source control

Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.

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.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

Wendover Productions explains counterintuitive riot control techniques based on research, showing that effective tactics tend to avoid violence.

National Geographic footage showing the cordyceps fungus infecting ants and other insects and steering their behavior so it can reproduce.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

Kurzgesagt compares how many people nuclear accidents have killed against other energy sources. It walks through the worst nuclear accidents and puts their death tolls in context per unit of energy.

A Climate Town video on how the auto industry reshaped American cities and culture through advertising, lobbying and campaigns like the 1939 World's Fair. It is snarky in tone but backed by a published source document.

Mark Rober digs into bed bugs, testing popular beliefs about where they come from and how to get rid of them. It mixes entertaining experiments with research-based advice on what works and what does not.

Yuta explains what Japan's 99% conviction rate actually means, noting that prosecutors drop cases unless confidence is very high. He argues that the number is widely misunderstood and cites his sources.

Tom Scott explains how in Norway and other Nordic countries tax returns, and so individual incomes, are public. He looks at the effects of wage transparency and whether it is a good idea, with sources listed in the description.

A Kurzgesagt explainer asking whether organic food is really healthier or better for the environment. It defines what organic means and looks at pesticide use, nutrition and environmental impact, with sources.

Brian Douglas introduces Braitenberg vehicles, simple robots whose sensors are wired directly to motors yet show surprisingly lifelike behavior. He draws on Valentino Braitenberg's book Vehicles.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

Tom Scott explains how decades of deep coal mining sank parts of Germany's Ruhr Valley and changed its drainage. Pumps run by Emschergenossenschaft must now work permanently to keep towns and cities from flooding.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains how a US Navy nuclear submarine surfaces through Arctic ice, filmed during the ICEx exercise. It shows ballast and control systems and the physics involved.

CGP Grey's animated adaptation of The Dictator's Handbook, explaining how rulers stay in power by keeping a small group of key supporters happy rather than ruling fairly. It lays out selectorate theory and how resources shape regimes.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1940s Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster. It senses the toast's own browning and lowers and raises it automatically using purely mechanical parts and no electronics.

Not Just Bikes argues that urban noise comes mostly from motor vehicles, drawing on the book Curbing Traffic and a visit to Delft, a city that takes noise seriously.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

Potholer54 presents the climate science case and a market-oriented, conservative-friendly approach to addressing global warming, with sources listed. It is part one of a two-part series.

Adam Ragusea examines whether olive oil is unsafe for high-heat cooking and whether it tastes bad when heated. He cites studies showing it is among the most stable cooking oils and that smoke-point worries are overblown.

CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.

Wendover Productions examines why carbon offsets so often fail to reduce emissions, covering specific examples and the perverse incentives in offset schemes.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that tipping should be banned. It covers the history of tipping, its weak link to service quality, and why employers should pay a fair wage.

Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.

An Isaac Arthur episode on civilizations in the dark, post-stellar universe, including black hole farming, accretion disks and the Penrose process as energy sources.

CGP Grey explains why "Indian" is often preferred over "Native American" in the United States, especially near reservations, and how many tribes exist in the US. He draws on conversations with people who identify as Indian.

Kurzgesagt lays out a speculative plan to terraform Venus, covering its hostile atmosphere and how it might be made Earth-like, with a sources page linked.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Not Just Bikes argues that stop signs are a poor traffic control, drawing on Dutch practice and the Idaho stop to show intersections can be safer without them, especially for cyclists.

Veritasium explains how ASML's EUV lithography machines make the most advanced computer chips, covering the engineering of the light source, mirrors and the supply chain around them. It is a long-form explainer on the world's most complex commercial machine.

A snarky, comedic video essay from Climate Town, with a guest appearance by Not Just Bikes, arguing that American suburban sprawl and single-family zoning are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It covers how zoning rules shape housing and what viewers can do locally, such as attending zoning meetings.

A step-by-step animated explanation of how SHA-256 works, from padding and message schedule to the compression function and final hash, with source code for the animations.