[mpalmer]

"Modelled" is exactly it. It's a mapping of meaning to changes in various states.

Not an expert and I know counterintuitive phenomena exist, but at bottom it makes way more sense that information is the effect of energy, not the cause of mass.

It's a property of energy transfer that incidentally requires you to take into account the existence of some entity to interpret/record/act on it. So how can such a thing as information have mass? Something must be backwards here.

What is information without its receiving entities, be they computers, signal relays, microphones or people? Or hard drives? Just changes in energy that sometimes change mass as well.

Any change in mass you care to measure is bound to change the information inherent in the object. That's the direction of the relationship: The change in mass/energy leads to the information, not the other way around.

For that matter, am I really making a sheet of paper heavier when I run it through a Braille printer? The example of the hard drive doesn't really provide clarity on this.

[derbOac]

Yeah I suddenly had very similar questions and then read your comment.

If a bit exists but there's no one to encode it, does it inform?

Seems like a lot of what we think of as information is really "potential information" along the lines of potential energy.

Also surprising lack of quantum physics in the article.

I'd be interested in what someone in the field of quantum physics or computation would have to say about these issues.

I do research in information theory but in a totally different way.