TLDR · SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

THE UNIVERSE JUST WANTS TO LEARN

dayafter.substack.com27 min read

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

DNA doesn't do anything by itself. The information only becomes something when an enzyme unzips the helix and copies a stretch into messenger RNA, after which its instructions are decoded to create chains of amino acids. Similarly, the weights of a neural network don't mean anything on their own. They only become meaningful during the forward pass, activated during inference. In both cases, a passive informational substrate is brought to life only by a process outside of it.