13 ms·

I understand and share the excitement on this subtle topic, but this only exists on a source code level. There’s a list of source codes linked in time by compil

by wruza 2y ago

I understand and share the excitement on this subtle topic, but this only exists on a source code level. There’s a list of source codes linked in time by compilation processes that eventually lead to a numeric literal entered by a human. But physical computers knew what to insert in place immediately, because there was 0x0a somewhere in binary every time.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
Of course our physical computers know what to insert, since it was embedded in the binary. But it hasn't always been embedded "every time": there was a point in the past where someone's physical computer didn't know what to insert, and so they had to teach it by hand. Without the source code (or some human-entered code) at the end of the chain, we'd have to insist that the code was embedded from the very dawn of time, which would be rather absurd. Personally, I like how this article and other such projects push back on some of the mysticism around bootstrapping that sometimes floats around.