Comment by testdelacc1
1 day ago
I read a book about the immune system and it’s actually insane how much tech debt there is in there. We have several systems, each one built a hundred million years after the previous one. Each one targets the kind of threats that were prevalent then but are still there because they haven’t completely disappeared. So much complexity, and systems can go haywire so easily - autoimmune diseases, allergic reactions and so on.
And yet, like a startup that found product market fit with a garbage tech stack, this pile of jenga spaghetti is still going strong. Complexity doesn’t matter, people dying because they looked at a peanut doesn’t matter - ultimately this spaghetti works well enough to get humans to where we are today.
Great comment, which book did you read?
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive By Philipp Dettmer. If you’ve heard of the Kurzgesagt channel on YouTube, it’s very similar in style.
https://www.philippdettmer.net/immune