I feel like I get the *idea* behind SHA256 but holding it all in your mind at once - correctly writing out the entire algorithm, for example - is so friggin hard.

does anybody know of any resources that help explain either i) the intuition behind these *kind* of operations, without getting bogged down in exactly which are used, or, relatedly, ii) why certain constants and variables were chosen and what effect they have over other, seemingly arbitrary, candidates?

I feel like what would be really cool, and would tie together a lot of this, would be a split screen video with 3 sections in which 2 very similar inputs - say, with 1 character difference - are run through the algorithm at the same time, and the third section shows what operation is happening at that moment.

that way you’d be able to “watch” the “scrambling” and get a better visual intuition for the mechanics rather than just believing it has certain properties.

I wanna be able to explain *why* it has those properties. Currently I only feel like I kinda can …