Students ask me iF vIrUsEs NeEd ceLLs tO LiVe aRe ThEy ReAlLy aLiVe?
And I answer "If I sent you to the rings of Saturn, you're not alive. If you need the biosphere to live are you really alive?"
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This very Buddhist idea of no boundaries between you and the "surroundings." This very Buddhist idea that "life" requires, is co-equal and identical to, this planetary system. Including the sun and the moon!
Two of the ideas that are "subtle" and "non-intuitive" to the modern Western mind, but in themselves self-evident and trivial. My favorite catchphrase, maybe the best of the two or three possibly original thoughts I have ever had, is:
"Ecology is economics without externalities."
(Or surpluses, but alliteration. Also tautology. Anyway.)
This is why the results are so comical on Hacker News when engineers presume that it behooves them to reason about biology. Hilarity universally ensues.
Golden Age Silicon Valley got away with it, but Trump Era Silicon Valley is naked before us all, with the pedal to the metal, LEVERAGING externalities TO THE HILT in order to Medievally ennoble five or six maniacs and Medievally enserf the remainder of humanity.
My buddy, a dev, complained that code he wrote on a server that is still live no longer works. No staff or funding, so it'll never work again.
A "program," a self-contained selection of source code, is self-contained in only the most artificial, abstract, and banally false sense. Ask any curator of a computer museum. Ask any contemporary librarian. Ask the guy whose thankless job is to deal with Andy Warhol's Amiga artefacts.
The effort required to make something work from ten or twenty years ago may not even have a path to success.
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