We're good until one day we're not. Imagine a big event happens, maybe a power outage, or a spike on the internet due to the Super Bowl or something, and for whatever reason a bunch of customers all try to make changes at the same time?
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Ok now if I lost you with that, here's the simple version: when systems change a lot, they undergo stress, and getting stressed at the worst times, like under attacks or in the middle of outages, is really bad. At a high level these problems are the same.
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And it turns out at a low level they are the same too! Information theoretical entropy, which is all about computability and bits, can be related to thermodynamic entropy, which is all about energy and work!
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How? Well Maxwell proposed a thought experiment that showed a problem with thermodynamics. He imagined two rooms side by side, at even temperatures. He posited that a daemon, a ghost, could open a door between the two rooms and let faster moving molecules over to one side.
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This sort of disproved existing thermodynamics, because the work it takes to open a door like that is less than the energy transferred due to the faster molecules changing sides. This was unresolved for a long time ... UNTIL ...
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A bunch of folks showed that you don't just open the door, you have to observe and predict, and therefore COMPUTE, the position of the molecule. THIS TAKES ENERGY ... and they showed that the energy it takes is at least equivalent to the difference.
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So in a big old nuts, strange-loop sort of way, these completely unrelated things are totally the same at both a MACRO and MICRO level. This blows my mind .... but may also make no sense ;-)
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O.k. that's it, and AMA if you want! Oh and
@threadreaderapp please unroll this mess I made.Show this thread
End of conversation
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