And entropy when your browser garbage collects and free()

Or the decision to do it, the neurons involved, free will or otherwise.

Basically to load a web page you must first invent the universe.

This would be an interesting way to frame an entire series of textbooks covering pretty much all of science, electrical engineering, and CS. The entire premise being "you type a URL into your browser and it loads the requested webpage".

Each textbook in the series at the depth of a bachelors degree, split by relevant subject including physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, materials science, electrical engineering, hardware design, kernel and device driver design, systems level networking, and all the remaining browser engine, VM, security, and webdev stuff.

To keep the task at least theoretically tractable cut off at the NIC in the local box.

Who knew you could premise a textbook on protein folding on "how a web page is loaded"?

You may say that as a joke, but looking back at my education, this is in part what I did later, after uni, when I thought about things to learn next. In my mind, I started explaining stuff in depth, and found the many many many holes in my apparently quite superficial school knowledge.

I think this would be excellent as a once-in-a-while exercise to teach the complexity of it all, after we went the other way to abstract the hell out of everything to make it more palatable. A reality check, so to speak, and as a check for everyone about the many holes in their understanding. Basically, in support of something that has been posted here more than once, this blog post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

In the last few years I read a lot of easily digestible progression fantasy on RoyalRoad. One frequent theme is rebirth or isekai on another world, one that's usually much more primitive. Often the main character starts bringing earth technology ideas into the new world. And every single time it is obvious that the authors very, VERY severely the complexity and difficulty of even the smallest thing that we take for granted. My favorite blog post describing an extremely simple product, and how large and sophisticated its supply chain is: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d4499...

To me, this shows that some more awareness of how much complexity there is in things might be valuable.

Being more aware of the connections across our abstractions also helps finding what's missing. It could also help to find optimizations across abstraction borders, instead of limiting oneself to only looking within ones favorite abstraction layer.