3 ms·

Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redund

Anyway, I agree there’s ways we can improve, only disagreed with the implication that we’re running on some sort of hacked together or sloppy system. The redundancy of biology is incredible, the opposite of easy to break.

ceejayoz 6y ago
I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Where would you put the urethra, for example? Many of your examples are contrived. Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. I’d bet a lot of money a “human designed human” would not perform better, except for taking ideas from other humans, and only when done in very limited cases.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Sloppy compared to, say, crocodiles, which largely haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years. We humans aren't well designed for our current use cases, as we changed a whole bunch of our behaviors in the last few hundred thousand years. > Where would you put the urethra, for example? I'd leave that up to a biomedical engineer. Perhaps they'd rig up a system like reptiles and birds have, where the useful water gets reabsorbed and they excrete urea crystals. > Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. Again, this is true for spaghetti code. It is a mistake to think "spaghetti = broken". Spaghetti = hard to understand/maintain.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      The diff between the error rate of crocodiles, humans, and spaghetti code is really where it doesn’t stand up. Crocodiles > humans >>>>>>> spaghetti code. End of story, unless your spaghetti code only fails a very small amount, I guess. Not what I assume most people think when they think of it.
      - rowanG077 6y ago
        You keep ignoring the point that spaghetti code and error rate are not related by definition. It's been spelled out to you multiple times now.
      - nwienert 6y ago
        @rowan Won’t let me respond to you directly, but I haven’t failed to note that. I’ve never seen someone say anything positive about the reliability of spaghetti code.

ceejayoz 6y ago

I mean, it is hacked together and sloppy. Ureters come out near the vagina, causing UTIs. Our intestines are better suited for being on all fours, leading to hernias. We eat and breathe with the same orifice, and some of us choke to death from it. Our eyes have blind spots that lead to our brains filling in details, sometimes inaccurately. Goosebumps are vestigial, men have nipples, human embryos briefly make tails and gill slits, heads are too big for the birth canal, etc. etc. etc. If we had the technology to design a human from the ground up, we'd make a lot of fixes. As with many hacked together and sloppy codebases, it still works, fairly well. That doesn't mean it's not hacked together and sloppy, though.

nwienert 6y ago
Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Where would you put the urethra, for example? Many of your examples are contrived. Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. I’d bet a lot of money a “human designed human” would not perform better, except for taking ideas from other humans, and only when done in very limited cases.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Sloppy compared to what? What would you point to as better? Sloppy compared to, say, crocodiles, which largely haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years. We humans aren't well designed for our current use cases, as we changed a whole bunch of our behaviors in the last few hundred thousand years. > Where would you put the urethra, for example? I'd leave that up to a biomedical engineer. Perhaps they'd rig up a system like reptiles and birds have, where the useful water gets reabsorbed and they excrete urea crystals. > Sure they have some failure modes, but they also are succeeding trillions of times a day. Again, this is true for spaghetti code. It is a mistake to think "spaghetti = broken". Spaghetti = hard to understand/maintain.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    The diff between the error rate of crocodiles, humans, and spaghetti code is really where it doesn’t stand up. Crocodiles > humans >>>>>>> spaghetti code. End of story, unless your spaghetti code only fails a very small amount, I guess. Not what I assume most people think when they think of it.
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      You keep ignoring the point that spaghetti code and error rate are not related by definition. It's been spelled out to you multiple times now.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      @rowan Won’t let me respond to you directly, but I haven’t failed to note that. I’ve never seen someone say anything positive about the reliability of spaghetti code.