While this workaround exists, it breaks Microsoft’s Visual Studio Marketplace terms of use: https://aka.ms/vsmarketplace-ToU :/

I appreciate the thought!

As far as I’ve tested it, vscodium doesn’t support the same remote extensions that vscode does, it’s very silly.

VSCode! I’m yet to find another editor that runs as smoothly on remote machines. Zed has been getting much better at this, but it’s still too buggy to consider a switch.

Like you said, there’s plenty of external forces affecting the entropy of a closed “earth” system, and so the notion of a closed system seems a bit meaningless to me. I probably have some more reading to do on this tbh. I tend to take the view that everything is a single closed system (i.e. universal wavefunction) and so talking about smaller subsystems is helpful but never exact.

I think i might be a bit more optimistic on how well we can use these “entropy gradients” to our advantage. I study computational nanotechnology for a living, so ofc i’m a lil bullish on it, but generally i think that our current high technology regime can get us far enough past scarcity, it’s mainly the sociopolitical implications of doing so that i worry would stop us first.

This was a pretty cool read, I hadn’t thought much about the entropy of a non-isolated system. I’m still not sure it has much physical meaning - the idea that entropy always increases only applies to isolated systems, but it made me think more about where the entropy gain would have to be to achieve a lower entropy mineral/energy world.