not asymptomatic spread, if not you're behind a year on the research], to become symptomatic and therefore capable of transmitting. If that same strain were to infected an unvaccinated individual who had never been exposed to the real virus, it might cause much more severe symptoms in them.

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There's also the separate phenomenom of immune escape. The current major vaccines (mRNA and adenovirus-vector) all just make the body's own cells express (generate) the spike protein (S2 subunit), and nothing else. So specifically point mutations in the S2 subunit could allow some degree of artificial immunity evasion (it wouldn't work against those naturally infected because they were infected with whole, live-replicating virus and thus have much more diverse epitopes for their immune system to "learn" and possibly a stronger immune stimulus in the first place)

Interesting you're so focused on the "vaccine hesistancy" side of the fence. Do you have any concerns about people using their prestigious degrees and credentials to frighten the population completely out of proportion with their actual risk from a pathogen, in order to persuade them to comply with top-down public health measures?

It sounds a lot like you just don't like the conclusion that this classic paper leads to: that the "societal benefit" of mass vaccination with an imperfect vaccine is not nearly as clear-cut as many have been led to believe.

My advice to people is to treat the vaccines as a personal risk reduction tool and little else. The only way to actually guarantee you won't infect someone you interact with, is to have acquired (and recovered from) the natural SARS-2 virus, which will build robust immunity. As far as immunity to reinfection, looking at antibodies alone, IgG levels stay seropositive for ~3.5 years:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.18.20156810v...

> Based on these half-life data, we estimate that the median times for IgM, IgA and IgG to become seronegative are 4.59 (IQR 4.12-5.03), 7.78 (IQR 6.71-9.16) and 42.72 (IQR 33.75-47.96) months post disease onset.

> This study suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust neutralizing and binding antibody responses in patients and that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 acquired by infection may persist for a relatively long time.

and furthermore once those IgG levels fade you will still have immunological memory, which lasts basically forever and allows your system to much more rapidly and effectively respond to future infection, leading you to have a much lower peak viral load, lessened symptoms (usually fully asymptomatic) and therefore a near inability to transmit the virus.

For example for the 1918 flu, immunological memory has been shown to persist 60+ years later: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2008/08/research...

Exactly this. Insofar as the vaccines actually worked to protect people who had never acquired SARS-2, an even somewhat vaccine-evading mutation has a sizeable population of real-SARS-2-naive individuals to spread through (i.e. the vaccinated who never had natural infection).

This is why I and others have opposed the concept of mass vaccination for an endemic highly-spreading respiratory virus. It simply doesn't make sense unless you can develop a vaccine comparable to natural immunity (both in magnitude of immune response but also robustness/resiliency to mutations; over the long-term the current vaccines offer neither).

SARS-2's risk is incredibly well bounded; we have a great idea of who is truly vulnerable and who would have to get struck by lightning 8 times in a row to be seriously harmed. We should have recognized that fact from the beginning; but recognizing that fact runs counter to the narrative required to scare the whole population enough to accept lockdowns/etc.

> Host death does not stop transmission of Covid-19

Huh? It does for that host. Yeah their corpse can still spread it for awhile or whatever but they're no longer engaging in society.

> What advice would you give Apple if they’re faced with a legitimate government asking it to comply with the laws they have instituted in the society Apple wants to do business?

When someone is trying to rob you, generally the best thing to do is to hand over your wallet. If a law passes you should obey it for your own sake. That's an entirely orthogonal question to whether we as the users should be outraged or not.

Also while obeying an injust law, a company has a responsibility to legally challenge it in court with their resources, if for no other reason than to avoid the profit loss of having to comply with invasive regulations

Furthermore, it's not clear that this is the direct result of some federal law. It reads more like pro-actively appeasing their federal overlords.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14231090022805135... and https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14231094582936289... kind of sums it up. Clearly there is an intent to progress to more than just what's been shared with iCloud. Otherwise there'd be no need for software on the devices themselves at all.

It's dystopian because a private company, who in the past has been committed to maintaining user privacy even when it inconveniences the government, is now regressing and going to scan the "private" contents of peoples' phones to see if they have any matches for images that have been added to a government-supplied blacklist. This blacklist is completely opaque to us as citizens; there is no way to audit or review the contents. Additionally because it's using photoDNA, if someone ever did get ahold of even a single entry in the database, they could craft malicious images that fool the perceptual hash algorithm into flagging an innocent image. (Yes, I get there will be manual review, etc).

Furthermore in principle there's no reason this has to be, or will be, just CP. First it'll expand to blatant terroristic images, say ISIS beheading type videos. Then it will progress to subversive material: COVID "misinformation", "domestic terrorism" (read: anyone the feds don't like), the list goes on. This tool and its successors will be used to completely abolish the concept of device privacy and will be used to ruin the lives of anyone who sufficiently pisses off the feds. And that's just in America, god knows what they're going to do with this system in China.

You think Facebook and Google Photos should be the goal for privacy standards? You and I are practically in different universes then, philosophically.

You're also being naive by swallowing the "it's only iCloud" justification. There is a clear intent to progress to scanning all local photos. After all, if photos must be match those of a government child abuse database, and any matches trigger manual review, what would an innocent person possibly have to hide? By that logic it'd be absurd to not scan just because it's only locally. After all, you're only catching bad guys! This is about protecting the children after all! /s

I oppose government-supplied blacklists. Doubly so when we can't even see what's in the database, but I would oppose them either way.

Agreed. From my comment:

> although (to your point) without doing any magic to intentionally cause a collision, effectively you will never get one because of just how many damn buckets there are

COVID "misinformation", anti-lockdown protests, any movements that are commonly labelled as domestic terrorism (boog bois, antifa, maybe even BLM; in China it will be anything that speaks out against the CCP, etc) - the potential for abuse is massive.

Anyone that trusts the feds to do the right thing here is incredibly naive. They get to operate a black-box database; if your phone has any photos that match an entry in the db you will be reported to the authorities. I can't believe on HN of all places there's not 10x more of an outcry.

> As described here, the scanning only applies to images also uploaded to iCloud ("[the] algorithm will continuously scan photos that are stored on a US user’s iPhone and have also been uploaded to its iCloud back-up system"). While we don't know whether this description is accurate, it suggests that if you don't back up images to iCloud your device won't do any scanning locally. Apple already has the keys to your iCloud backups, so if you value privacy you're probably not backing up to iCloud anyhow.

If we had a way to guarantee that it would stay that way, it'd be less concerning. As it stands, clearly there are plans to scan on the device itself, otherwise there would be no need to roll out software on iPhones at all.

> Hash collisions aside, this should only produce matches against images that are already in a government database. It will match manipulated images (e.g., rotated or cropped), but it won't match new images.

Agreed, but the issue is the government can stick whatever photos in the DB they want. And we have no way to verify what's in there, since they're not gonna release thousands of CP images for us to audit them.

> Apple has the control to do all sorts of invasive things to our privacy. They could be scanning and reporting all kinds of things already, and we might not even know. Or they could start doing so tomorrow. From this point of view we're already trusting them to do right by us as their customers, and this feature doesn't change that.

It changes plenty. Currently Apple more or less promises not to spy on you, and so they have to actually be lying to do so. Is lying an option for them? Sure, but that's different than them just announcing in advance "hey we're gonna start scanning every photo you have and crossreferencing against a somewhat-transformation-invariant secret government database". I'd prefer that they have to lie to me to spy on me, since that at least has the potential for backlash if discovered. If they get this feature rolled out we're all fucked.

You have two primary misunderstandings AFAICT.

(1) You're assuming it's a "traditional" hash, as opposed to a perceptual hash. The former is purely based off file contents and thus any transformations applied on an image will lead to a new pseudorandom hash. By contrast, perceptual hashes are made to be able to still return a positive when a photo is resized, accumulated artifacts etc. This proposal is to use phashes, not hashes

(2) You have a subtle misunderstanding of how a traditional cryptographic hash function works. Such a function maps an infinite number of possible inputs to a finite number of possible outputs. To your point, flipping even a single bit will basically give you a completely new pseudorandom hash. However, given the infinite inputs and finite outputs, for every output (every hash) there is a countably infinite number of possible inputs that would hash to that value. Thus it's entirely possible to change the file contents and end up with the same hash, although (to your point) without doing any magic to intentionally cause a collision, effectively you will never get one because of just how many damn buckets there are

From the article:

> The automated system would proactively alert a team of human reviewers if it believes illegal imagery is detected, who would then contact law enforcement if the material can be verified. The scheme will initially roll out only in the US.

This is dystopian and needs to be opposed, not applauded.

Apple will be scanning the photos on your phone and cross-referencing them against photoDNA for a government database. You don't see how that's not a huge potential for abuse right there? The government decides the images. And you best believe they're not going to release the images publicly to verify what's in the db, for [many] obvious reasons.

This is a horrible idea, a massive regression in Apple (and therefore the broader industry's) stance on security/privacy, and the fact that you are dutifully swallowing the "child porn" justification is so incredibly concerning to me.

> The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."

That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)

> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.

You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.

> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.

This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.

BTW:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...

If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))

Revenue numbers at time T are often the result of work done at T-3 years, T-2 years, T-1 year etc

> Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.

Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.

This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.

As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.

So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.

And to expand on what I would like to hope your point is, comments like the GP are exactly why I and many others come here :)

> These are open questions that science doesn't have very satisfying answers to yet.

Agreed.

—

It’s nowhere near complete but one place to start is psychedelic (a) increase communication across/between disparate brain regions, (b) synchronize the various waves of brain activity into a single vibration, and (c) reduces the threshold at which pattern matching / classifier networks will fire (thus the increased visual acuity at small doses and pareidolia and other visual effects at high doses)

I remember a study that explained (b), can’t remember anything else about it though :/

—

EDIT: https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-... is also great to think about. DeepDream produces very psychedelic images and the bit about reversing the network and having it recurse on pattern matching its on output to “massage” the raw input into alignment with a schema (akin to feeding output back into input) is very relevant

The “stoned ape” theory is one of the dumbest theories ever invented. I say that as a big McKenna fan - he’s a great orator and very insightful, but his theory is very transparently a way to elevate the perceived importance of shrooms. There’s a common trip motif that shrooms make one “more human” and the “theory” is just a projection of that.

Mechanistically it just doesn’t make any sense. The reason mushrooms make us trip is because there’s already a network there that they “talk” to (the 5ht_2a receptor system)

And how exactly would non-linguistic animals suddenly gain linguistic ability? They better hope everyone around them is tripping on the perfect dose too otherwise they’re just gonna perceive it as meaningless babblimg

It's no longer mere "opprobrium". These days it's losing your career (or at least your current job) and getting incessantly harassed. The calculus has very much changed.

(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)

It really scares me that this even needs to be explained to people. The government is outright stealing from landlords. They literally made it illegal (while also not passing an actual law, as far as I know [which is how every COVID restriction worked as well]) to evict somebody.

So many people have this juvenile notion of what a landlord is, too. They seem to think the only type of landlord is a mega-tycoon that owns hundreds of properties. Don't get me wrong, I am against all forms of theft so it's still wrong to steal from them, but it makes it a lot more apparent how wrong it is when you're stealing from the old Grandma that has 1 or 2 extra properties that she rents out.

I generally don't like to quantify things that don't have hard numbers behind them, but just to get some napkin math down:

Let's say there's a 1/1000 chance in infection of the parent if the [adult] child is actively infected during a brief outdoor hug. The chance of the child being currently infected depends on the current base rate but for the napkin's sake let's put it at 1/10. (As an aside, in actuality while there is evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-CoV-2 the overwhelming evidence shows that asymptomatic transmission doesn't occur so just a heuristic of "am I actively sick or not" gets you good risk management anyway but let's avoid that for now)

Now let's say that the chance of the parent dying or having a seriously bad outcome given SARS-CoV-2 infection is 1/10.

That brings us to (1/1000) * (1/10) * (1/10) = 1 death per 100,000 of these hug-events. If we stick with my earlier example of someone with 2 years of life expectancy, that would factor out to (365*2*24*60)/(10^5) = 10.512 minutes "lost" per hug, if we assume that hugging someone doesn't have any positive effects on their physical wellbeing whatsoever.

My point is that regardless of their immune status, briefly hugging someone in an outdoor environment is not actually a risky behavior. Thus why I'm saying that it's really much better viewed as trauma induced by the societal fear-programming rather than an inevitable result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerging.

By the way, I do feel the need to mention this because it's not recognized enough: the closer someone is to death (as are most of the people at genuine risk of COVID-19), the higher the relative cost of spending a year of avoiding physical contact with loved ones. If your parent has only an expected value of 2 years left then they could easily spend 75% of that being deprived of social interaction and physical contact from loved ones. That's no small thing.