Tagged “explainer”
63 pages · most loved first · page 2 of 3
H.264 is Magic
A readable walkthrough of how video compression in H.264 works, from frame differences to motion vectors, explaining why…
How Bayesian Inference Works
A friendly illustrated explainer of Bayesian inference that walks through priors, likelihoods and posteriors with simple…
How Browsers Work
An interactive guide explaining how web browsers work, stepping through what happens between typing an address and seein…
How Did I Get Here?
A live traceroute that shows the actual network path from your device to the server, paired with a friendly explanation…
How Distortion Works in Music
An explainer on guitar distortion with animated waveform plots and playable audio clips, showing how clipping a clean si…
How DNS Works
A charming comic strip that explains step by step what happens when you type a website address and press enter.
How Do MRI Headphones Work?
A curious patient wonders how audio can reach your ears inside an MRI scanner full of huge magnets, and works out the cl…
How HTTPS Works
A comic that follows Certificat as she explains why HTTPS matters and how certificates and encryption work together, in…
How Passive Radar Works
An illustrated explainer of passive radar, which detects aircraft by listening to reflections of existing FM and TV broa…
How To Make A CPU
A picture-driven walkthrough of how a CPU is built from basic logic, starting with simple parts and working up to a mach…
Inkwash
A browser watercolor sketching app paired with a clear write-up of how it works, so you can paint digitally and learn wh…
JPEG Compression
A clear illustrated guide to how JPEG works, from exploiting human visual perception to the change of basis, quantizatio…
Kalman Filter Explained Simply
A picture-driven walkthrough of the Kalman filter that explains how it blends noisy measurements with predictions, using…
Lambda Calculus
An illustrated explanation of lambda calculus, Alonzo Church's 1936 model of computation, showing how functions and vari…
Modern Microprocessors - A 90-Minute Guide
A fast-paced, well-illustrated introduction to how modern processors work, covering pipelining, superscalar execution, c…
Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
A long illustrated explainer on how electricity, light and radio carry data across independent networks, built up step b…
Off World Backup
A tongue-in-cheek pitch for saving your files off-world before the apocalypse, paired with a clear explainer of how data…
Putting the You in CPU
A free illustrated mini-book explaining what actually happens inside a CPU and operating system when you run a program.
Scroll to a Billion
How big is a billion? Start scrolling a seemingly endless page of dots and comparisons to feel the true size of a billio…
State Machines - Basics of Computer Science
A friendly illustrated explainer of state machines, walking from simple diagrams through finite automata, regular expres…
The Animated Elliptic Curve
An animated visual explainer of elliptic curve cryptography, building from point addition on a curve to the Curve25519 k…
The Illustrated TLS Connection
A byte-by-byte illustrated walkthrough of a real TLS handshake, with color-coded fields explaining what every part of th…
The Internet from Rocks
A long, friendly explainer that builds the whole stack from sand and transistors up through logic gates, CPUs, operating…
Transformers from Scratch
A patient, jargon-light walkthrough of how transformer models work, building the idea from simple pieces up to attention…
Stumble onto more like this
One click takes you to a page you didn't know you were looking for. Rate it and the next one lands closer to your taste.
Add to Browser — it's freeWorks in Chrome, Edge and Brave. No account needed.