alt Hacker News> Assembly still runs on abstractions: You're ignoring the CPU microcode ...
Yes and no. There's no way to "get" to these. Arguably assembly is an abstraction on top of codes (hexcodes or binary if you want to see it that way), but the assembly instructions are the lowest level we get to access. For as a programmer you don't get to access the microcodes emulating an amd64 architecture and you cannot decide to use these microcodes directly.
Otherwise it's just electricity. Then it's just electrons.
So it's not false that it's all abstractions but it doesn't help much to view it that way.
> Otherwise it's just electricity
There is a lot going on at the hardware level that is going on and hidden from the view of assembly. Hardware is not magic, there are a ton of design decisions that go into every architecture, most of which isn't immediately obvious by looking at the ISA.