The Python interpreter as acting totally sanely.

The author is asking it to loop over a list (or any iterable) and destructure each of the elements. But is then providing a a list containing some strings, none of which can be destructured.

Reducing to just the second part of the loop:

    [(x, z) for x, _, z, *_ in ["0x2d41854", "3", "0x80001a14", "(0xbffd)"]]

IE in non-list-comprehension form:

    for x, _, z, *_ in ["0x2d41854", "3", "0x80001a14", "(0xbffd)"]:

IE, the first element is expanded as:

    x, _, z, *_ = "0x2d41854"

Which is clearly nonsensical.