The "first example" is merely a preliminary; it isn't an example of what he's actually trying to do. He's trying to write a very short program that (1) is valid

The "first example" is merely a preliminary; it isn't an example of what he's actually trying to do. He's trying to write a very short program that (1) is valid C, (2) would terminate eventually on a system that perfectly implements C semantics and can run as long as it wants, but (3) would take so long to do so that no physically realisable system within the observable universe could enable it to run to completion. You are of course welcome to find this uninteresting, but "I can think of lots of big complicated programs that would terminate but not do so for a very long time" and "In the real world, an infinite loop may terminate because of a hardware malfunction" don't seem to me like good reasons for finding it uninteresting.