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Let's say you have a running program on a computer, and you figure out a way to swap out parts of its instructions / state in RAM while it is running. What are
by psadri 2y ago
Let's say you have a running program on a computer, and you figure out a way to swap out parts of its instructions / state in RAM while it is running. What are the odds of your swap causing problems? Now, what if the program is 100 - 1000x more complex than anything you have ever managed to create.
- georgyo 2y agoYou may not remember GameSharks, but those things did you exactly what you suggest. As do most game cheat engines. Editing the state, directly in RAM, without the program's knowledge. The next time something tries to use whatever memory or function it overroad, it would pick up your version instead.
- 0x457 2y agoI think this is more like introducing and RCE into your body, since CRISPR essentially modifies your executable code?
- thrw42A8N 2y agoDNA is more like configuration for your molecural factories.
- exe34 2y agoconfiguration is code.
- 0x457 2y agospeakig like a true "exe"
- thrw42A8N 2y agoNot in this case. There is only a very restricted set of options and these can be interpreted in different ways by different machines that read it.
- hinkley 2y agoAnd merge conflicts are a bitch when you don’t have unit tests.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoIt's code, but not a program - there is no algorithm. Something resembling an algorithm is on the reader side.
- exe34 2y agoby that logic, programs have no algorithms either, they have to be executed by the hardware.
- thrw42A8N 2y agoThere is a difference between a series of instructions that maps to machine code nearly directly, and a data format like an image, or factory templates. The point about algorithms stands - it's not that programs don't contain any because a machine interprets them. I'm referring to the simple fact that program code can be expressed as a flow diagram - but try doing that with a CAD file. You can't, it's declarative in nature, not a series of steps and decisions.
- exe34 2y agoYou're trying to say that data isn't code? you haven't tried lisp, have you?
- hoherd 2y agoFYI doing this to a game is illegal in Japan, which kinda makes it seem like CRISPR should also be illegal in Japan.
- chiffre01 2y agoI remember having a Game Genie, it worked sometimes. But like the article says. it would also make things glitchy and crash everything now and then.
- jncfhnb 2y agoNot surprising. They weren’t designed cheat codes. Folks would try stuff, sort of figure out what it did, and then publish it with a name.
- TrainedMonkey 2y agoBiology is already probabilistic, there are things going wrong with the body all the time. Most often this affects a single cell and is corrected by programmed cell death...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- colmmacc 2y agoThis is how many live-update and hot-patching systems work. Some changes are easy and reliable; if you need to add a new condition or a few instructions, you can build your new basic block of instructions elsewhere and then atomically insert a jump to that basic block (which then jumps back to the correct post-insertion point). Others are hard; if you need to add a new variable to some state that's being tracked, then you have to find a way to know when it's a safe time during execution to make that change, and you might have had to wrap accesses to that state in RCU gadgets. It takes expertise, but it's doable and satisfying when you manage it!