I literally just saw someone advising people to liquidate their 401K to buy uniswap. Whether they explicitly say it is a get rich quick scheme or not, this is the message the marks are receiving.
Wow. Did that person give an explanation why?
I follow "blockchain world" fairly closely and I really fail to see much value to UNI. But I have seen people speak quiet exuberantly about it. I am wondering what their thesis is.
Thanks for the link. After reading up on reversible for an hour after seeing this story, I'm still trying to figure out in an intuitive way why physical reversibility will not lead to energy loss. Or to put it another way, why does bit Erasure end up in energy expenditure. I understand why from a theoretically derived perspective that entropy increases, but I haven't been able to make the connection with the physical world.
Richard Feynman published a lesser-known set of lectures on the subject of computation and he deals with this. The computational system he depicts is one in which 'computation' occurs as a intentionally setup quantum system falls to its ground state. It might take an arbitrarily long amount of time, but the computation will occur with zero energy loss. In order to get the result more quickly you can input energy and spur along the process. He also deals with the theoretical, and some of the practical, considerations surrounding reversible computing (which he stresses as critically important for zero-energy-used computing). I've always just considered it a matter of if X bits of information enter into a system and you are only preserving Y bits of them... the others have to go somewhere. Information is as physical as anything else, even though it can take many forms. We usually end up dumping it as heat, but we could have it be vibration or RF or maybe some weird geometry morphing (on the quantum scale I mean) all the same.
> why does bit erasure end up in energy expenditure
Following this explanation from the link:
"Theoretically, room‑temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with energy being converted to heat in the memory media at the rate of only 2.85 trillionths of a watt (that is, at a rate of only 2.85 pJ/s). Modern computers use millions of times as much energy."
I understand that to flip a 1 to a 0 it is necessary to dissipate that energy into heat.
Edit: But also I'm not sure how reversibility avoids that.
There's some interesting explanation about the thermodynamics of reversible cellular automata in these papers:
INVERTIBLE CELLULAR AUTOMATA: A REVIEW.
Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus.
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Because of this "information-losslessness"
(ach!), ICA automatically obey the second principle
of thermodynamics and, more generally, display
a full-featured statistical mechanics analogous
to that of Hamiltonian systems. As additional
structure is introduced (for instance, particle
conservation), macroscopic mechanical features
such as elasticity, inertia, etc. naturally
emerge out of statistics itself. In sum, once we
make sure that it is conserved, information has an
irresistible tendency to take on a strikingly tangible
aspect (cf. [73]) to materialize itself.
One of the tripper far-reaching (to the end of the universe) applications of reversible computation is Tipler's "Omega Point," which he wrote about in "The Physics of Immortality".
Tipler's Omega Point prediction doesn't seem like it would be compatible with the expanding universe, would it? Eventually everything will disappear over the speed-of-light horizon, and then it can't be integrated into one mind.
It also wishfully assumes that the one mind can't think of better things to do with its infinite amount of cloud computing power than to simulate one particular stone age mythology.
Then again, maybe it's something like the 1996 LucasArts game Afterlife, where you simulate every different religion's version of heaven and hell at once.
The primary goal of the game is to provide divine and infernal services for the inhabitants of the afterlife. This afterlife caters to one particular planet, known simply as the Planet. The creatures living on the Planet are called EMBOs, or Ethically Mature Biological Organisms. When an EMBO dies, its soul travels to the afterlife where it attempts to find an appropriate "fate structure". Fate structures are places where souls are rewarded or punished, as appropriate, for the virtues or sins that they practiced while they were alive.
After reading the wikipedia page on Landauer's principle, I'm left with some vague questions.
If irreversible computations have an effect on entropy in the environment, does transmitting a bit so it is not lost have an interesting effect too, even if it is done with a conventional computer and not a reversible one?
The amount of data transmitted over the internet has reached over a zettabyte per year - does thermodynamics tell us anything interesting about the consequences? Yes, it produces heat, but beyond that...
To truly benefit from this theoretical advantage, reversible computing requires reversibility at all levels, including the electronics and the program itself. Simply retransmitting a bit requires fan-out which is itself forbidden in reversible circuits, so it doesn't buy you anything.
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/4167