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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • In the pseudoarchaeology space you see a lot of equivocation between digital circuit configurations (e.g. the paths on a main board) and the designs of various ancient sites, particularly in Central America. In the crank version this is a sign that the Aztecs had digital technology and computers of some kind. In reality I think it’s neat to see the same design patterns crop up for trying to route non-overlapping paths for foot traffic as for routing non-overlapping paths for electrons.










  • There’s a whole lot of ontological confusion going on here, and I want to make sure I’m not going too far in the opposite direction. Information, in the mathematical Shannon-ian sense, basically refers specifically to identifying one out of a possible set of values. In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right? Like, depending on the encoding a given amount of information can use a different amount of space on a channel (TRUE vs T vs 1), but just changing which arrangement of bits is currently in use doesn’t increase or decrease the total amount of information in the channel. I’m sure there’s some interesting physics to be done about our ability to meaningfully read or write to a given amount of space (something something quantum something something) but the idea of information somehow existing independently rather than being projected into the probability distribution of states in the underlying physical world is basically trying to find the physical properties of the Platonic forms or find the mass of the human soul.



  • Honestly I’m more surprised to learn that this is deriving itself from actual insights being misunderstood or misapplied rather than being whole-cloth bullshit. Although the landauer principle seems kind of self-evident to me? Like, storing a bit of data is more dependent on the fact that an action was performed than on the actual state being manipulated, so of course whether we’re talking about voltages or magnets or whatever other mechanism is responsible for maintaining that state the initial “write” requires some kind of action and therefore expenditure of energy.

    Then again I had never heard of the concept before today and I’m almost certainly getting way out of my depth and missing a lot of background.