Nothing against your specific comment, but in general I wish that the Landauer limit had less cultural importance and salience in discussions of computation & e

Nothing against your specific comment, but in general I wish that the Landauer limit had less cultural importance and salience in discussions of computation & energy. It's a simple result, but the assumptions leading to it are quite subtle. First, it relies on the widely misinterpreted second law of thermodynamics and second, it relies on the subtle notion of 'erasure'. In loose analogy, it reminds me of quantum mechanics - "what's the definition of a measurement?" "It's anything that causes the system to act like it was measured." "What's the definition of information erasure?" "It's anything that causes the system to obey the Landauer limit." In any case, this limit is so far away it's practically theory (though experiments purport to show it), and since the limit can be exceeded in theory, it doesn't seem like a useful principle to guide us.