zero-knowledge

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

GothamChess walks through AlphaZero's famous games against Stockfish, highlighting its unusual pawn sacrifices and positional style. It is aimed at chess fans rather than ML specialists.

A 37C3 talk by Kaspersky researchers on Operation Triangulation, a zero-click iPhone attack that targeted their own colleagues. They describe capturing every stage of the chain, four zero-days and a previously unknown spyware active for years.

Tom Scott races a London black-cab driver who has memorized The Knowledge against a phone GPS across the city, comparing local expertise to navigation software.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

A 2020 video by laowhy86 arguing that the coronavirus did not originate outside China, pointing to evidence about the Wuhan institute and a possible patient zero. It cites sources in the description.

Medlife Crisis asks whether academic research should sit behind paywalls, covering publisher profit margins, unpaid reviewers, Sci-Hub and Aaron Swartz. It includes an interview with Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan.

Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic talks at [un]prompted 2026 about how adversaries could misuse current LLMs for attacks. He shows recent models finding zero-day vulnerabilities in heavily tested software, including a SQL injection in Ghost.

Fernando Rojo explains how BeatGig reached $10M in sales with one frontend engineer by sharing code between React Native and Next.js, covering navigation, animation, theming and performance.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas spends months in the virtual world Decentraland and delivers a long critique of the metaverse, NFTs and DAOs, and why virtual worlds fail as places.

Barely Sociable presents a case that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is cryptographer Adam Back. It uses interview clips and circumstantial evidence, and also touches on the block size dispute.

Coffeezilla gives a comprehensive history of Tether, the stablecoin issued by a company controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. He lays out accusations that it is not fully backed.

Lex Fridman interviews Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum, cryptocurrency and the future of money. The conversation also touches on technical topics such as quantum computing and mining.

A documentary from Swan Bitcoin exploring Bitcoin's relationship with energy, featuring Lyn Alden and others, and arguing that mining is a net positive for the environment and not wasteful.

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.

Dr Mike Pound of Computerphile shows how a modern laptop can crack Enigma, using a ciphertext-only attack based on an older paper. He compares it with the tooling in CrypTool.

A Reason TV segment, drawing on Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation, argues that Bitcoin works as an escape hatch for people living under authoritarian governments and inflating currencies.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

A long Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Austrian economist Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard. They cover Bitcoin, fiat money, anarchy and Austrian economics.

Ivan Krstic's Black Hat talk on Apple platform security, including the Find My design that uses elliptic curve key diversification to locate offline devices privately. It also covers hardware features such as the T2 chip and secure boot hardening.

The opening lecture of MIT's Blockchain and Money course taught by Gary Gensler, covering the course plan, the history of failed digital currencies, cryptography and what a blockchain is.

Coffeezilla reacts to Sam Bankman-Fried's explanation of yield farming on the Odd Lots podcast, arguing he effectively described a Ponzi scheme. The video was made well before FTX collapsed.

A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.

A FIDO Alliance demo with Google and Microsoft engineers showing passkeys working across operating systems, browsers, and devices. It walks through registering and signing in on new devices.

Computerphile video in which Mike Pound explains a University of Maryland paper on watermarking LLM output. The method biases token choices so generated text can later be detected statistically.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

A More Perfect Union report from a small Texas town next to a large Bitcoin mining facility, where residents describe constant noise and health problems. It looks at the political and corporate power behind the facility.

Tiffany Fong's phone interview with Sam Bankman-Fried shortly after FTX filed for bankruptcy. He discusses the alleged backdoor, FTT collateral, political donations, and his legal position.

A WSJ interview in which Apple's Craig Federighi explains Apple's CSAM scanning and child-safety features, including neural hashes and safety vouchers, and defends them against backlash.

A CNBC interview in which Deirdre Bosa talks with Tether's CTO and general counsel about the company's role in crypto and the future of stablecoins.

Not Just Bikes explains why cars rarely crash into buildings in the Netherlands, attributing it to street design that forgives mistakes and to systematic crash investigation. It contrasts this with North American acceptance of such crashes.

A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day gives a talk to an aerospace audience, comparing how Apollo was engineered and managed with NASA's Artemis program. He raises concerns about unresolved details, the number of launches and in-orbit fuel transfer needed to reach the Moon, and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.