[sepositus]

This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

At Google (as an SRE), a large portion of my work was trying to understand problems that people have never even comprehended due to the sheer scale we operated at. Reading through code, I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident. I feel the same can be said for biology. Just because it doesn't immediately fit into our theoretical understanding doesn't mean it was designed poorly.

[yongjik]

> I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident.

But the equivalent in biology is that we scratch our heads at some clearly suboptimal "design" choices, only to later find out that it evolved gradually from a much simpler system that solved a much simpler problem, sometimes even a different problem.

[squigz]

> This seems to propose that IT systems deal with the sheer amount of variability a living organism has to contend with on a daily basis. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

Might they not? I think measuring such things would be near impossible, but a human body does interact with a generally specific set of variables on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down when new variables are introduced - like when you travel to a new place and pick up a local bug that you have to get used to.

At least IT systems can generally disregard variables they don't recognize.