youtube algorithm

Tom Scott's long explainer on YouTube's copyright system, Content ID and the DMCA. He argues the platform's system is a workaround for a broader copyright system that does not fit the modern world.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

AlphaPhoenix uses Monte Carlo simulation and annealing-style methods to draw North Carolina congressional district maps, both gerrymandered and fair. He focuses on the fascinating computational problem rather than the politics.

Reducible's visual walkthrough of the Fast Fourier Transform, motivated by polynomial multiplication. It shows how the FFT's key ideas can be discovered by asking the right questions.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

A walkthrough of the Quake III fast inverse square root, explaining where the constant 0x5f3759df comes from. It covers IEEE 754 floats, the bit hack that approximates a logarithm, and a Newton's method refinement.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG explains why people feel unmotivated and unable to start tasks after hours of YouTube or similar distractions. He frames it as a result of how social media is designed to capture attention, and says not to blame yourself.

Veritasium tells the story of the Fast Fourier Transform, from its use in detecting nuclear tests to Cold War politics, and how it could have changed the arms race. It includes a short, intuitive explanation of what the Fourier transform does.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

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.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.