When you abuse someone they'll say anything in order to get you to go away and stop. What they actually believe becomes immaterial.
You wanted them to get vaccinated. You failed to convince them that it was in their best interests. So you started attempting to force them. You tried to remove them from friends and family, to prevent them from finding work, to prevent them from accessing escape hatches such as travel. You posted adverts - "get vaccinated to avoid lockdown". The list goes on. Do what I say, or I'll punish you.
All of this is still raw and visceral in my mind. It's not fading.
They didn't want that. So they banded together and started grasping onto anything that would allow them to simply say -
"No."
That might be no to the vaccine. It might be no to one way systems. It might just be "no" to forced isolation. Ultimately, they said no.
You may feel that in the jumbled nonsense they expressed to you, in anger, as a substitute for a boundary, ignorance was expressed. But ultimately you wouldn't recognise their boundaries, you saw them only as an extension of yourself to be manipulated at will.
That's patronising, regardless of the terminology used.
There are a lot of issues here, so I can share some stuff about some of them and hope that some helpful internet commenters come along and point out where I have neglected important things.
A single modern CPU core is superscalar and has a deep instruction pipeline. With your help, it will decode and reorder many instructions and execute many instructions concurrently. Each of those instructions can operate on a lot of data.
As famous online controversial opinion haver Casey Muratori tells us, most software just sucks, like really really bad (e.g. commonly people will post hash table benchmarks of high-performance hash tables that do bulk inserts in ~100ns/op, but you can do <10ns/op easily if you try), and using SIMD instructions is table stakes for making good use of the machinery inside of a single CPU core. SIMD instructions are not just for math! They are tools for general purpose programming. When your program needs to make decisions based on data that does not contain obvious patterns, it is often a lot cheaper to compute both possible outcomes and have a data dependency than to have a branch. Instructions like pshufb or blendv or just movemask and then using a dang lookup table can replace branches. Often these instructions can replace 32 or 64 branches at a time[0]. Wojciech Muła's web site[1] is the best collection of notes about using SIMD instructions for general-purpose programming, but I have found some of the articles to be a bit terse or sometimes incorrect, and I have not yet done anything to fix the issue. "Using SIMD" ends up meaning that you choose the low-level layout of your data to be more suitable to processing using the instructions available.
Inside your single CPU core there is hardware for handling virtual -> physical address translation. This is a special cache called the translation lookaside buffer (TLB). Normally, chips other than recent Apple chips have a couple hundred entries of 1 4KiB page each in the TLB, and recent Apple chips have a couple hundred entries of 1 16KiB page each. Normal programs deal with a bit more than 1 meg of RAM today, and as a result they spend a huge portion of their execution time on TLB misses. You can fix this by using explicit huge pages on Linux. This feature nominally exists on Windows but is basically unusable for most programs because it requires the application to run as administrator and because the OS will never compact memory once it is fragmented (so the huge pages must be obtained at startup and never released, or they will disappear until you reboot). I have not tried it on Mac. As an example of a normal non-crazy program that is helped by larger pages, one person noted[2] that Linux builds 16% faster on 16K vs on 4K pages.
Inside your single CPU core is a small hierarchy of set-associative caches. With your help, it will have the data it needs in cache almost all the time! An obvious aspect of this is that when you need to work on some data repeatedly, if you have a choice, you should do it before you have worked on a bunch of other data and caused that earlier data to be evicted (that is, you can rearrange your work to avoid "capacity misses"). A less obvious aspect of this is that if you operate on data that is too-aligned, you will greatly reduce the effective size of your cache, because all the data you are using will go into the same tiny subset of your cache! An easy way to run into this issue is to repeatedly request slabs of memory from an allocator that returns pretty-aligned slabs of memory, and then use them all starting at the beginning. That this could cause problems at all seems relatively unknown, so I would guess lots and lots of software is losing 5-10% of its performance because of this sort of thing. Famous online good opinion haver Dan Luu wrote about this here[3]. The links included near the bottom of that post are also excellent resources for the topics you've asked about.
When coordinating between multiple CPU cores, as noted in TFA, it is helpful to avoid false sharing[4]. People who write trading systems have mostly found that it is helpful to avoid sharing *at all*, which is why they have work explicitly divided among cores and communicate over queues rather than dumping things into a concurrent hash map and hoping things work out. In general this is not a popular practice, and if you go online and post stuff like "Well, just don't allocate any memory after startup and don't pass any data between threads other than by using queues" you will generally lose imaginary internet points.
There are some incantations you may want to apply if you would like Linux to prioritize running your program, which are documented in the Red Hat Low Latency Performance Tuning guide[5] and Erik Rigtorp's web site[6].
Some other various resources are highload.fun[7], a web site where you can practice this sort of thing, a list of links associated with highload.fun[8], Sergey Slotin's excellent online book Algorithms for Modern Hardware[9], and Dendi Bakh's online course Perf Ninja[10] and blog easyperf[11].
> Off topic: What level of sophistication about modern CPUs is _good_ to have?
Probably none? These skills are basically unemployable as far as I can tell.
I did a lot of research on this last year. Here are the best answers I could find out to your questions:
1. This is possible. No real information is public on how dose ranging was done. The closest I could get is the suggestion that doses were calculated based on animal experiments by simply starting high and reducing it until the animals didn't seem to get sick or die anymore. So, doses appear to be the highest tolerable in whatever sample size they used to do this. If there's deeper theory behind the doses it's unclear what it can be because Moderna dosage is 3x stronger than Pfizer for no obvious reason (they are advertised as granting equivalent protection).
2. Yes, vaccinating against CoVs is ~useless and can backfire. There was evidence in the research literature about this before COVID. There are two related problems:
2a. Useless: respiratory viruses like CoVs and influenza can mutate very fast. Nobody ever made a vaccine against the common cold because the viruses mutate beyond it immediately, rendering the vaccine useless. Flu vaccines routinely have efficacy of <20% or even zero because they get made for a variant that doesn't then emerge. It was not a huge leap to realize that the fast mutation problem was also going to apply here, and indeed just months after vaccination started Omicron appeared and replaced Delta completely.
2b. Can backfire: There can be a problem called OAS or antigenic fixation. The immune system appears to lack fine grained resolution. After the immune system memorizes a virus it's possible for it to get confused and think it's detected that virus when in reality it's seeing a slight mutation. When this happens it produces antibodies to the older antigens, and if the virus mutated in such a way that they're now less effective this can lead to the virus not being stopped properly. In other words it can make things worse. Not all viruses are as unstable as CoVs so this problem doesn't occur with e.g. smallpox, but SARS-CoV-2 is very unstable. There's some evidence that COVID vaccines can cause this effect unfortunately, whereby the immune system produces antibodies to the long extinct Wuhan 2019 strain instead of the one the body was actually exposed to.
3. mRNA tech is very neat in theory but there are two major possible issues:
3a. It never launched before COVID because it was plagued with extremely severe toxicity problems that caused any drug using it to fail trials / safety approvals. The problem seemed to be the lipid nanoparticle wrapper which became toxic on repeat doses. Most drugs require repeat doses so that's a problem. Moderna was a failing biotech firm before COVID because of this. They couldn't find a solution so pivoted to vaccines. Why? Because - pre COVID - vaccines were assumed to be something you take once and then you're done for many years or for life, so it was a way to dodge the repeat-dose-toxicity problem rather than solve it. Well, then COVID mass hysteria infected the globe and people are being forced to take 2, 3, 4 doses. So we're well into repeat doses territory. How many doses did Moderna's tech become toxic after, exactly? That's not public AFAIK.
3b. We were assured that the mRNA disappears from the body within a few days. That turned out to be false and mRNA spike can be found collecting in different parts of the body weeks or even months after injection. Because research that could undermine vaccines is so rare and hard to get published, and because mRNA vaccines are so new, why this happens is unclear. However some doctors have speculated that it's to do with the pseudo-uridine substitutions they do. (mRNA vaccines disable the immune system's normal defenses against foreign mRNA using some chemical tricks).
On the other hand, mRNA itself is probably not the cause of the heart/clotting problems. AstraZeneca's vaccine doesn't use mRNA and has the same issues. The problem is more likely that the spike protein is toxic and can cause these problems if it gets into the bloodstream. Doesn't matter how you make it.
You wanted them to get vaccinated. You failed to convince them that it was in their best interests. So you started attempting to force them. You tried to remove them from friends and family, to prevent them from finding work, to prevent them from accessing escape hatches such as travel. You posted adverts - "get vaccinated to avoid lockdown". The list goes on. Do what I say, or I'll punish you.
All of this is still raw and visceral in my mind. It's not fading.
They didn't want that. So they banded together and started grasping onto anything that would allow them to simply say -
"No."
That might be no to the vaccine. It might be no to one way systems. It might just be "no" to forced isolation. Ultimately, they said no.
You may feel that in the jumbled nonsense they expressed to you, in anger, as a substitute for a boundary, ignorance was expressed. But ultimately you wouldn't recognise their boundaries, you saw them only as an extension of yourself to be manipulated at will.
That's patronising, regardless of the terminology used.