Thursday, June 1, 2017

Data is abstract

Take a hard disk. Print it out on a sheet of paper. It's just a long string of bits. The processor does nothing but shuffle around these bits, using some of the bits to interpret the other bits.

DNA is the same; instructions to build proteins to build cells and build more DNA.

The interesting parts are the concrete details; what kind of machine gets built. And they're not really in there; looking at machine will tell you what kinds of instructions there are, but not how to interpret them.

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