> Similarly, many of humans' capabilities are pretrained with massive computing through evolution.
Hmm .. my intuition is that humans' capabilities are gained during early childhood (walking, running, speaking .. etc) ... what are examples of capabilities pretrained by evolution, and how does this work?
If you look at animals, they can walk in hours, not much time needed after being born. It takes us a longer time because we are born rather undeveloped to get the head out of the birth canal.
A more high level example, sea sickness is a evolutionary pre-learned thing, your body things it's poisoned and it automatically wants to empty your stomach.
The brain is predisposed to learn those skills. Early childhood experiences are necessary to complete the training. Perhaps that could be likened to post-training. It's not a one-to-one comparison but a rather loose analogy which I didn't make it precise because it is not the key point of the argument.
Maybe evolution could be better thought of as neural architecture search combined with some pretraining. Evidence suggests we are prebuilt with "core knowledge" by the time we're born [1].
See: Summary of cool research gained from clever & benign experiments with babies here:
Learning to walk doesn't seem to be particularly easy, having observed the process with my own children. No easier than riding a bike or skating, for which our brains are probably not 'predisposed'.
Walking is indeed a complex skill. Yet some animals walk minutes after birth. Human babies are most likely born premature due to the large brain and related physical constraints.
Young children learn to bike or skate at an older age after they have acquired basic physical skills.
Check out the reference to Core Knowledge above. There are things young infants know or are predisposed to know from birth.
The brain has developed, through evolution, very specific and organized structures that allow us to learn language and reading skills. If you have a genetic defect that causes those structures to be faulty or missing, you will have severe developmental problems.
That seems like a decent example of pretraining through evolution.
But maybe it's something more like general symbolic manipulation, and not specifically the sounds or structure of language. Reading is fairly new and unlikely to have had much if any evolutionary pressure in many populations who are now quite literate. Same seems true for music. Maybe the hardware is actually more general and adaptable and not just for language?
And reading and music co-evolved to be relatively easy for humans to do.
(See how computers have a much easier time reading barcodes and QR codes, with much less general processing power than it takes them to decipher human hand-writing. But good luck trying to teach humans to read QR codes fluently.)
I think of evolution as unassisted learning where agents compete with the each other for limited resources. Over time they get better and better at surviving by passing on genes. It never ends of course.
Your brain is well adapted to learning how to walk and speak.
Chimpanzees score pretty high on many tests of intelligence, especially short term working memory. But they can't really learn language: they lack the specialised hardware more than the general intelligence.
I mean, there are plenty - e.g. mimicking (say, the mother's face's emotions), which are precursors to learning more advanced "features". Also, even walking has many aspects pretrained (I assume it's mostly a musculoskeletal limitation that we can't walk immediately), humans are just born "prematurely" due to our relatively huge heads. Newborn horses can walk immediately without learning.
But there are plenty of non-learned control/movement/sensing in utero that are "pretrained".
A solo maintainer getting hit by a bus can be mitigated by forking the repo by other interested contributors. A more malicious scenario raised by OP is a solo maintainer with little to no funding getting enticed by a nation state actor to add a backdoor, a supply chain attack proven to be very feasible by the recent XZ library incidence.
My 10 years old son asked me a few days ago "Dad, is there any way I can get rid of these ads I keep seeing all the time on YouTube?".
I answered that he could use Firefox instead of chrome (I've already configured Firefox on his laptop account with ublock origin).
He was reluctant at first to use Firefox rather than chrome but it seems getting rid of ads was a compelling enough advantage that he did use it eventually.
Interesting, it's also 18 dollars per month in the US for a Youtube premium family subscription.
Doesn't that make it, with respect to exchange rates, 33% more expensive effectively in the UK for the same subscription? I've noticed this happens with videogames too, where the prices are always the same numerical value regardless of currency.
In some places of the world, hiding from drones could be a matter of life and death. But if someone uses techniques for evading drones, and other people around are not, couldn't he be alerting the drone that he might be a potential target?
The comment period is closing in 3 days. The page links to a 4MB text archive of comments so far[1]. I think this one quoted below explains the issues with this proposed amendment:
[quote]
Dear Madam, or Sir,
I am concerned about this amendment to the Registry Agreement because it
will affect, not just me, buy any individual who would like their own
domain name. I am 100% sure that no corporation will object to the 28%
cost increase every six years as they earn money off their domain name and
paying almost any amount would be acceptible to them. However, there are a
great deal of small businesses that would see this as a burden as well as
individual users out there that have purchased their own domain name and
are using it for personal use, not commercial use. Several of us have
multiple domain names, if for no other reason than to protect our own names
from being used to run a website. I personally have about 6 that I use to
protect myself and my family while also allowing my children to be able to
have a domain name that is exclusively theirs.
20 year Cost analysis:
$ 7.85 / year 2018
$10.29 / year 2023 (31% increase over 2018)
$13.49 / year 2029 (72% increase over 2018)
$17.68 / year 2035 (125% increase over 2018)
$23.17 / year 2041 (195% increase over 2018)
I am aware that the 7% is a maximum per year for each of the four years
and, theoretically, there could be no increase or a sub 7% increase some
years, however, I have little faith on this being the norm and, most
certainly, CANNOT plan on it being any less than the full 7% in any fiscal
plans made.
I understand it would be extremely difficult for you to create a
regulation that would charge businesses more and individuals less, however,
that may be what is required at this time. This would leave a loophole for
businesses to have an individual register their domain name, however, no
corporation of any size will be willing to leave their domain names in
private hands. This would also allow fledgling businesses (aka startups)
to keep their costs low at first. Remember, many businesses have been
started in individual's garages.
You may also assume that all ".com" domain names are used for, or are
supposed to be used for commercial purposes, however, this is not the case
today. If this had been defined and enforced from the beginning of the
internet, this would be a non-issue, however, to start enforcing it today
would cause many many individuals to lose their domains. Yes, there are
other top level domains they can move to, however, that doesn't alleviate
the fact that they would be losing an asset they had invested much time,
money, and resources acquiring.
Please keep the annual fee very low or consider a more flexible charging
system for the .COM top level domain that will keep it accessible to
individuals and small businesses.
Thank you,
Andrew Farnsworth
> Dear Madam, or Sir,
I am concerned about this amendment to the Registry Agreement because it
will affect, not just me, buy any individual who would like their own
domain name. I am 100% sure that no corporation will object to the 28%
cost increase every six years as they earn money off their domain name and
paying almost any amount would be acceptible to them. However, there are a
great deal of small businesses that would see this as a burden as well as
individual users out there that have purchased their own domain name and
are using it for personal use, not commercial use. Several of us have
multiple domain names, if for no other reason than to protect our own names
from being used to run a website. I personally have about 6 that I use to
protect myself and my family while also allowing my children to be able to
have a domain name that is exclusively theirs.
20 year Cost analysis:
$ 7.85 / year 2018
$10.29 / year 2023 (31% increase over 2018)
$13.49 / year 2029 (72% increase over 2018)
$17.68 / year 2035 (125% increase over 2018)
$23.17 / year 2041 (195% increase over 2018)
I am aware that the 7% is a maximum per year for each of the four years
and, theoretically, there could be no increase or a sub 7% increase some
years, however, I have little faith on this being the norm and, most
certainly, CANNOT plan on it being any less than the full 7% in any fiscal
plans made.
I understand it would be extremely difficult for you to create a
regulation that would charge businesses more and individuals less, however,
that may be what is required at this time. This would leave a loophole for
businesses to have an individual register their domain name, however, no
corporation of any size will be willing to leave their domain names in
private hands. This would also allow fledgling businesses (aka startups)
to keep their costs low at first. Remember, many businesses have been
started in individual's garages.
You may also assume that all ".com" domain names are used for, or are
supposed to be used for commercial purposes, however, this is not the case
today. If this had been defined and enforced from the beginning of the
internet, this would be a non-issue, however, to start enforcing it today
would cause many many individuals to lose their domains. Yes, there are
other top level domains they can move to, however, that doesn't alleviate
the fact that they would be losing an asset they had invested much time,
money, and resources acquiring.
Please keep the annual fee very low or consider a more flexible charging
system for the .COM top level domain that will keep it accessible to
individuals and small businesses.
