this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
369 points (99.7% liked)

Greentext

8480 readers
496 users here now

This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I think that people just can't make the software --> hardware jump. Like they understand what machine code is, and what CPU registers are, but can't understand how a CPU with baked in hardware instructions (i.e. a seemingly fully deterministic piece of hardware) can drive transistors to high or low voltages in a random way.

The key is to see all software as hardware, and to envision the CPU as many many light bulb switches, with some wired into each other, creating flip/flopping latches.

Once you get the idea of a flipflop, you can maybe then start to understand how all you really want from the switches is to output a switch configuration that encodes a value in some representation. The switches are all initialized in some state, but then drive a known flipflop path towards a desired value, and this happens millions of time a second, often in parallel with isolated switches, or with switches that are virtually segmented from each other, or switches that can chaotically interact with each other