Comment by ramraj07
3 years ago
Every cell in your body is running a full blown OS fully capable of doing things that each individual cell has no need for. It sounds like this is a perfectly natural way to go about things.
3 years ago
Every cell in your body is running a full blown OS fully capable of doing things that each individual cell has no need for. It sounds like this is a perfectly natural way to go about things.
Organic units should not be admired for their design.
DNA is the worst spaghetti code imaginable.
The design is such a hack, that it's easier to let the unit die and just create new ones every few years.
"Let the unit die and just create new ones every few years" is a brilliant solution to many issues in complex systems. Practically all software created by humans behaves the same way - want a new version of your browser or a new major version of your OS kernel or whatever else - you have to restart them.
it's almost like Erlang supervisors all the way down :)
"The creatures outside looked from DNA to k8s YAML, and from k8s YAML to DNA, and from DNA to k8s YAML again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Death isn’t a solution to maintenance issues, there are some organisms including animals that live many hundreds of years and possibly indefinitely. The reason seems to be to increase the rate of iterations, to keep up the pace of adaptation and evolution.
its a pretty amazing hack though
the human body can scale from 1 cell to several trillion without going down for maintenance even once all while differentiating to different functions
it can take a high level of damage and heal without needing a shutdown as well, most software crashes completely at the first exception
cells give you that highly scalable and fault tolerant system that we all want
> without going down for maintenance even once
doesn't it go down for maintenance approximately once a day?
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Poor comparison - DNA is compiled assembly language code. It is meant to be spaghetti to save space and reuse proteins for multiple functions. In that regard it’s the most efficient compiler in the universe.
And it’s still more adaptable/robust/intelligent than almost any system we’ve built so far.
> it's easier to let the unit die and just create new ones every few years
Cattle, not pets
Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?
Mature mammalian red blood cells ditch their DNA, which is one reason they don’t live very long.
Did dinosaur / do reptilian blood cells live longer?
No idea about dinosaurs but some reptilian red blood cells live much longer as in 500+ days for turtles vs 120 for humans. However, it varies widely with mice and chickens having much faster turnover. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000649712...
Five species of salamanders have similar enucleated red blood cells, but I can’t find out how long they last in comparison. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18328681/
One theory is it’s an adaption to having unusually large genomes which would otherwise be an issue, but biology is odd so who knows.
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Those from birds which are nucleated last about 30-40 days compared to 120 in us so no
Not with that attitude
I didn’t know this. That is fascinating!