TL/DR: don't live in a bubble, but do avoid needless infection. So long as you have some exposure - and it's extremely hard to prevent any exposure unless you're a hermit living in a cave, as we all saw during COVID - you're fine.

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

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This will just weaken immune systems since people will not be exposed to viruses.

That's not how this works, and is a misunderstanding of the Hygeine Hypothesis. Viruses are not Pokémon - you don't need to catch them all. T and B cell immunity is generally long-lived - many decades, and tolerant of viral evolution in the interim (it varies from pathogen to pathogen, and for some you lose that first-line humoral immunity with time, e.g. you will get infected if exposed, but T and B cell immunity generally remains highly effective at preventing the worst outcomes). There is no need to, say, catch influenza every winter. All you're doing is increasing the risk of sequelae (there are a vast number, and they can be miserable. I had a cold virus progress to pneumonia to pleurisy early this year, spent a month feeling like I was being stabbed every time I coughed, laughed, sneezed, or drove over a bump. My father recently developed Guillain-Barré after a nasal infection and became paralyzed - was doing an 8km walk to prepare for hiking to Everest Base Camp during the day, and by the evening was in the hospital losing control of his body. Sequelae suck, man.

(That's one thing we increasingly learned during COVID. Huge numbers of people were developing COVID sequelae - the rates of bloody everything rise after infection, from heart attack to stroke to kidney disease and on and on - but largely because everyone was getting infected, not necessarily/not exclusively because of unique properties of the virus. Influenza, RSV, colds, etc all cause broad rises in a vast range of conditions post-infection, we've just neglected them. Turns out that having your body attack itself (systemic inflammation and a prothrombotic state) to fight off a virus is inherently actually as bad for you as it sounds, that viral actions taken to deregulate the body are indeed as bad as that sounds, and that some common viruses (Epstein-Barr being a classic example) can cause a staggering number of terrible sequelae)

That's not to say that you should never get infected. First off, children lack most humoral and cell-mediated immunity to common pathogens; to get it they either need vaccination and/or infection (ideally the former if available, and in the latter case, ideally after the former), for the whole range of commonly circulating pathogens. Since children tolerate most infections better than adults, it is best to get them for the first time as a child. And while T and B cell responses are long lived, they do slowly weaken with time. If you're 86 and you haven't caught a certain disease since you were 5 years old, that's probably not good. It probably would have been best if you had caught it again when you were, say, in your 40s or 50s (or better, where available, restored immunity by vaccination instead). But you don't need to catch every variant that goes around every year. All you're doing with that is feeling miserable and accumulating damage / risk of sequelae.

If you feel the need to eat an unidentified mushroom, though, boletes (pore mushrooms) are what you want to pick. Leave anything with gills alone. The family lacks the deadly amatoxins and orellanine. They only have gastrointestinal irritants and potential allergens (and, apparently, novel psychedelics!), and even then, it's only like a dozen species that have them, and nearly all, if not all, are either red and/or stain blue, with the biggest culprits doing both. There's only been one confirmed death from a bolete that I'm aware of (from the red-+pored bolete (red pores, stains blue), an elderly man, and it seems to have been linked to (at least in part) severe dehydration from the mushroom's gastrointestinal effects (dehydration, vomiting). This despite the fact that boletes are among the most popular mushrooms globally to collect.

Don't get me wrong, if you eat the wrong bolete, you're going to have a really miserable time of it. If you're really unlucky you'll need to go to the hospital (among other things, to get an IV to keep you hydrated). But it's exceedingly unlikely that one will kill you. And it's quite unlikely that anything bad at all will happen.

Still, yeah, not worth it for a fancy meal!

Random agarics (gilled mushrooms), though, that can readily kill you. There are certain *subcategories* of agarics with very distinct characteristics that are safe, but if you just go out there and pick some random white mushroom or some LBM (Little Brown Mushroom), well, roll the dice ;)

... two warning signs are red colour and bluing when cut, and this has them both.

Great Scott! We just need 0.21 gigawatts more!

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

I'm not even sure if it's that deliberate, or it's just the fact that Trump is thinking about rigging the election... so he talks about rigging the election.

But it's hilarious how consistent the pattern is. Normally with something like that there's just a few occasional examples. But with Trump if he says "Democrats are kicking puppies!" chances are that we're about to find out that Trump kicked a puppy.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.

The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

BTW, AI is a godsend for ALS patients. Even with an eye tracker, your writing throughput is low / tiring compared to typing, and of course you can't do anything that requires physical activity (painting, playing an instrument, speaking, etc). AI tools help fill the gaps.