When you look at a program on your computer, you are not in fact looking at the program. You are looking at a series of pixels and/or characters that the program has asked the operating system (or hardware) to display on its behalf.
I think about this a lot.
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Take it further: the only thing that is a 'program' is your mental model of it, constructed from interpreting those pixels. Not the pixels, not the electrons trapped inside the computer.
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If I made the program blink a light, that light would blink whether or not I observed it or cared that it did so.
Unless it's a TI chip, when it almost certainly will crash or do something random when unobserved.
Yes I'm having a bad day.
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But before you made the led blink in reality, you made the model blink in your head first.
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Sorry you're having a bad day and yes I'm being annoying. Not distinguishing reality and expectation is a trap I keep falling into. The "GUIs are fake" observation really is a good reminder that while we think we work with predictable systems, we do gloss over _a lot_.