skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Defining mitochondria as “nonliving” isn’t just a classification mistake, nor a question of word choice. Rather, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and role of mitochondria. It inherently undermines our understanding of biological systems and deeply influences the tools we build to study them.

Once you accept mitochondria as alive, you might be motivated to explore its "potential" niche, as described by the author. The example of implanting cross-species mitochondria in human cells (e.g. from a gorilla) might lead to novel therapies.

It's about breaking outside the box of mitochondria having to live inside specific environments.
This a million times over. This is why Apple will always play third fiddle to Linux and even Windows for power users.
It matters for a number of reasons, but the main reason in terms of pure biology is that it was not originally recognized that cells could absorb other cells and utilize them for the absorbed cell's natural function.

This meant, importantly, that we learned cells did not always need to evolve a functionality from scratch, but could acquire it through phagocytosis.

It's also a useful tool for studying evolution for many reasons.
I feel so sorry for Zelenskyy.

Putin is one thing, but Elon Musk AND Trump? How do you even make sense of that?
Organisation. Personal windows on one desktop,work ones on another, for example.
But the definition of a word is not knowledge.

Knowing that mitochondria have their own DNA is knowledge. Knowing that they reproduce independently of their home cell is knowledge. Learning whether they evolved from a separate viable organism would be knowledge. Learning whether we can make them viable, or breed them separately, and use them in therapies -- all knowledge.

Whether they are "alive" or not is just the definition of a word.
DNA is more like configuration for your molecural factories.
What is the delta in production between cows eating the grass and the same grass decomposing without the cows?
Talking about what is considered "alive" is an interesting exercise, and shows just how fuzzy those boundaries can be sometimes. But I really don't see how this has any practical impact on how we study mitochondria.

> If we think of mitochondria as non-living organelles, how will we ever harness their full potential?

Whenever anyone uses the "harnessing [its] full potential" cliché, my bullshit alarm starts buzzing. I don't think this article is bullshit, but...we can "harness" as much "potential" as mitochondria have whether we consider them alive or not.
> I sometimes pay for things and then pirate them anyway because I can adjust the subtitle position on the pirated version. Or I can rely on being able to play them offline. Or a dozen other reasons where the pirated version offers a better UX.

I've been doing this for years. I have a stack of Blu-Ray discs I've never opened because I send a request to my home server while I'm in line to check out at the store and by the time I get home the exact same content on the disc I just purchased has already landed there exactly as if I had ripped it myself.

As you note, every element of the user experience is better with the pirated copy and absolutely nothing is worse, even for those who legitimately own it. The only way you compete with free is by being better than the free offering, and the home video industry just refuses to acknowledge that reality.
Last I checked, a lot of the time this is entirely dependent on region. For eg. the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex series on Netflix exclusively has English dubbing and English subtitles everywhere but Japan but changing these settings did not make the Japanese audio available anywhere else that I was able to find out. It's also very annoying that sometimes the only subtitles available are closed captions when I really only want dialog subtitles. It's a real pain that all dialog and subtitle options aren't available out of the gate for everything.
No, Safe C++ does not have that type system. I was just trying to emphasize the amount of, let's be honest, downright genius that had to go into that lifetime specification and borrow checker implementation.

For C++, it'll be about cramming lifetimes into diamond-inheritance OOP, which... feels even harder.

Safe C sounds like a much, much more believable project, if such a proposal were to exist.
Mitochondria seems to have been an 'accident', yes.

That does not mean that other lifeforms in different planets require mitochondria or equivalent organelles. As long as they can perform the necessary chemical reactions (which could be different in a different environments) and extract enough energy, they should be good.

How did mitochondria evolve in the first place? Could they have remained as independent organisms and use their massive energy budget to evolve independently?
> they might send an email to your ISP and then you'll have to pay

I've probably downloaded/uploaded 10s of TBs at this point, in the two European countries I lived in since like two decades ago, and never received a single letter or had to pay anything. I'm sure there are more countries like these two.
Absolutely! For inspiration on how roaring bitmaps can be used in practice, check out https://roaringbitmap.org/. The blog post is part of a book I am writing on obscure data structures (https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/dsa-book.html), so explaining the history was a way to dive into the evolution of this topic and the limitations of each implementation, in order to motivate a SOTA.
It's really interesting to imagine what might happen if people had a legal right to filter their own digital experience without retaliation.

Sure, it might deepen some echo-chambers, but it also might curb the worst excesses of the advertisement/spyware economy.
Micro-Environment Token Enhances Protein Prediction
So the theory is that if we don't accept them as alive, then we can't experiment with implanting cross-species mitochondria in human cells? Why not? What stops us from doing this?
Yes! And if this were not the case then account portability between PDS hosts would be really challenging. Same logic as keeping your phone number when you switch cell carriers
So only a few billion planets with complex life?
Unfortunately Jock Itch (the same type of fungus) didn't get the same PR treatment.
I used to follow the development blogs of the witness. I remember reading somewhere that accessibility was why you can beat the game with only 7/10 sections complete. You can completely skip both the colour puzzles and sound puzzles and still finish the game. Its an interesting compromise.

As someone who is colorblind, you are correct. Those puzzles are just about impossible for me.
Recommend r/sysadmin on Reddit if you haven’t already checked there
How a BBC navigation bar broke depending on which external monitor it was on
No, the predecessors of mitochondria were also cells and they reproduced through cellular division.
> your body gets used to it and it becomes a baseline

That doesn't happen for every drug. But side-effects still exist for them all, so yeah, there are several reasons to limit how much you use them.
An olfactory Streisand Effect!
> long as they can perform the necessary chemical reactions

That mitochondria are conserved as an independent organelle across almost [1] all eukaryotes, across billions of years of history, suggests this is something the nuclear can’t easily in house.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6343361/
Finally, a human being brave enough to take cookies as seriously as they deserve.
Yes. Neurons are very energy hungry.
Dr. Becky talked about this topic in her video this week. She goes into a fair amount of detail about the back and forth between the two research groups involved. She is good at giving a layman's explanation, but I was getting a little lost on the details she was getting into on this one.

https://youtu.be/9U6bvR6SzMo
I have a chloroplast for you on line two; can you hold?
> Why? It comes down to how I manage my work. I often set up one browser window per project or topic, labeled accordingly (e.g., Project1, Project2). I even have a window called MAIN for my daily essentials like Mail, Calendar, WhatsApp, and Signal.

This is very similar to my workflow in some ways and I was just talking to another developer about this. I keep most of my projects on separate workspaces. I feel very confident in my ability to leave each workspace in whatever state I need. I'm on an AMD system running an open stack of GPU drivers, which means if I want I can pop open a new workspace and play a run of Darkest Dungeon if needed and leave that running on the workspace too.
social-app is the client side, AppView is the backend api surface
https://www.science.org/content/article/first-eukaryotes-fou...
> Have you ever wished for a 500 Hz, millimeter-precise linear position sensing system

Kind of, but I'd like an 0.01mm precision please. It can be just a few Hz, I don't need 500 Hz.

Great project though!
I have been a Thunderbird user since very shortly after its birth. I don't claim to have been there on the first day, but it wasn't long after that. (crazy to think it has been this long - our perception of time is weird). The stand-out feature in its early days was the built-in junk mail filter that worked pretty well, and not being Outlook helped a lot.

In later years, the lack of support for MS Exchange was a drawback. I was a macOS user for a few years, and I needed to access Exchange for work email. MacOS allowed me to access both email and calendar when Thunderbird did not. There was a plugin, but it cost money[1]. Evolution did support Exchange well enough, but it was not as pleasant to use as either Thunderbird or Mail.app.

When I went back to GNU/Linux in 2017, I tried Mailspring for a while, which I liked for its similarity to Apple's Mail.app - but something or other didn't work the way I liked it, so I returned to Thunderbird.

I am glad it is still here, after all those years. I no longer need Exchange support, and with that nuisance gone, Thunderbird is still my favorite email client. There might be better ones, but it feels like switching my hairdresser or dentist. I feel at home with it, it works well for my needs.

So, Thank you to everyone who has made it real.

[1] - that is okay, but I was/am on a tight budget
this is an exceptional example of modern website. very nice job. may i ask what framework you are using for the UX?
Feels analogous to the CPU and the Management Engine heh.
I may be wrong, but I recall reading recently it had been found the same event had occurred again, fairly recently (hundreds of thousands of years, could be millions) in some species of bacteria or something like that.

Here's a thought, also; maybe once this has happened, it tends to crowd out needing to happen again.
> But if you squint then sensory actions and reactions are also sequential tokens

I'm not sure you could model it that way.

Animal brains don't necessarily just react to sensory input, they frequently have already predicted the next state based on previous state and learning/experience, and not just in a simple sequential manner but at many different levels of patterns involved simultaneously (local immed action vs actions part of larger structure of behavior), etc.

Sensory input is compared to predicted state and differences are incorporated into the flow.

The key thing is our brains are modeling and simulating the world around us and it's future state (modeling the physical world as well as the abstract world of what other animals are thinking). It's not clear that LLM's are doing that (my assumption is that they are not doing any of that, and until we build systems that do that, we won't be moving towards the kind of flexible and adaptable control our brains have).

Edit: I just read the rest of the parent post that said basically the same thing, was skimming so missed it.
that's your preference but not universal
There's a lot of reasons but IMHO the engineering answer is that the firmware is stored on the SSD, not on a random SPI NOR sitting on the PCB. So rather than having to support a wide variety of SATA controllers or do PCIe training (because few vendors implement the spec well so you gotta do a bunch of hacks to get it to work), they have a single storage controller that the SecureROM talks to. Then LLB and iBoot bring up more and more of the storage stack. Apple documents some of it here:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...
Block Blast Puzzle Game
Way to go Lucas!
I Talk to Robots While Driving
KDE 4 was pretty bad and we had to use it via Whonix for years.
Every cell in the body (except blood cells) has mithocondria.
World's Smallest Functional Rubik's Cube
I recognize that you might be motivated to explore removing and implanting mitochondria regardless of whether you consider it to be alive (as you might think about implanting an organ from another source).

I think the main point the author is making is to not fall prey to reductive thinking about mitochondria's potential and less about the question of "aliveness". We were all taught about mitochondria producing ATP, but it sounds like it serves many other functions and there's a lot more to explore about its potential in synthetic biology and therapeutics.
Painting by A.I.-Powered Robot Sells for $1.1M
I worked through this [1] book (PDF) as a child, everything worked fine but have no idea if component availability has changed.

[1] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/M...
> I just need to avoid the companies using Go

and they also will avoid you! A monthly go-lang meetup in San Francisco impressed me as the only meetup I have ever been to where no one (in a crowded venue) seemed to want to talk to anyone outside their clique
Yeah, exactly. I'm not too clear on how PLC, DCS (which is what I do), and others relate to each other but function block diagrams are used in both (according to Google anyway).
So if we're moving the goalposts from hundreds of successful booster landings and reuses back to a simple technology demonstrator executing a hop in the 1990s, then I propose we go all the way back to propulsively landing a manned capsule on the Moon in 1969. SpaceX is 60 years obsolete!
Maybe!

That could also suggest that any other strategies were just out competed by this one and lost the opportunity to develop further.
Not a surprise that another Evil Corp. LLC is organising against their workers.

We should not let them get so big, and still be for profit.

When firms get past a certain small size they should be reorginised into non-profit trusts
Whether or not mitochondria were once viable independent organisms that were absorbed by early eukaryotes does not depend on whether we call their modern descendants "living" or not. If we determine that they did, then we still don't have to call them alive -- certainly things like mitosomes exist and are suspected to have either evolved from mitochondria or evolved after amitochondrial division, but do not have DNA and do not reproduce independently but fulfil similar functions.

We know they have DNA, we know they reproduce independently of the host cell, we know to a degree why they tend to move to both sides on cell division. We know lots of stuff about them and we can always learn lots more. Whether they are "alive" or not has absolutely no bearing on that, other than to naval-gaze.
Papers, Please is an all time favorite of mine. I made flash cards to remember key bits of information and drilled on them to improve my review skills. Not many games would have me doing that. Never played Obra Dinn because the art style didn’t appeal to me. That said, if you like mystery games, check out Curse of the Golden Idol. It’s adjacent to these games from a creative standpoint and a lot of fun.
You can can do this or your doctor can write you a prescription. I've never stopped using pseudoephedrine and depending on how congested I am sometimes it's the little red 4 hour pills or sometimes it's the big monster 12 hour version - but your doctor can write a generic prescription for pseudoephedrine and the quantity and amount and you can buy a box that way via cash or insurance too.
This is also not quite accurate. The edit is happening, but the problem is the same word appears three times in the same sentence, and the program can’t distinguish them.

Specifically, there are three copies of the gene, the active one and two inactive ones. Trying to only edit one, they ended up hitting ay least one of the others as well. That then caused misalignment and other issues for the rest of the neighborhood.
I proposed ban on all social media politicians and government officials.
The problem with a popular-vote systems is that we have a decentralized system of elections. Most people don't take seriously that many states would be incentivizes to cheat or at least look the other way to boost the number of votes coming from their state.

It's not election changing if one state, lets say accidentally, allows people to vote twice. It could effect their local outcomes, but if everyone votes twice, it should net itself. However, a fair election of the president would be completely fucked.
There's so many alternate uniforms they many seem like low effort spam.

My team Timberwolves, some of their alternates are so simple they look like something you'd buy for your rec league at some small town screen printer...
Oceanographers record the largest predation event ever observed in the ocean
Go read the side-effects and restrictions of commonly used medicine some day, it's unsettling.
I wonder how much Cook dithered over that cheerful-looking exclamation mark
Tigsource is a treasure trove of information and design docs. Lots of famous games were hatched there (spelunky and dead cells to name a few).
It means you have to go to the pharmacy when it's open. That's a significant hurdle if you're sick, especially if you have something contagious and you're trying not to expose people to it, or if you work weird hours, or if you don't have reliable transportation, or if you're the primary caregiver for young children, etc....

It also means you can't get it delivered, can't stock up, might have trouble sending someone else to get it, etc.... It's a big pain for some people, and particularly for people who already have a harder life than average.
Oh, I see, you're getting hung up on the use of the term alive for modern mitochondria.

This sort of definitional argument is not interesting to me.
It's both. With 2 or 3 cuts, you have several pieces of DNA that recombine in whatever arrangement. So in addition to the disease not being treated, you have other issues.

When the sections are subsequently rejoined, entire gene segments may be misaligned or missing. The medical consequences are unpredictable and, in the worst case, contribute to the development of leukemia.
Differential Dataflow for the Masses
You have to find a way to set your display letterboxed to a resolution that is a direct multiple of whatever the game plays at.
Yes. Jesse couldn't score enough product via his smurfs, so they had to find an alternate industrial method for quantity purposes - in the show.
Seconding this, Greg Egan is one of the best of all time.

The short stories "Luminous" and "Dark Integers", the novels "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder". So good.

qntm (another author) hits somewhat similarly.
Lightweight Artificial Aggregates: Typologies, Compositions, and Applications
Democratizing Algorithmic Feeds on Bluesky
Honestly this reads like a potential revenue source for Thunderbird...
I think the term "low-information voters" get thrown around as an insult, but the reality is that like, most people probably should just care about whether they feel they have enough money to be successful. I kept seeing this thing on reddit denigrating people for choosing Facism to save 50 cents on eggs. But this perspective fucking sucks. Purchasing power is probably 95% of general happiness and fulfillment for most people.

I think it's very rational to choose "This person might benefit me and my community specifically" over "our policies are more sustainable for the whole nation in the long term."
For the past 4-5 years this is what has worked exceptionally well for me:

- pyenv for installing multiple versions of python on my machine

- direnv for managing environments (env variables, python version, and virtual environment)

- pip for installing dependencies (pinning versions and only referencing primary packages in requirements.txt - none of their dependencies)

This makes everything extremely easy to work with. When I cd into a project directory direnv loads everything necessary for that environment.

Each project directory has a .env and a .envrc file. The .envrc looks something like this:

layout python ~/.pyenv/versions/3.11.0/bin/python3
dotenv .env

Absolutely no headaches working on dozens of local python projects.
And this time they lost the meme war. Apparently it's time to come up with new material.
> That means throwing out a lot of code too. It's the cost to pay.

And likely, upsetting power users who want to run with all the safeties off.
I know nothing about biology, pardon my ignorance. From the article it sounds like mitochondria were a separate organism that has perhaps simplified through specialization and is currently on the boundary of being an independent life form. It also sounds like there are other structures (golgi apparatus are mentioned?) which are not on the bubble. Are we sure that there is not an arrow of time here, where once those other structures were also semi-independent and have become less so?

More broadly, it leads me to wonder whether cellular life might eventually/might have at some point specialize towards hosting novel endosymbioses.

Either scenario, assuming what I'm saying isn't just total nonsense, would seem to make the state of mitochondria less of a one-off event and more of the instance of that event we are around at the right time to observe.
This is a fair point. I can see the excitement around recognizing that mitochondria is alive to motivate exploring its other functions. But I think you're right someone might be interested in that exploration regardless of whether it's considered alive.

Edit: to your point, there are plenty of scientists interested in studying viruses and much debate about whether or not they are alive. Ultimately it probably doesn't matter.

I do think when you consider mitochondria to be alive, it broadens the scope of your thinking because you start considering each characteristic of life in relation to mitochondria. You might not be motivated to do that without thinking in those terms.
Heffte: Highly Efficient FFT for Exascale
Hope what doesn't happen? The invasion? Or the embargo?

The Beijing regime is already in intense sub-threshold warfare on Taiwan and reiterate their false claim to the country's territory at every opportunity.
Denying them access to the finest silicon processes will no doubt trigger more narcissist punishment tantrums delivered through PLA military provocations, or sabotage, or trade attacks, etcetera, but it's hardly going to matter for whether they launch the invasion. They will do that once they've built so many new nukes and cruisers that they like their chances against the total of Taiwan's defense forces plus any other military that could be expected to intervene.
Yeah, I think there are some things on the edges and long term strategy, but the reality is Biden won in 2020 because of the pandemic and Trump won in 2024 because of inflation. Those would have been enormous headwinds to overcome.
Great to see Apple taking a firm stance on this, this above other fancy features maintain customer loyalty.

People often point out the law enforcement case for breaking into phones but conveniently forget that the very same security holes used by law enforcement are used to make stealing phones more profitable and by other nation-states to spy, commit corporate espionage, etc.