code generation

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

A WSJ investigation by Joanna Stern into iPhone thieves who watch victims enter their passcode, then use it to lock them out of Apple accounts and drain bank and payment apps. It explains how the thefts work and how to protect yourself.

A sketch from the Seattle comedy show Almost Live! in which Pat Cashman plays a US Bell rep explaining the new 425 area code. It first aired in 1997.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

A DevOps YouTuber tests GitHub Copilot on a range of Leetcode problems and finds it solves most immediately, with a few needing tweaks and some far off. He concludes it would outperform him in a FAANG-style interview.

A live performance at AGDQ 2014 in which Super Mario World is made to execute arbitrary injected code, running other games like Pong and Snake on the cartridge. It is done through a TASBot feeding precise controller inputs.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

Biologist Michael Levin explains the bioelectric layer that coordinates cells to build organs and bodies, showing footage of two-headed worms and introducing xenobots. He discusses implications for medicine and the nature of life.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

The final codec conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2, in which the AI 'Colonel' explains that the Patriots filter out junk information and curate truth for humanity. It plays as a dark meditation on information overload, manipulation and shared reality.

A fan-made Metal Gear Solid 2 codec call using AI voice synthesis, in which the Colonel warns Raiden about using AI to censor the internet and enforce digital ID. It riffs on the game's 'Selection for Societal Sanity' conversation.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

A short Ericsson film demoing Erlang, showing concurrent processes, debugging tools, and hot code reloading, including crashing parts of a running system while calls continue.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

Milton Friedman explains why the US tax code is enormously complex and why meaningful reform is unlikely. He argues that politicians profit from the complexity, since tax breaks are products they sell and the code works as a tool of reward and punishment. The clip is about 14 minutes from his lecture series.

A short film about the Erlang language, showing telecom systems built from lightweight processes and demonstrating hot code swapping. It is an edited version of the original Ericsson video.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

About Here explains how North American building codes requiring two staircases make small multi-story apartment buildings hard to build, and contrasts this with places that allow single-stair designs.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

A short animated explainer that stages a $100 footrace in which contestants start at different distances from the line, depending on the advantages or disadvantages they inherited. It uses the race as a metaphor for how unequal starting points shape outcomes, citing US census income and poverty figures.

Digital Foundry investigates why Resident Evil Village on PC runs worse with Capcom's Denuvo DRM than a cracked version. They benchmark and confirm performance and frame-pacing differences.

Marcus du Sautoy of the BBC demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd, showing that averaging many guesses of jelly beans in a jar lands near the true count.

Reason TV profiles Elvis Summers, a Los Angeles musician who crowdfunded dozens of tiny homes for homeless people. City officials moved to remove them while pushing a multibillion-dollar housing plan.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

Bisqwit writes a NES emulator in C++ in about 15 minutes of tool-assisted, sped-up coding, narrated with captions. It shows an accurate emulator built with a compile-time generated 6502 instruction table. Part 2 covers compiling and running it.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Al Baydha project co-founder Neal Spackman gives a final update nine years in, explaining how desertification followed the loss of indigenous land management and how the land has changed since inputs stopped in 2016. It lists which species worked best.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.