brainbrane

MS is autoimmune. HIV/AIDS is a viral infection. The diseases and their treatments are night and day with respect to each other. If by "that disease" you are referring to an HIV infection, then yes, complications from HIV often kill people. If you are referring to MS, not so much, relatively speaking. One study found that people with MS live to be 75.9 years old, on average, compared to 83.4 years old for those without.

Ocrelizumab.

I just learned last week that my COVID antibody count from the vaccine is zero. Since I'm on an immunosuppressing medication that wipes out the B cells in my bloodstream, this isn't really all that surprising to me. I learned about this because I'm in a medical study, and other people in the study who take the same medication also don't produce any COVID antibodies in response to the vaccine.

What's interesting is that I still get side effects from the vaccine, and they seem to be right in line with the side effects that other people generally report. I'm no immunologist, but I've taken an armchair interest in the subject since I've been managing an autoimmune disease (MS) for the past 25 years.

The immune system is an amazingly complex thing with many branches. Different types of cells interact in ways that we have yet to fully understand. In spite of having no B cells (except what's in my bone marrow), my T cell count is solidly in the normal range. And the currently-accepted catalog of types of T cells is enough to make your head swim:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_cell#Types_of_T_cell

Three types of CD4+ Helper T cells are implicated in MS: Th1, Th17, and Th9. And yet by killing the B cells in my bloodstream, for me that seems to stop these T cells from doing MS-like activity without substantially compromising my body's ability to still fight infections.

What does all this mean for my own risk level from COVID, and in particular the Delta variant? Absolutely no clue. I've gotten my third (booster) shot and will be getting more blood drawn next week for the medical study, which I expect will again result in a zero COVID antibody count.

People on my medication have been shown to have more severe cases of COVID when they contract it. I'm a realist about COVID and realize that some day I'll contract it. The best I can do is make sure I'm otherwise in good shape by eating, sleeping, and exercising right. Another option is to go off my medication, let my B cells recover, and then try another less effective medication for a while. For people in my circumstance, there really are no good answers right now.

I know this is all at best tangential to the subject of this study, but I'm glad this research is getting done, and I hope it will lead to a better understanding of how to protect everyone.

I've known maybe a handful of people I'd consider 10x in my career.

I've only known one. And having that type of engineer isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.

The other members of the team would discuss a problem, hash out a couple of potential solutions, and then begin assessing how long it will take and who will do which parts.

Two days later the 10x engineer would drop an amazing implementation of the solution into our laps.

The result is that everyone else on the team got demoralized and stressed about whether they were going to have meaningful work to point to in their performance assessments. The entire team ended up blowing apart.

I suspect that the ADA will come under severe attack in the next few years.

I'm not worried. No politician will carry the flag of denying rights for people with disabilities.

Lest we forget iProvo:

http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=56288307&itype=CMSI...

I refinanced just to get away from Phh. And I made sure my new lender didn't include in the contract the right to transfer servicing of the loan.

Crypto is indeed hard to use.

https://www.nds.rub.de/media/nds/veroeffentlichungen/2011/10...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME

About 15 years ago, my school's electrical engineering lab had a fleet of HP-UX boxen that were configured by default to dump huge core files all over the NFS shares whenever programs crashed. Two weeks before the end of the semester a junior lab assistant noticed all the core files eating a huge chunk of shared disk space and decided to slap together a script to recursively delete files named "core" in all the students' directories.

After flinging together a recursive delete command that he thought would maybe work, he fired it off with sudo at 9:00pm just before heading out for the night. The next morning everyone discovered that all their work over the semester had been summarily blown away.

No problem, we could just restore from backups, right? Oh, well, there was just one minor problem. The backup system had been broken since before the start of the semester. And nobody prioritized fixing it.

Created quite the scenario for professors who were suddenly confronted with the entire class not having any code for their final projects.

They talked about firing the kid who wrote and ran the script. I was asking why the head of I.T. wasn't on the chopping block for failing to prioritize a working backup system.

The majority of people reading this sentence have the JC virus present in their brains right now. Medications that suppress the immune system's ability to keep the JC virus in check can lead to PML, a brain-destroying disease that's often fatal. One oral medication that has led to cases of PML is dimethyl fumarate, marketed as Tecfidera.