Silas comments on True Sources of Disagreement - Less Wrong
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Khyre: Setting or clearing a bit register regardless of what was there before is a one-bit irreversible operation (the other two one-bit input, one-bit output functions are constant 1 and constant 0).
*face-palm* I can't believe I missed that. Thanks for the correction :-)
Anyway, with that in mind, Landauer's principle has the strange implication that resetting anything to a known state, in such a way that the previous can't be retrieved, necessarily releases heat, and the more information the state conveys to the observer, the more heat is released. Okay, end threadjack...