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Comment by mamborambo | Hacker News Reader

In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.

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It reminds me a bit of this book, which I recommend: Algorithms to live by.

[0] https://algorithmstoliveby.com/

Humans often like to compare the brain to technology.

For example, when gears were high tech there were people that drew heads with gears turning inside of the head, likening the act of thinking to the motion of gears. And I think in cartoons etc we still see this sometimes.

Also relevant: “How an Algorithm Feels from Inside” (2008)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg...

Yes, I remember those. And later, a light bulb flashing inside of the head when the character has an idea.

Gears did something, they stood for purposeful activity. A light bulb illuminates its surrounding, letting you see in the dark - an apt metaphor for having an idea, seeing something that previously couldn't be seen, etc. In both cases these are metaphors, not actually imagining the brain running on gears or light bulbs.

Computer analogies are different. These are direct, not metaphorical, and rightfully so, because computation is fundamental and not just a piece of technology. Computer science stands at the intersection between mathematics and physics.

Possibly our autonomic nervous system is closer to what we think is an OS. Abstracts over the low level operation of the wetware

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system

And civilization is a distributed operating system! (I heard this from Joscha Bach)

What is the operating system analogy for whacking off? Clearing the cache?

Luckily our computer hardware can Not self-repruduce yet.

But computer software can. Worms, viruses, etc

Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP response it can provide network boot instructions telling other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box. But on a network where they use net boot already you might be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the clients to boot your OS image instead.

Sending an email to yourself

Garbage Collection

I'd say sleep is more analogous to GC.

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