#how-it-works
12 articles tagged “how-it-works”.
The 4,000-Year-Old Money Trick Einstein Never Explained: A Short History of Compound Interest
The Babylonians called interest 'calves', three religions tried to ban it, Bernoulli found a universal constant inside it, and Benjamin Franklin used it to mail a fortune 200 years into the future. Th
How a Blogger and a Teenage Prodigy Gave the Whole Internet Its Writing Style: The Story of Markdown
The asterisks that bold your Slack messages, every GitHub README, your Reddit comments — they all trace back to a tiny format built in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. Here's how a language desig
How Humans Learned to Bend Time on Film — From a Galloping Horse to the Slider on Your Screen
In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge slowed time down to win a bet about whether a galloping horse could fly. Everything since — slow-motion replays, time-lapse blooms, the speed slider in your browser — descen
Why the Form Keeps Rejecting Your Signature: The Three Numbers Nobody Explains
Uploading a photo to a government portal means satisfying three completely separate numbers at once — pixels, kilobytes and DPI — and nobody explains that they're independent. Here's what each one rea
The Cutting-Room Floor: How Video Editing Went From Razor Blades to Your Browser
Dragging two handles to cut a clip feels like nothing — but it's the oldest, most powerful move in filmmaking. From slicing celluloid with a blade to non-linear editing and a browser tab, and why your
What's Really Inside a Video File — and the Strange Story of the MP3
Extracting audio from a video isn't 'converting' — it's lifting one stream out of a box. Here's what's actually inside a video file, how MP3 shrinks sound by deleting what your ears can't hear, and th
Why a Two-Hour Film Fits on Your Phone: The Clever Lie Inside Every Video
Raw 1080p video weighs 11 GB a minute, yet you stream films over a phone connection. The reason is a beautiful con: most of every video isn't really there. Inside keyframes, motion vectors, and why co
The Image Format You Can Actually Read: Why SVG Is Secretly Just Text
Open an SVG in a text editor and you can read it — angle brackets, shapes, colors in plain hex. It's not a picture, it's a recipe. Here's why that changes everything, from infinite scaling to the scri
Could Two Random UUIDs Ever Collide? The Surprising Math Behind Unique IDs
Every UUID is a bet that a random string has never existed before, anywhere, without checking with anyone. It sounds reckless — here's the staggering math that makes it one of the safest bets in compu
Why Your Photos Show Up Sideways: The Tiny Flag That Rotates Every Phone Picture
Your photo looks fine on your phone, then arrives sideways everywhere else. The culprit is one hidden number — the EXIF Orientation tag — and the clever, lazy trick phones use instead of actually turn
'Zoom… Enhance': Why You Can't Really Upscale a Photo (and What AI Actually Does)
The detective barks 'enhance' and a blur becomes a face. It's nonsense — and the reason why is a tour through pixels, interpolation, information theory, and the AI that fakes the trick convincingly en
How JPEG Quietly Throws Away Most of Your Photo (and Why You Never Notice)
Your phone photo was ten times bigger before it was saved — and most of that data was deliberately deleted. Here's the elegant mix of maths and psychology behind JPEG, what the quality slider really d