One reason for collaboration is to raise the bus factor.
For small to medium-sized applications, it's not hard to get a single good developer to crank out feature after feature... but they're the only one that understands any of it. Then that single developer is hit by the proverbial bus (or Corona, or retires, or resigns, or whatever...) and you have important software without any maintainer.
That might be OK for some startups where the expectation is that the code will be thrown away and replaced by something better pretty quickly, but for slower organizations, that's often a nightmare scenario.
Makes me wonder if we're building towards another extinction/oxygen catastrophe type of event. Not one where the microplastics themselves are the primary driver, but because microplastics are not renewable in the environment without humans. With solar energy transitions, greater pollution awareness, and a population that's shrinking or leveling off, what will happen to all of the microorganisms which spent a great deal of energy evolving ways to metabolize plastics that suddenly lose that source of energy? They're suddenly less fit for their niche.
Or in a different area of concern, what happens to the plastic economy when plastics are no longer useful because they'll be decomposed too quickly? Sanitary packaging for medical supplies come to mind.
That seems very far away. My understanding is that these PETases digest plastic VERY slowly and need human engineering efforts to digest it in any appreciable amount of time (hours to days rather than years). And human bioengineering of these enzymes is still not to the point where it's actually usable at industrial scale. The paper just says they've discovered the variants, not "oh no all animal life on earth is now dependent on microplastics" :D
> What happens to the plastic economy when plastics are no longer useful because they'll be decomposed too quickly?
We already use lots of biodegradable things for crucial applications, such as the wood used in framing houses. Just because wood can rot in a damp forest doesn't mean that the wood inside your walls will rot away just because. There are conditions where it can start rotting, and we're aware of those conditions and how to prevent them, at least enough for a house to last for decades.
Just because they can digest PET does not mean they cannot digest other things. Being able to switch between food sources as they become more or less abundant is a very common adaptation.
The lifespan of microorganisms is sufficiently short (in most cases) that you’re turning over the entire population regularly - the reason you see such rapid evolution in microorganisms is because they do an enormous amount of dying and procreating anyway. As such, it’s hard to really quantify what a microorganism extinction event would look like in a way that meaningfully distinguishes it from any random Tuesday.
I don't think they are unlearning how to eat other things. It's humans who will have to find a new way to build cars, planes, boxes, bottles and electronics. Think how expensive it will be once car tire or fiber-optic cable eating bacteria hits a major city. Your access to fresh food will be limited and you don't even have a single apple tree.
>what will happen to all of the microorganisms which spent a great deal of energy evolving ways to metabolize plastics that suddenly lose that source of energy?
As the article implies, microorganisms evolve relatively quickly. So the answer is, they would evolve to consume another source of energy. (As has happened for the subjects of the article in the opposite direction.)
I think environmental conservation efforts would have to be fairly successful for your concern.
Fortunately, the US will see that possibility isn't very likely. In the 1980s, there was growing concern about the use of plastic and styrofoam one-time packaging. Both still widely used today…
On an evolutionary timescale, our plastic era probably won’t last very long, right? The byproducts might, but I guess if something learns to eat them, not so much.
Actually it seems pretty crazy that they are figuring it out so quickly (guess there’s lots of energy bound up in those molecules).
I guess we’ll have to go back to our old friends glass and copper. Petrochemicals were a fad anyway; glass and copper have been with us the whole time.
That's mostly a type of sand needed for concrete, sand which is relatively "young" and has not yet had the sharp edges ground off by wind and water. You need sharp sand in construction, because "round" sand leads to weaker concrete.
Sand for glassmaking is more than abundant enough for all but the most distant futures, and even then glass is extremely recyclable.
There was an article on here (sometime in the last year?) claiming that the concrete strength issue is a myth. Apparently it's based on a very narrow claim in a single academic paper that's been wildly extrapolated.
Well yeah, if we insist on continuing to burn our limited supply of hydrocarbons, soon(ish) we won't have enough for making plastics either. Or plastics will become prohibitively expensive...
This is not true in a practical sense. There is a lot of petrochemicals still out there and our ability to recover marginal reserves keeps improving. I was really into the idea of peak oil when I was younger but it really hasn't panned out. Rather, if we continue to using oil, we'll cook ourselves and drown ourselves in plastic.
Yep, there isn't exactly a shortage of hydrogen, carbon or energy in the world. Currently we get all three from the same place, but there are other approaches
Yeah, I really look forward to seeing more research on the ability of these PETase genes to spread. The article touched on it briefly, but it’d be great to have more insight on how much of this is due to HGT vs. something likely to originate de novo across species.
> That makes me wonder if we'll soon see mammals with gut microbiomes that can digest microplastics.
On a less serious note, my cat is deadset on this accomplishment.
It sounds quiet inefficient to me. The energy differential comes from the different salt concentrations, so you have to move a lot of water to exploit a relatively low mass differential.
Mentions of efficiency are conspicuously absent from the article.
Another potential problem is marine ecology: pumping high-salt sea water to the top and releasing it en masse might lead to much larger fluctuations in salt concentration than what the ecosystem is used to.
That said, we need many different approaches to solve energy storage, and I hope to be wrong, and that they end up very successful.
Yeah no mention of how it would effect marine ecology is bad, but the avg startup/mega-corp doenst care see how far people are trying to make deep sea mining legal, even with its obvious implications of destroying the sea
"We are sorry for overwriting the manual translations of all our volunteers. We have disabled the workflow and are working on restoring the old, manual translations.
We had planned to use the translation bot to help you guys, but based on your response, we have understood that we have overshot our target, and actually made it harmful.
Would you be interested in a call where we can apologize in person, and interview you about how the workflow integration could be designed so it actually helps you and other translators?"
Heh, I can relate. We employ a lot of Linux and Windows admins, for them it's usually not a big problem.
We also have a small finance team (typically around 2 employees), and finding somebody with a finance/billing background who is willing to work with TUI on Linux... that was a challenge :-)
I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for very specific tasks.
For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would also be great.
The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
Yeah, everything that couldn't be done through the TUI was a shitty web app, or worse, an iPad app. Fortunately those tasks were far less common and mostly dealt with the meta processes like searching national inventory, special corporate account data, things like that. All the day to day was in the TUI
There is no reason a TUI couldn't do this. Calling another program is easier in a TUI, since it is one step nearer to execve and a shell. If it is in a file, then opening another program isn't hard.
> The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.
Run another Linux VM on the client. /s
Aren't there X servers for Windows? I remembered installing one on a locked down university computer for fun.
Yes, we still have a TUI to our core CMDB and billing. With 500+ employees, not everybody is happy with it, so we also built an API and a web app to access and manipulate the most central data.
But, we also have some power users who absolutely swear by it, and we offer some power user features for them :-)
* full readline integration, so there's a command history, Ctrl-R reverse search in the command history etc.
* tab completion for many prompts
* a generic system where outputs can be redirected to a pager, a physical printer, "wc" (word count), into a file etc.
* tabular data also has an alternative CSV representation
* generic fast-jump into menus. This works by supplying commands on the command line, and transitioning to interactive mode when the command list has run out
This is all built in-house; the first git commit is from 1997 but that was "import from CVS" and already 20k LoC, so the actual origins go back further.
It's written in Perl with no framework, just libraries.
I recently listened to a podcast episode about Enron, and one of the red flags was that they reported profits on paper, but didn't generate cash flow proportional to their profits.
Both Amazon and Nvidia probably don't need the cash flow right now, which is why they can get away with it. It'll be interesting to see what happens if their cashflow ever runs dry.
VC investments are inherently high-risk, high reward. That is, most of the investments will go to zero, but hopefully one or two really good ones make up for it. In order to make that work, you have to invest in many different startups, which is what Nvidia seems to do.
Nvidia has the additional advantage that some of their invested money will make it back to them in the form of dollars spent on compute, which makes their investments cheaper for them, relatively speaking.
> If it can be explained, that every investment is good now, and the answer to the previous question is something like "greed", why stop at a measly billion? Why not just, say, 10 billion?
If the startup isn't looking to raise 10 billion, why give it 10 billion? Instead, give 10 startups one billion each, to spread out the risk.
For small to medium-sized applications, it's not hard to get a single good developer to crank out feature after feature... but they're the only one that understands any of it. Then that single developer is hit by the proverbial bus (or Corona, or retires, or resigns, or whatever...) and you have important software without any maintainer.
That might be OK for some startups where the expectation is that the code will be thrown away and replaced by something better pretty quickly, but for slower organizations, that's often a nightmare scenario.
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