encoding

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

2swap explores lambda calculus using John Tromp's lambda diagrams, with animated beta-reductions, asking what PLUS times PLUS gives. It touches on Church encodings and the equivalence of Turing machines and lambda calculus.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an FFmpeg enthusiast. It pokes fun at the open source command-line tool experience and video conversion woes.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

Ben Eater explains how a USB keyboard communicates, covering the electrical interface, bit and packet encoding, packet contents, and a comparison with PS/2.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.