I was thinking of the same and also that this is just a glimpse of what's possible and possibly just intended this way to raise the interest in those genuinely curious. Unfortunately I don't fully understand from just glancing over the article (sorry, my bad), but I understand the implications. And these are incredibly fascinating to me. I was always thinking of living-code (just like DNA) living through the packet-state.

Anyway I think abstracting away variables+lexer via sed and indexing is hot!

My mind is so rusty, but I can imagine constructing an elegant & expressive language using "category theory + lambda calculus" and oh my god... instead of computing a single result using binary encoding we can compute all results in parallel (array-based) by using a lossless compressor (similar to data-fusion).

A Finite State Entropy Encoder (FSE) with a multi-symbol alphabet (>2) can be used for this purpose. FSE is a very interesting development in ANS encoding (Asymmetric numeral systems). I need to put all these pieces together + self-modifying code. Because I don't have the feeling that this is a dumb idea at all.

Maybe infecting any device like the skynet code isn't that far of a stretch away? Disregarding any malicious intent, this is simply inspiring. Maybe I'm just too much of a nerd though to enjoy this a bit too much.. idk.