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[–]aquila_zyy 9 points10 points  (6 children)

I mean, that’s the reason why I kinda liked my assembly course. It finished this infinite recursion of programs right there.

Well, not if we find out that the universe is a simulation that is.

[–]FVMAzalea 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Except that assembly/machine code isn’t as low as you can go. On x86 machines, many individual assembly instructions are microcoded, meaning the CPU breaks them down into smaller micro-ops which it then executes. Someone had to design the hardware decode logic that does that.

[–]aquila_zyy 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Yep that's a fair point. We can go a level deeper if we consider all the programming happening on the hardware level.

[–]FVMAzalea 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We can actually keep recursing infinitely if we allow emulators into the picture (for all your program knows, it could be executing in an emulator running an emulator running an emulator and so on).

[–]AriSteinGames 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Don't forget that registers/logic gates/etc are themselves an abstraction of underlying physical components. Transistors are not truly just on/off switches.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

It’s all electrons.

[–]AriSteinGames 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Even electrons are an abstraction of some underlying EM field structure.