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How do you know that your text editors aren't compiled to hide the payload when examining this compiler, thus perpetuating the hidenness?

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If you wanted to solve for that, you would have to build a computer like the monster6502 [1] to run the compiler on, and visually inspect the memory contents.

1: https://monster6502.com/

How do you know the person who designed that isn't in on it?

The thing is pretty easy to verify.

The ultimate question is: How far do you need to go until you believe that the earth is indeed not flat? Do you trust your teachers? Stand on a tall building? Take a balloon ride? A plane? A spaceship? Then still, at which point can you rule out that the earth just appears to be a ball due to some yet-to-be-explained phenomenon (gravitational anomaly?) but is indeed flat? (The correct answer of course is "turtles all the way down").

For some definition of 'easy', yes. You still need to know a lot about how a CPU works. I think a project to bootstrap a PC with code generated from a completely verifiable platform would be really cool, but in practise would be of limited usefulness above and beyond secure boot we already have, because you're still trusting all the binary BLOBs you can't control (BIOS/UEFI, Intel ME, microcode, etc)

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