7 ms·

A backdoor lets the immune system monitor the brain

179 points by theafh 6y ago

doggodaddo78 6y ago
Brain region to immune system: I am root. Immune system: Yes you are, my bad. or I'm going to call bullshit on that. Put your arms up and prepare for phagocytosis.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Now if only the immune system was open source and not some binary blob we can only interfaced with by giving it fake targets.
  - bronzeage 5y ago
    It is open source. You can go ahead and download the human genome. You just can't run it because of a lack of efficient simulation, and unlike human-created code the code is both obfuscated and lacks clear separation of intents.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      yeah its a code base millions of years old consisting of spaghetti code with no comments written in a turring tarpit of a language that compiles directly to hardware with ridiculous compile times
      - bserge 5y ago
        Yeah, every time someone says I need to believe in God, I tell them that I want to believe, if only to get there and punch them in the face for creating such bullshit :D
        willcipriano 5y ago
        To be fair he was under a crunch. He delivered the whole project in a week.
        failwhaleshark 5y ago
        She did it in one sprint without agile development tools or user feedback.
        salawat 5y ago
        Did this improve the User Experience?
        failwhaleshark 5y ago
        It's a simulation. Should I ask her to hit the reset button and try again to see if 2 sprints makes it any better?
        chii 5y ago
        still an amazing delivery. He did it literally from scratch, in one week, and that week included a break on the 7th day. Must be a programming god.
        rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        In six days. He rested on the seventh day.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        They actually took a day off. Maybe they should have used the 7th day for UAT and a bug hunt.
      - failwhaleshark 5y ago
        Let's not forget all of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Turing*? Does it have capitalization and punctuation though?
  - tux3 5y ago
    The GPL makes this "binary" vs "source" distinction by talking about the "preferred form for making changes". Well, the binary blob of DNA happens to be also be the source! Feel free to publish your genome under an open source license =)
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    It's totally open source. You just have to learn arcane, out of date methods for interacting with it. Kind of like someone addressing Y2K by knowing Cobol.
    - failwhaleshark 5y ago
      RCS, CVS, or UUCP?
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        You've exceeded my knowledge of coding suitable to attempt to crack a joke. Maybe you could supply me programmer-speak equivalents of: 1. Fasting 2. Dietary restrictions 3. Sleep hygiene 4. Exercise 5. Actual hygiene 6. Spartanism
        failwhaleshark 5y ago
        > arcane, out of date methods This. is. HN!!! (Kicks messenger into the well) Smoke signals, telegraph wires, spark gap transmitters then? We could always put alarm bonfires at the summits of the tallest hills and mountains.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        salawat 5y ago
        >Fasting: stop dicking with the code and lets see if the error reoccurs. >Dietary Restrictions: I added a new linter! Now you can't commit crappy code! >Sleep Hygiene: This...sleep thing... You're saying if I learn to lucid dream, I can figure out problems while I sleep? >Exercise: Yessssss! 100% test coverage.... Wait, are we talking the code, or me? >Actual hygiene: Keyboards. Are. Disgusting. >Spartanism: I live in an office with a desk, three screens a chair, and maybe a mat. No, I bear no ill will towards ancient Athens, or the rug... Why do you ask?
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    It's open source if you git clone the adaptive part and put it on Github. There's just a bunch of IP restrictions on your own genes because plutocracy. Apache license then? I lost the compiler though, so it might as well be a binary amoebic blob, but I hear you can throw mRNA at the API to teach it new tricks.
Diggsey 6y ago
I like that it is a literal "back door" in that there's an opening in the barrier at the back of the brain.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yes, a pretty big oversight by anyone on the design team concerned with security. It just makes it look like humans were yet another product pushed out the door before they were ready for prime time.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Maybe the backdoor has an evolutionary reason to exist. Unlike devs, nature tests its ideas more thoroughly. When reading old code you can often find some parts that don't make sense, especially if you don't know the original motivation.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I don't know, not every aspect of our biology is an evolutionary advantage. Some just didn't have enough of a negative impact to get weeded out over time. For example we're rather squishy. Considering that built-in armor is a known-feature of other animals, the devs could have added that into the release. Honestly I would expect "not squishy" to have been in the initial human MVP release. I mean, they figured out that the mouth input channel needed to occasionally be used as an emergency output-- they had some idea of what they were doing, but still missed some obvious things. Then again, if we're being developed by an evolutionary algorithm, why should I assume we're a full version release? It's possible we're still in the alpha stage. Or possibly some other developmental culdesac that just hasn't been pruned yet. We could be one of many incorrect answers to a recursive depth-first search algorithm, each iteration of which uses incremental parameter changes for the input of the evolutionary algorithm. Some dev one level up in the layers of reality might be getting yelled at right now for not using a breadth-first approach, or for using a resource intensive evolution process when the client just needed something "good enough".
grouphugs 6y ago
headline: more harmful nazi technology what a surprise, anyone notice a very strong and deliberate pattern here?
Wassimo 6y ago
Hopefully this will lead to better treatment of brain tumors and other diseases.
steelframe 6y ago
As somebody who has a somewhat strange form of Multiple Sclerosis wherein almost all of the damage is in my so-called "water channel" nerves located in my optic nerves and around my brain stem, the observation that pathogens get "swept" into the area of my CNS where most of my lesions occur is very interesting. I've been tested multiple times for neuromyelitis optica, but that's come back negative each time, so it's still officially diagnosed as MS. It's just that my white matter has been completely untouched for the 23 years I've had symptoms, which is really unusual. Interferon beta worked really well for me, and now Ocrelizumab is doing even better. I'm convinced that what we call "Multiple Sclerosis" today is actually a collection of distinct conditions with largely orthogonal causes, and just about the best we can do in absence of a more thorough understanding of the issues is nuke all the adolescent B-lymphocytes (which is what Ocrelizumab does).
- therein 6y ago
  Here is an interesting fact for anyone who might be reading. All the medications with the -mab suffix are monoclonal antibodies. For instance the "monoclonal antibody cocktail" Trump received was casirivimab and imdevimab, made by Regeneron.
  - steelframe 5y ago
    Another fun fact: BioNTech, the company that co-developed the mRNA COVID vaccine, applied similar techniques to develop an experimental MS vaccine. https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech-reports-potential-multiple-sclerosis-breakthrough https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech... Of course if I could have a Bitcoin for every time "autoimmune encephalomyelitis" has been cured in a mouse model I would be set for life!
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Do you happen to know an online MS community with folks similar to the HN crowd?
  - treeman79 5y ago
wombatmobile 5y ago
> The new findings help clarify one detail of Shirai’s 1921 mouse study that never sat well with the naive notion of immune privilege. Shirai found that tumors survived and grew when implanted in some locations in mice’s brains. But when Shirai placed tumors right next to the ventricles — now known to be the locations where the brain produces the fluid that sweeps antigens off to the immune cells — the tumors didn’t survive. So, the key experiment to reveal this fact was performed one hundred years ago, but overlooked.
alanchen 5y ago
Don't run unsafe code with root. That's common sense lol

179 points by theafh 6y ago

Brain region to immune system: I am root. Immune system: Yes you are, my bad. or I'm going to call bullshit on that. Put your arms up and prepare for phagocytosis.

judge2020 5y ago
Now if only the immune system was open source and not some binary blob we can only interfaced with by giving it fake targets.
- bronzeage 5y ago
  It is open source. You can go ahead and download the human genome. You just can't run it because of a lack of efficient simulation, and unlike human-created code the code is both obfuscated and lacks clear separation of intents.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    yeah its a code base millions of years old consisting of spaghetti code with no comments written in a turring tarpit of a language that compiles directly to hardware with ridiculous compile times
    - bserge 5y ago
      Yeah, every time someone says I need to believe in God, I tell them that I want to believe, if only to get there and punch them in the face for creating such bullshit :D
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        To be fair he was under a crunch. He delivered the whole project in a week.
        failwhaleshark 5y ago
        She did it in one sprint without agile development tools or user feedback.
        salawat 5y ago
        Did this improve the User Experience?
        failwhaleshark 5y ago
        It's a simulation. Should I ask her to hit the reset button and try again to see if 2 sprints makes it any better?
        chii 5y ago
        still an amazing delivery. He did it literally from scratch, in one week, and that week included a break on the 7th day. Must be a programming god.
        rad_gruchalski 5y ago
        In six days. He rested on the seventh day.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        They actually took a day off. Maybe they should have used the 7th day for UAT and a bug hunt.
    - failwhaleshark 5y ago
      Let's not forget all of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Turing*? Does it have capitalization and punctuation though?
- tux3 5y ago
  The GPL makes this "binary" vs "source" distinction by talking about the "preferred form for making changes". Well, the binary blob of DNA happens to be also be the source! Feel free to publish your genome under an open source license =)
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  It's totally open source. You just have to learn arcane, out of date methods for interacting with it. Kind of like someone addressing Y2K by knowing Cobol.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    RCS, CVS, or UUCP?
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      You've exceeded my knowledge of coding suitable to attempt to crack a joke. Maybe you could supply me programmer-speak equivalents of: 1. Fasting 2. Dietary restrictions 3. Sleep hygiene 4. Exercise 5. Actual hygiene 6. Spartanism
      - failwhaleshark 5y ago
        > arcane, out of date methods This. is. HN!!! (Kicks messenger into the well) Smoke signals, telegraph wires, spark gap transmitters then? We could always put alarm bonfires at the summits of the tallest hills and mountains.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - salawat 5y ago
        >Fasting: stop dicking with the code and lets see if the error reoccurs. >Dietary Restrictions: I added a new linter! Now you can't commit crappy code! >Sleep Hygiene: This...sleep thing... You're saying if I learn to lucid dream, I can figure out problems while I sleep? >Exercise: Yessssss! 100% test coverage.... Wait, are we talking the code, or me? >Actual hygiene: Keyboards. Are. Disgusting. >Spartanism: I live in an office with a desk, three screens a chair, and maybe a mat. No, I bear no ill will towards ancient Athens, or the rug... Why do you ask?
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  It's open source if you git clone the adaptive part and put it on Github. There's just a bunch of IP restrictions on your own genes because plutocracy. Apache license then? I lost the compiler though, so it might as well be a binary amoebic blob, but I hear you can throw mRNA at the API to teach it new tricks.

Diggsey 6y ago

I like that it is a literal "back door" in that there's an opening in the barrier at the back of the brain.

ineedasername 5y ago
Yes, a pretty big oversight by anyone on the design team concerned with security. It just makes it look like humans were yet another product pushed out the door before they were ready for prime time.
- visarga 5y ago
  Maybe the backdoor has an evolutionary reason to exist. Unlike devs, nature tests its ideas more thoroughly. When reading old code you can often find some parts that don't make sense, especially if you don't know the original motivation.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I don't know, not every aspect of our biology is an evolutionary advantage. Some just didn't have enough of a negative impact to get weeded out over time. For example we're rather squishy. Considering that built-in armor is a known-feature of other animals, the devs could have added that into the release. Honestly I would expect "not squishy" to have been in the initial human MVP release. I mean, they figured out that the mouth input channel needed to occasionally be used as an emergency output-- they had some idea of what they were doing, but still missed some obvious things. Then again, if we're being developed by an evolutionary algorithm, why should I assume we're a full version release? It's possible we're still in the alpha stage. Or possibly some other developmental culdesac that just hasn't been pruned yet. We could be one of many incorrect answers to a recursive depth-first search algorithm, each iteration of which uses incremental parameter changes for the input of the evolutionary algorithm. Some dev one level up in the layers of reality might be getting yelled at right now for not using a breadth-first approach, or for using a resource intensive evolution process when the client just needed something "good enough".

grouphugs 6y ago

headline: more harmful nazi technology what a surprise, anyone notice a very strong and deliberate pattern here?

Wassimo 6y ago

Hopefully this will lead to better treatment of brain tumors and other diseases.

steelframe 6y ago

As somebody who has a somewhat strange form of Multiple Sclerosis wherein almost all of the damage is in my so-called "water channel" nerves located in my optic nerves and around my brain stem, the observation that pathogens get "swept" into the area of my CNS where most of my lesions occur is very interesting. I've been tested multiple times for neuromyelitis optica, but that's come back negative each time, so it's still officially diagnosed as MS. It's just that my white matter has been completely untouched for the 23 years I've had symptoms, which is really unusual. Interferon beta worked really well for me, and now Ocrelizumab is doing even better. I'm convinced that what we call "Multiple Sclerosis" today is actually a collection of distinct conditions with largely orthogonal causes, and just about the best we can do in absence of a more thorough understanding of the issues is nuke all the adolescent B-lymphocytes (which is what Ocrelizumab does).

therein 6y ago
Here is an interesting fact for anyone who might be reading. All the medications with the -mab suffix are monoclonal antibodies. For instance the "monoclonal antibody cocktail" Trump received was casirivimab and imdevimab, made by Regeneron.
- steelframe 5y ago
  Another fun fact: BioNTech, the company that co-developed the mRNA COVID vaccine, applied similar techniques to develop an experimental MS vaccine. https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech-reports-potential-multiple-sclerosis-breakthrough https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech... Of course if I could have a Bitcoin for every time "autoimmune encephalomyelitis" has been cured in a mouse model I would be set for life!
faeyanpiraat 5y ago
Do you happen to know an online MS community with folks similar to the HN crowd?
- treeman79 5y ago

wombatmobile 5y ago

> The new findings help clarify one detail of Shirai’s 1921 mouse study that never sat well with the naive notion of immune privilege. Shirai found that tumors survived and grew when implanted in some locations in mice’s brains. But when Shirai placed tumors right next to the ventricles — now known to be the locations where the brain produces the fluid that sweeps antigens off to the immune cells — the tumors didn’t survive. So, the key experiment to reveal this fact was performed one hundred years ago, but overlooked.

alanchen 5y ago

Don't run unsafe code with root. That's common sense lol