IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.

One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.

But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.

just a lot of pretraining through evolution

who? The evolution. The observed instructions are also chosen by evolution

It's not "chosen". It is evolution. Your DNA has the metaprogram that sets up all the programs in your brain. Most of them are learning programs but you also have hardcoded programs on how to perform your bodily functions, how and when to cry, and how to suck on a tit.

> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".

The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.

Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.

A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.

I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.

"Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information"

If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused)

And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)

Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU

> gets built using this information only

No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human.

Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".

Well technically yeah but consider that it takes ~9 months for the product to function without constant life support, at least a few years until majority of the basic functions work and ~15 years until it is fully functional.

Talk about compile time.

> For me, it's a mystery.

For me, it's one of the last true mysteries! We've figured out damned near everything else, nothing has this level of "unknown" to it.

It's simply mind-blowing to me how such a tiny block of data can encode such high-level behaviours so indirectly!

Genes code for proteins, not synapse weights!

Those proteins influence cell division, specialisation, and growth through a complex interplay of thousands of distinct signal chemicals.

Then those cells assemble into a brain, apparently "randomly" with only crude, coarse patterns that are at best statistical in nature. Some cells are longer, some shorter, some with more interconnects, some with less, but no two perfectly alike.

Then, then, somehow... waves hands... magically this encodes that "wide hips are sexually attractive" in a way that turns up fully a decade later, well into the "pre-training" phase!!!

What... the... %#%@!

How does that work!? How does any of that work?

Y'all work in AI, ML, or adjacent to it. You know how hard it is to train a model to learn to detect anything even with thousands of examples!

PS: Human DNA contains only 750 MB (62 billion bits) of information, of which maybe 0.1% to 1% directly code for brain structure and the like. Let's be generous and say 10%. That is just 75 MB that somehow makes us scared of snakes and spiders, afraid of heights, attracted to the opposite sex, capable of speech, enjoy dancing, understand on instinct what is a "bad" or "good" smell, etc, etc...

It somewhat makes sense if you think of it in terms of a really complicated 1.5GB metaprogram with a huge pile of conditionals that are triggered by the programs it itself writes (proteins). The final you is made up of an incomprehensible huge number of copies of the metaprogram, running different configurations, and spitting out programs to each other which then do more stuff. Our human brains can't really conceive of a configurable metaprogram that writes programs by interacting with itself in different configurations that it itself sets up.

The even crazier thing is that DNA does not encode any of that. Behaviour and morphology is not directly encoded in there, you'll only find recipes for proteins. The zigote will divide into billions of cells that share that same recipe book. Depending on the electric and chemical signals surrounding cells are sending, individual cells get their "personalities" or function. This cell colony forms an organism which emerges from the sum of morphology and behaviour of all cells. But you'll find no recipe for an arm in DNA, it is the result of the work of the collective intelligence that is your body.

I think you're underestimating the role epigenetic information plays. 1.5 GiB encodes every protein used to build us, sure, but which genes get switched on when and how are sensitive to factors not encoded for in DNA, including the environment of the cell and the fundamental chemistry of biology. Epigenetic information is hard to capture but can profoundly affect how an organism develops; cloned cats, for instance, may show a vastly different fur color and pattern from the original, to cite just a highly visible example.