I lived in apartments for a long time then moved into a house. I thought my cat who had never seen stairs would take some adjusting. Nope, he look up them, wiggled his butt, then ran full tilt to the top. Ran full tilt down them too.

One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.

It’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal.

There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.

I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.

To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.

You’re right on that.

They’ll have heard noises, experienced gyroscopic forces and gravity. But a calf being born and standing up within minutes to an hour is pretty neat. Same with vision, going from no sensory input to seeing.

Apparently piglets have full motor control in 8 hours after birth. I went to a local agricultural museum the other day and saw some week old piglets climbing over each other and nursing with no problems.

As I said, I would love to have the time and go back to school to learn way more about all of this. Nature and evolution are pretty amazing.

What's also fun to think about is the compression ratio of that data. the human genome is in the 725MB range.

Evolution is kinda like pre-training in a sense.

Also illustrates an adaptability-ability trade-off. A human baby is supplied a SOTA brain and sensors and actuators it can make sense of given time. A deer baby is preprogrammed to handle its sensors and actuators. In time, the human baby surpasses the deer baby in general ability.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

That’s reviewing code vs contributing code.

The problem is for over a decade companies keep doing enshittification tactics and it’s destroyed trust.

Plus there’s been a lot of public to private migrations like minio and others that feel like total rug pulls.

I am with you that the birthday field is blown way out of proportion, but I’m also positive that once that’s enforced governments will use this to restrict whatever they don’t like arbitrarily (see LGBTQ book bans).

Trust in open source devs is definitely down. There was that book lore app drama just a couple weeks ago because the dev used AI, and the community didn’t like AI (which escalated poorly).

Nobody really cared how the open source sausage was made, but now it’s the most important thing to people.

A lot of these seem to allude to the user’s input/mind being the thing that helped the LLM gain sentience, and there’s a lot of shared consciousness stuff that people seem to buy into.

There’s also lots of stuff about quantum consciousness that is in the training data.

How do you prevent a Cambridge Analytica exfiltration situation with third party algorithms?

And how does this prevent addictive algorithms which will win through social selection?

The Cambridge Analytica stuff never got fixed, it just got hidden out of sight. The situation is worse than ever now.

It’s not so bad, there’s no double negative and it’s not a confusing “switch” that is always ambiguous as to whether it’s enabled or not.

In contrast when you create a a GCS bucket it uses a checkmark for enabling “public access prevention”. Who designed that modal? It takes me a solid minute to figure out if I’m publishing private data or not.

Disabled - You won't have access to this feature of disallowing training.

You should check out the Modern Pandas series by Tom Augspurger, it’s well worth reading to get clean modern style code.

https://tomaugspurger.net/posts/modern-1-intro/

I second this blog post. I worked with Tom on a project several years ago and he's brilliant. Started doing python more frequently after that project and I found his blog to be very helpful in finding a good way to conceptualize pandas and python data structures in general.

Thanks. There's a special place in my heart for any blog that opens with 'Prior Work' :)

also I would recommend looking at videos from matt harrison for polars or pandas, e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9ekw2Ou3s0

I’m intermittently getting artifacts vs the new visuals api, depending on which version of the Claude app I use. iOS/iPadOS apps are not yet supporting the visualization API, and I don’t see an app-store update yet.