29 Nov 2021, Bangkok

The kindly author of S2JS, a website for learning coding beyond Scratch, has created an amazing online clone of MITS Altair 8800.

And in explaining how to program the MITS Altair, he described what reality is in the digital realm:

Imagine taking a photo of your loved ones with your phone. For a programmer, even when we know that the image on the phone are but ones and zeroes, we never perceive it as that. Rather, the image invokes the memory of the person(s) and the place where the photo was taken. But reality of that image is just ones and zeroes.

Similarly, the Buddhist concept of anatta (non-self) is similar, even knowing that the notion of you, me, the world are suppositions, fabrications and conventions are not enough, the path requires that we train our perception to see the world as so.