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Very fun article. Perhaps we'll be able to eliminate the bacteria one day, but it's a tall tall order. Beyond a certain level of complexity paratisitism seems
by akkartik 15y ago
Very fun article.
Perhaps we'll be able to eliminate the bacteria one day, but it's a tall tall order. Beyond a certain level of complexity paratisitism seems to spontaneously emerge for reasons we don't fully understand. To avoid it you'd have to either centrally design (micromanage) complex systems at least 4 orders of magnitude larger than anything attempted so far, or you'd have to come up with a set of simple rules that causes complex behavior without parasitism. I suspect the latter especially is an ill-posed meaningless question.
Personally I think all our largest codebases today already have a parasitism 'problem'. They suffer from two kinds of parasites: dead code and crappy programmers living off maintaining them.
I would bet on attaining immortality before eliminating parasites from the human body. It's not a bug but a feature.
- lukeschlather 15y agoCalling out bacteria as parasites is pretty silly. One might as well call out the appendix (which is composed entirely of human cells) as parasitic. Bacteria are much more like shared libraries. Libraries can of course have malicious code embedded in them, and human systems are prepared for that inevitability, but that doesn't mean the wholesale removal of shared libraries is very desirable.
- ars 15y agoFunny that you mention the appendix in a post about bacteria - because that is the function of the appendix: To tend to and maintain bacteria during times of intestinal illness.
- bermanoid 15y agoHell, we might as well call our mitochondria "parasites", if we're going all the way - those things have their own DNA, which evolves in tandem but separately from our own, in a rather different way from "normal" DNA.