Prototaxites was a massive, trunk-like organism (up to ~8m tall, ~1m wide) that dominated land ~420–370 million years ago, long before trees or complex plants existed. It looked like a tree, but chemical evidence suggests it didn’t photosynthesize. Internally it was made of interwoven microscopic tubes, unlike plant tissue. It’s often described as a giant fungus, but it doesn’t cleanly match modern fungi either, and some researchers think it may represent an entirely extinct branch of eukaryotic life. In other words, early “forests” may have been dominated by something we don’t have a modern analog for.
Plants grow tall to be able to gather light, instead of staying in a shadow.
Fungi and many other terrestrial organisms that reproduce like fungi (e.g. slime molds and myxobacteria) grow above the ground only in order to be able to launch their spores into the wind.
It does not seem possible to explain the size of Prototaxites by the need of launching spores in the wind.
The only plausible explanation is that it was tall in order to ensure access to light.
If it was not a plant, it might have had a symbiotic relationship with a phototrophic living being, which grew on the surface of Prototaxites, i.e. either a blue-green alga (Cyanobacteria) or a green alga, exactly like the present lichens. Prototaxites could have provided access to light, water and minerals, while the alga would have provided food.
> The only plausible explanation is that it was tall in order to ensure access to light.
Thought the same, but that implies both that it grew in very dense "forests" (mono-species because there were no competitors) and probably that it had leaves (because otherwise trunks don't occlude much light).
Although, counterexample: why do (some) cactuses grow tall? Claude provides these explanations that might apply:
Water collection and storage — Height means more volume for water storage. A large saguaro can hold thousands of liters of water in its stem, which is crucial for surviving long droughts.
Temperature regulation — Being taller gets the growing tip and flowers farther from the scorching ground surface, where temperatures can be extreme. The ground in deserts can reach 70°C (160°F), while air temperature a few meters up is significantly cooler.
The 2 explanations given for cactuses seem non-applicable to Prototaxites, as the fossils appear to have formed in some swamps with abundant water.
According to the linked paper, the structure of the stem of Prototaxites contained several kinds of tubes, which might have formed some kind of simple vascular system, able to extract the water from the soil and circulate it through the body.
You are right however that the plants among which Prototaxites was growing had a much smaller height so the competition with them would not have been a strong reason for its height and for the competition between Prototaxites individuals there is no evidence that they would occlude much light.
Still, I am not aware of any better explanation for its height. At that time there were no flying insects. The terrestrial vertebrates and bigger arthropods were predatory. There were a few groups of non-predatory arthropods, i.e. millipedes, mites and springtails, some of which might have been able to feed on Prototaxites tissues, but such small arthropods are likely to have been able to easily climb its stem, so it seems unlikely that its height could have provided any protection for its reproductive parts.
Besides avoiding shadows, there is another explanation for the great height, but that is also applicable only to organisms able to capture solar light. As there is evidence in its isotopic composition that Prototaxites was not phototrophic, any explanation based on capturing light must involve a symbiotic alga. A great height could have helped with the ascent of water through the stem of Prototaxites, due to capillarity and evaporation at its top. However this explanation requires for the pumped water to be useful somewhere high in the stem, which would be the case if the water were given to a symbiotic alga, which would provide food in return.
That summary is more helpful and interesting than a comment whining about it. According to the staff, HN is aimed toward maximizing curiosity--summaries contribute to that, attempts to shut down information because of its source do not.
When you have LLM requests you don't mind waiting for (up to 24h) then you can save 50% in costs. Great for document processing, image classification at scale, anything that you don't need an immediate result from the LLM provider and costs play a role.
I needed a Python library to handle complex batch requests to LLMs (Anthropic & OpenAI) and couldn't find a good one - so I built one.
Batch requests take up to 24h but cut costs by ~50%. Features include structured outputs, automatic cost tracking, state resume after interruptions, and citation support (Anthropic only for now).
We're huge fans of Better Auth -- it's a really great offering. They might have their own take on how we differ, but here's my best attempt at a quick comparison.
We take pretty different approaches to roughly the same family of problems.
Better Auth is focused on being a great library for TypeScript. If you write Typescript and want to build your own auth, they're a great bet.
We're more of an API-first service that's agnostic to the language or framework that you use. We have a pretty opinionated product that is meant to handle auth for you -- it's not really an auth library per se.
I'm not even sure better auth is worth comparing to, there are so many critical open issues that impact not only security but feature parity with much more established and mature open source solutions.
Not to be harsh but the website not loading earlier clearly doesn't set a good first impression.
I didn't know that about Maybe Finance. Was that what prompted you to os inboxzero?
What are the pros and cons? Aren't you afraid that it makes the SaaS offering less enticing, especially to highly technical people (which seems like might be a big chunk of your potential users)?
Retool for sure, they are pumping out features really quickly too. The model makes a lot of sense from a developer's point of view. Now that they are also going into public apps I would really consider them seriously.
Hoping for:
- Better pricing for public apps.
- Better ability to easily customize the frontend design without touching CSS/HTML/JS.
We're revamping some things around Public Apps to make them better/more accessible/more easily shareable for unauthenticated use cases, where you don't pay for end users.
For use cases where you are authenticating external users (using Retool Embed or Retool Portals), we offer custom pricing because use cases vary quite a bit. Sometimes the number of users doesn't even make sense as the billable metric.
Happy to chat more to see what'd work for you - feel free to reach out at antony [at] retool [dot] com!
