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0 pointsmaratd8y ago0 comments

> If you’re lucky you’ll get what you were after.

No, if you're lucky, nothing happens. The majority of the other alternatives are just death.

Just imagine a complex codebase and then you start changing parts of it randomly. What are you going to get? Either nothing or more likely, some sort of a crash which in biology means death.

What's the probability that you'll get a feature or fix a bug doing that? Almost 0.

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dTal8y ago

What about a complex codebase with nearly 8 billion subtly different running copies? Your copy has a bug, so you find a copy that doesn't and monkey-patch the assembly. Have you fixed the bug? Unless it was in some initialization code that won't get run again, your odds are pretty good.

A lot of genetic disorders are simply "whoops, your gene for X protein/enzyme/whatever is corrupted". I'd sure be tempted to patch that in myself.

ben_w8y ago

“Lucky“ in the sense that the tutorial you followed didn’t miss a step, that you followed it perfectly, and that you correctly understood what it did. How often do people copy the wrong thing from stackoverflow, for example? Or miss an important step, or the last character of text?

I rather doubt many people will try to hack their own DNA by keyboard mashing a new sequence.

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