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Comment by iamflimflam1 | Hacker News Reader

I often think this about medicine and the human body. We want to believe that our bodies are some miraculous well oiled machine. But it often seems that it’s a barely held together bag of mess.

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Biology is incredibly robust!! I'd say barely held together bag of mess describes something like an internal combustion engine. A primate, on the other hand, is a self-replicating machine capable of self-repair and just about universal fuel sourcing. It has a robust defense network capable of identifying and eradicating a staggering number of foreign replicators. It has holographic design storage, with each cell containing the plan for the whole organisim. It has general cognition based on a world model, and does all this on almost no energy.

Biology is incredibly well oiled!

I think your reply and the parent can both be true, you're just using slightly the same words to describe different things.

The parent is talking more about elegant simplicity vs. sprawling, seemingly haphazard complexity, and you're talking more about durability to failure points and 'completeness'.

Likewise, in code, a lot of the most durable, battle tested software looks extremely inelegant and duct taped, as 90% of the code is dedicated to handling one-off patches and weird edge cases.

I think politics and economics work along similar lines.

No, you just need to be on a regular good maintenance schedule!

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