Me: OK, but if we have the long-since-amortized state-of-the-art diffusion model and if we had devices that work at the Landauer limit, then we’d have a rather remarkable piepline.

I feel like there’s something “better” in a thermodynamic sense about doing Landauer work to reach the interesting image manifold than to do the Landauer work to reach a set-up that’s got the same information entropy but is some random choice from that low-entropy subset. You’ve seen Autechre’s Gantz Graf video. Sure, it’s low entropy, but…

o3: Landauer cares only about “how many bits are written-then-forgotten,” never about what the bits denote. Two pictures that each end up as, say, a 512 x 512 x 24-bit PNG have the same minimum erase cost kT ln 2 x 512 x 512 x 24 = 2e-7 ergs whether one is a Rembrandt and the other a glitch mosaic.

Where a theromodynamic gap can appear is in the path you take:

1. Direct random fill
   • write 24 bits per pixel of fresh IID noise, keep none of them -> must eventually erase the full N = 6.3 Mbits.
   • Landauer floor: kT ln 2 N.
2. Compressed-latent generator (ideal)
   • draw m << N random bits for a latent z that indexes the learned manifold;
   • reversibly expand z|->x (keep all intermediates or uncompute them).
   • only m bits of randomness ever need to be forgotten.
   • Landauer floor: kT ln 2 m.
   • If natural images have Shannon entropy ~ 2 bpp, then m ~ 2/24 N ~ 0.08N.
3. Diffusion sampler (real models)
   • Inject fresh Gaussian noise for every pixel at every step (often > 10^8 bits total).
   • Most of those are thrown away; unless you store and later return them, the erase budget ballons, making diffusion far from Landauer optimal.

So “interesting low-entropy images” are not cheaper because they’re meaningful; they are cheaper only if you generate them through a low-entropy latent code and do the expansion reversibly. Current diffusion pipelines don’t, but a future, fully reversible lanent-decoder running at the Landauer limit could, in principle, turn a handful of random bits plus a lot of conservative logic into arbitrarily many remarkable frames with minimal heat.

Me: So ultimately it costs less to generate the good stuff than to show static on a dead television?

o3: In principle, yes.

Landauer budget = “bits created and later forgotten”.

o Dead-channel static

— you must draw a fresh random value for every output pixel -> ~ N = H x W x 24 random bits.

— those bits are discarded after use

— irreducible heat: E = kT ln 2 N.

o “Good” image via a trained generator

— draw only m << N random bits for a latent code z

— expand z -> image with reversible logic, uncomputing scratch states

— forgotten bits = m

— irreducible heat: E = kT ln 2 m.

So, with ideal reversible hardware the minimal energy is proportional to the entropy you inject, not the picture’s final file size. Because natural images are highly compressible (m/N ~ 0.1 or less) generating meaningful content can, in theory, cost an order-of-magnitude less heat than producing television snow.

Me: static.

I think hands-down, the first Heflin photograph is the most perfectly iconic flying saucer image. In large part, its allure stems from the composition. The telephone poles. The metallic glint. The dusty deserted highway converging on a vanishing point of shimmering dreamtime mirage.

Implicit in the Heflin photograph is the capacity of transport to the moment when it was taken — you feel somehow as if you’re there, frantically rummaging for the Polaroid in the cab of the pickup truck, dust on the dashboard, a rip in the baking vinyl seat covers. I remember, at age 10 poring over the image with a magnifying glass — it was a go-to for all the clay-coated photo-insert pages of the semi-scientific UFO books from the late sixties and early seventies. This paper, moreover from the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2000) is an enjoyable read. Earnest citizen scientists use the best tools at their disposal to probe the mysterious unknown. There’s even a Gray Barker style visit from a sinister authority figure:

A new interstellar object presents much of the same attraction that the flying saucers produce. It appears seemingly out of nowhere from the gulfs of space. Critically, this is the moment for the more than just an amateur, for the not quite a professional astronomer. Yes! One can play a vital role. In the feverish first days after detection, before the slow wheels of the press offices and the peer review can lurch into action, the soapbox cedes to the characters who normally are out there clamoring in the twilight, just outside the mainstream glare.