Posts tagged #Landauer
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How big is «practically impossible»?
«It is practically impossible for someone else to generate your own seed» sounds like a way out, and anyone who does not buy it deserves an answer rather than reassurance. How big the space a Bitcoin wallet's seed comes from really is, why the right question is not whether someone guesses yours but whether two identical seeds will ever turn up among all the seeds ever generated, what it would cost a perfect machine just to count them, what difference twelve words instead of twenty-four actually makes, and what a passphrase adds. The fragile point is not the coincidence but the birth, which is to say the generator: the Android episode of 2013 and the Coldcard defect of July 2026.
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Maxwell's demon, taken seriously
An imaginary being watching a single molecule seems to extract work out of nothing, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Dissolving the paradox took a century and a new idea: information is physical. Shannon's entropy of messages and Boltzmann and Gibbs's entropy of molecules answer the same question, Landauer's principle fixes the exchange rate between the two, and Szilárd's engine puts it to the test: how much a bit weighs, where it ends up when it is erased, and why there is no free lunch either way.
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The energy cost of a language model
Where the energy cost of a language model really comes from when it answers