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modeler

@ modeler @lemmy.world

Posts
1
Comments
135
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms truly merged into one organism

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  • Sorry for taking a long time to reply.

    with plain old binary fission cell division, how do you get both to divide at the same time, and give each cell one of the new organelles?

    An excellent question! Luckily it was answered in the paper. The researchers actually had a high resolution soft x-ray movie of cell division (ok, an exaggeration, they had a few micrographs showing the sequence). In the sequence, it showed how the organelles (including the novel N2 fixation one) undergoing division and each 'child' organelle ending up in different halves.

    Cell division is controlled in the cell by an amazing process:

    • 2 centres are created on opposite sides of the cell
    • Structures like tethers are built that connect each centre to each of the organelles (the nucleus, mitochondria and the N2 fixators). These are called microtubules
    • The microtubules then start shortening, pulling the organelles in two directions, separating them.

    The x-ray micrographs show that the N2 fixators are already integrated into this mitosis mechanism - my guess is that the N2 fixators already 'understand' the parent cell's mitosis signaling.

    The authors also say that the organelles have lost a number of genes for essential cellular functions, relying on the parent cell to provide those capabilities. By comparison, mitochondria have only 37 genes left, and chloroplasts weren't known for having any DNA when I was at school, but are now known to have about 110 genes.

    In other words, a lot of evolution has already occurred and they are well on the way to being 'proper' organelles.

  • For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms truly merged into one organism

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  • an extreme change like this can't be selected for

    I think you mean that the initial bit - where the smaller bacterium is swallowed but stays alive in its host - is the "can't be selected for". After this, if the chimera survives, then most definitely the natural selection process is in action and selection is taking place.

  • Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts

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  • Elon Musk didn't build the company.

    Elon Musk invested into the company,

    That's what I said a couple of paragraphs later

  • Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts

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  • Elon sounds like he's experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010's. I wasn't a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.

    Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he's said about Twitter is crap and everything he's done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.

    I've seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don't know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.

    He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).

    Basically he's been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.

  • As someone not in tech, I have no idea how to refer to my tech friends' jobs

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  • Surely that is reserved for QA!

  • Samsung does an Apple with its first Snapdragon X Elite laptop, suggesting the new Arm-based Windows machines aren't going to be a cheap alternative to x86

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  • Disagree with your disagreement. I also have an M1 and was a quite early adopter (within 3 months of launch). It was really snappy compared to my Intel Air it replaced. From the get-go. Even for apps that were still x86 code.

    Things definitely improved over the next 9 months, but I was and am a really happy camper.

  • What's the deal with Docker?

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  • This is exactly the answer.

    I'd just expand on one thing: many systems have multiple apps that need to run at the same time. Each app has its own dependencies, sometimes requiring a specific version of a library.

    In this situation, it's very easy for one app to need v1 of MyCleverLibrary (and fails with v2) and another needs v2 (and fails with v1). And then at the next OS update, the distro updates to v2.5 and breaks everything.

    In this situation, before containers, you will be stuck, or have some difficult workrounds including different LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings that then break at the next update.

    Using containers, each app has its own libraries at the correct and tested versions. These subtle interdependencies are eliminated and packages 'just work'.

  • An Automotive Locksmith On The Flipper Zero And Car Theft

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  • Exactly. And all the core internet encryption and signing algorithms are fully open source. Eg RSA, AES, DIffie Helman. And these are the algorithms the US (and most other western) governments require when sending data to or from or within there servers.

  • Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch

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  • Which, will also hurt the call center manager, until they hire enough staff to answer the fucking phones in less than 30 minutes.

  • TIL the word 'lox' (smoked salmon) is the oldest word in the English language- unchanged in meaning and pronunciation for 8,000 years

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  • There's lox to unpick there

  • AMD’s new CPU hits 132fps in Fortnite without a graphics card

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  • It's all software, even the stuff on the graphics cards. Those are the rasterisers, shaders and so on. In fact the graphics cards are extremely good at running these simple (relatively) programs in an absolutely staggering number of threads at the same time, and this has been taken advantage of by both bitcoin mining and also neural net algorithms like GPT and Llama.

  • “kill them with kindness”

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  • This commenter heiroglyphs!

    In many texts, writers play with different or unusual ways of sounding out words perhaps to make the visual representation better. Ugh. Here's a link if you're interested in learning more

  • Hydroxychloroquine could have caused almost 17,000 deaths in six countries during COVID, study finds

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  • Not quite. The drug causes heart irregularities in some people at therapeutic doses, and this killed some of those 17k people. It just doesn't quantify it here.

  • Very clever...

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  • My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:

    stty sane

    stty erase '^H'

    It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.