If you’re more into watching a presentation, I recorded “A Brief History of Unicode” last year, And there’s a YouTube recording of it as well as the slides:
True, but as it turns out in 2022 we are in exactly the same problem, as our bitterly incompetent Prime Minister is trying to save his own job at the cost of thousands of lives (152k and rising)
From the abstract: Microprocessors have evolved over decades to eke out performance from existing code. But the microarchitecture of the CPU leaks into the assumptions of a flat memory model, with the result that equivalent code can run significantly faster by working with, rather than fighting against, the microarchitecture of the CPU.
This talk, given for the JChampionsConf in 2022, presents the microarchitecture of modern CPUs, showing how misaligned data can cause cache line false sharing, how branch prediction works and when it fails, how to read CPU specific performance monitoring counters and use that in conjunction with tools like perf and toplev to discover where bottlenecks in CPU heavy code live. We’ll use these facts to revisit performance advice on general code patterns and the things to look out for in executing systems.
The talk will be language agnostic, although it will be based on the Linux/x86_64 architecture. The presentation was recorded at the JChampionsConf meeting in January 2022, and a recording is available here: https://youtu.be/Pa_l3aHCoGc
Actually, the current vaccines still seem to be doing a pretty good job, even with the latest variant (and there are always more variants). While none of the vaccines have ever claimed to prevent you catching covid 100%, they have prevented 90%+ against catching the disease and have reduced the severity of the disease in those who have caught it. It’s why emergency rooms around the world are largely filled with unvaccinated people, and most of the ones in hospital who go on to die are the unvaccinated.
Think of it as giving your body a natural head start to fighting off the infection. In the end, it’s your immune system that saves you, not the vaccine — but the vaccine stacks the deck significantly in your favour for a full recovery.
Of course the virus is mutating, and it’s possible that the next one will escape the mRNA vaccines that currently exist due to the different shape of the protein; but we have essentially developed a whole new science of how to create vaccines quickly from a known protein spike, so it will be a matter of months from discovery of an escaping strain to a protective vaccine for it.
In any case, the approaches used here are valid for more than just covid; an exciting HIV vaccine is undergoing trials at the moment And there’s potential to treat other kinds of viral diseases in this way.
