> Take away the mitochondria [...] can cells live on their own?
Neither can live without the other. Too much genetic exchange has taken place in some distant ancestor where critical genes were deleted from mitochondria and moved to the host. Meanwhile host cells became utterly dependent on mitochondria for energy production. Or you might say: the mitochondria were producing so much excess ATP the host cells started evolving to depend on that much energy being available.
The exceptions are later cases (like a few organisms that have copied energy production from the mitochondria genome then later lost the mitochondria entirely).
For all purposes mitochondria are zombie archaea (not bacteria). Hollowed out empty shells retaining just enough function to perform aerobic respiration and reproduce. There is little pressure to evolve away from this local maxima. What benefit would the host cells derive from getting rid of the mitochondria? Not much. And having those critical functions isolated in what amounts to a pseudo-organelle with its own DNA protects it from a lot of sources of damage/error.
So... are we obligate symbiotes? Or have mitochondria hyper-evolved to such a point they are just organelles in our cells - just ones that carry their own DNA instead of relying on the cell's main DNA? Like much of biology... a bit of both in a fuzzy mix without a clear line.
That is... not how the physical world works. The laws of physics hate the large and the small. Or perhaps less glibly parameters do not scale equally. Making a phone is more difficult and expensive than making a laptop for the same reason a 30ft tall human would break their own legs attempting to walk.
To put it another way: A thread rolling screw machine can churn out 12mm/0.5" bolts all day long for a penny each. But if you want to make tiny screws for small pocket watches you're going to pay more (relatively) even though that tiny screw contains way less metal than the larger bolt and the operation is similar. A .00001" error in the larger bolt threads doesn't matter. That much error makes the tiny screw completely unusable. Making a thread-forming die with less than .00001" error is very difficult and expensive and the one for smaller screws accumulates error faster relative to allowable error so must be replaced more often. The steel is just as hard in both bolts but the form of the tiny one is proportionally much thinner.
And similarly if you want a 6m/12ft long bolt you are going to pay a lot more than just the proportional cost of the extra metal because finding machines that can even put that much tool pressure on the dies is not easy. It has to be lifted with a crane. It is just more difficult in every way.
Miniaturization is more expensive. Water and dust proofing is more expensive.
For most things there is a sweet range where cost is lowest and utility highest. Prices go up on either end of that middle ground.
The number of people who aren't vocal tech people who actually want a smaller phone is a very small part of the market. In HN-like circles they're a notable minority but among the general population they are a smaller percentage. Especially when you consider huge segments of the market where your phone is your only computing device: a smaller phone is a massive anti-feature in large parts of the world.
Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The sales numbers just don't justify it. Like people who pine for manual transmissions: they're vocal in car forums and publications but they're a tiny minority and making one is a money-loser even in the sports car segment.
Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.
> Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair
I'm not much of a car person but I thought stick shift also had the benefits of:
1. engine braking
2. being able to jump start a car with a dead battery by pushing it down a hill while turning the ignition and shifting into 2nd gear (which my sister successfully did after school one day).
> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera.
Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.
There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones
I directly addressed the hard sales numbers, we don't need to talk about overrepresentation in HN/tech circles. The napkin math off public numbers tells us the iPhone mini sold 6 million units in the same year Google sold 10 million Pixels total, across all devices. So if 6 million units isn't enough to indicate demand for a niche phone, then there isn't enough demand for the Pixel lineup to exist either, only marginally more.
It's only a small number compared to Apple's total number of iPhones sold which is an astronomical stat to compare to. I don't think it's fair to compare mini phone demand against total iPhone sales.
My wife carries an iPhone 13 mini and hates the new frickin' huge iPhones. If it breaks I suppose I'll buy her a new one of those. If the OS refuses to update because the phone is too old, I guess we'll get a new frickin' huge iPhone, but only under protest.
> Plus almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway.
The last time I bought a phone I chose Samsung S22, which was way out of my initially intended budget, for the sole reason that there were not any smaller options available below its price range.
Gaming of the procurement system. The websites are all written by big consulting outfits. Not to mention the disaster that is big corporate IT projects combined with government rules.
Obama had the Digital Service (that Trump shut down) which paid higher salaries. Those folks were sharp and everything they touched was actually decent.
As I noted this is not unique to government. Large corporate projects at the Fortune 500 are often the same sort of consultant-driven crap.
It wasn't temporarily retasked, it was reorganized and permanently repurposed and renamed the US DOGE Service, and then within that reorganized service, a subordinate temporary organization was created called the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization that was scheduled to sunset not later than July 4, 2026. (All but 65 of USDS's pre-reorg employees were also fired as part of the reorg, and 21 of those remaining 65 employees did a mass resignation.)
If you visit their website, you will notice that except for historical documents, there is no full name branding at all; mostly only the logo and the occasional "USDS", when prior to the reorg (as can be seen on the Wayback machine) the original full name was prominent.
There are plenty of areas Kodak could make a difference if they cared to.
Fuji's instant Polaroid-like camera is a novelty and we still use it. Getting an immediate physical print is entertaining for people of all ages these days.
The security camera business is crowded but mostly with low image quality garbage.
For that matter webcams are also often garbage. A quality camera with optical zoom and good ISP and low light performance could do really well, especially with so much remote work.
The market for high speed cameras is still under-served. As is the market for high quality microscope cameras.
There are lots of opportunities out there if you aren't only focused on products that can sell a billion units.
Every AI-related invention is hyped as "intelligence" but turns out to be "Necessary but Not Sufficient" for true intelligence.
Neural networks are necessary but not sufficient. LLMs are necessary but not sufficient.
I have no doubt that there are multiple (perhaps thousands? more?) of LLM-like subsystems in our brains. They appear to be a necessary part of creating useful intelligence. My pet theory is that LLMs are used for associative memory purposes. They help generate new ideas and make predictions. They extract information buried in other memory. Clearly there is another system on top that tests, refines, and organizes the output. And probably does many more things we haven't even thought to name yet.
What do you mean? Most adult humans can learn to drive a car, book a plain ticket, get a passport, fly abroad, navigate in a foreign country etc. There is a variation in human intelligence, but almost all humans are very intelligent compared to everything else we know about.
Not really, only "merchants" are trying to package and sell LLMs as "artificial intelligence". To this day AI still very much is the name of a research field focused on computational methods: it's not a discovery, it's not a singular product or tool at or disposal (or it is in no greater capacity than Markov chains, support vector machines or other techniques that came before). If you ever expect the goalposts to settle, you are essentially wishing for research to stop.
I don't think we fully understand all the aspects of intelligence. What the potential feature set is. How to categorize or break it down into parts. We have some data and some categories but we are so far away from a full description that it only makes sense we must move the goalposts constantly.
Flight plans are only required for IFR flights in many countries. The VFR rules vary (altitude, area, etc). You can file a VFR flight plan if you want to but it is not required.
On the other hand you can't enter Clasa B airspace (the airspace around large airports) without permission from ATC. You also can't fly above 18,000ft in the US under VFR. That keeps small planes mostly away from the big jets.
I mean "Class B" airspace, which is mostly used in the USA. The ICAO definitions specify what the airspace classifications mean generally but each country often has its own slight variations of the rules.
Class B/C/D is airspace where contact with ATC is required but differs in separation policies. IFR traffic is always kept separated from other IFR traffic.
A: IFR only
B: All aircraft kept separated by ATC. IFR-VFR and VFR-VFR are all ATC's responsibility.
C: IFR traffic kept away from VFR traffic. VFR must watch out for other VFR.
D: IFR must watch out for VFR (only kept away from other IFR).
They used an unproven custom-designed sensor + controller system to monitor the health of the hull.
The monitoring system detected the beginning of total hull failure in the exact way they intended. They then ignored that monitoring system because hull failure would have been inconvenient.
Really that's the whole story of Stockton here. Massively motivated reasoning. Anything inconvenient was written off as wrong. A lot of normalization of deviance too as some of the written-off concerns turned out to be wrong. But not all of them.
I recently got my PPL and that's a massive risk for pilots. You fly in weather you shouldn't and get away with it for a while. Then it becomes normal. You've "proven" you can handle it. Then a situation comes along that requires more margin than you have left and you die.
Neither can live without the other. Too much genetic exchange has taken place in some distant ancestor where critical genes were deleted from mitochondria and moved to the host. Meanwhile host cells became utterly dependent on mitochondria for energy production. Or you might say: the mitochondria were producing so much excess ATP the host cells started evolving to depend on that much energy being available.
The exceptions are later cases (like a few organisms that have copied energy production from the mitochondria genome then later lost the mitochondria entirely).
For all purposes mitochondria are zombie archaea (not bacteria). Hollowed out empty shells retaining just enough function to perform aerobic respiration and reproduce. There is little pressure to evolve away from this local maxima. What benefit would the host cells derive from getting rid of the mitochondria? Not much. And having those critical functions isolated in what amounts to a pseudo-organelle with its own DNA protects it from a lot of sources of damage/error.
So... are we obligate symbiotes? Or have mitochondria hyper-evolved to such a point they are just organelles in our cells - just ones that carry their own DNA instead of relying on the cell's main DNA? Like much of biology... a bit of both in a fuzzy mix without a clear line.
reply