• yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 days ago

    To be honest, DNA is stupid anyway. Worst data format ever invented.

    I mean, a single mutation to get sickle cell anemia? Use fucking error correction codes, dammit! No, having everything twice is not error correction. It’s only error detection and the detected error is just silently ignored and randomly passed on to your offspring.

    Where are the damn backups? 3-2-1 should hold for every data format! How would an offsite backup be designed? I don’t know I’m not evolution incorporated.

    Why are viruses even a thing??? There is no reason EVER to be able to insert new DNA into your genome. Make it read only! With checksums! Why is there no Denuvo DNA-DRM?

    Slightly unrelated but even worse, your immune system is literally only controlled by the equivalent of HTTP. Deactivate completely? Attack everything on sight? No authorization required whatsoever! Just use the public API! Surely nothing could exploit this, right??


    Small Edit as a response to everyone mentioning the need to change for evolution:

    Maybe, just maybe use a test environment? You don’t just push to production the moment you make a change. Move fast and break things my ass. Since women already have the production environment just create a similar structure in men! They already have TESTicles after all.

    • WIZARD POPE💫@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      It’s like this because it allows you to live enough to procreate. Who needs all that if it just needs to keep you alive for 30 odd years.

      • four@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        DNA is legacy code that does the job and no one dares touch it

    • 🍉 Albert 🍉@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      what other DATA formats do you know that can adapt to changing OS by itself, and over time develop new features? All decentralised, and open source.

      Also, as a biologist, there are really cool error correction mechanism. And even systems to detect if there are too many errors and self delete the corrupted files to be replaced by neighboring cells.

      Plus a shit ton of metadata, to track it all.

    • chunes@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This made me laugh. I have a disease that is basically caused by the DNA repair machinery being unable to count when it attempts to repair a congenital mutation, adding an extra phrase to the DNA sometimes. I often wish I could just open up the damn source code and fix it.

    • cholesterol@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      If you switch your view from the level of the organism to the level of the gene, genes do have backups everywhere. You could call every instance of a gene in every organism a ‘backup’ of the others.

      As individual organisms, we also tend to look at genes and evolution from the perspectives of individuals. But for genes already established in a population, preserving any single genome (carried by a single individual) isn’t very important. Genes work instead to increase their overall frequency throughout the population.

      So to adapt the technological metaphor, maybe you’re better off looking at the entire gene pool as your system instead of the organism.

    • cashsky@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Are you saying spaghetti code isn’t all bad? Finally someone validates my open source projects 😅