“I’ve seen it first-hand” isn’t significant evidence because the frequency illusion effect is a thing. If you see dozens of ads a day and ignore them unless you notice them matching something you talked about, you’ll end up thinking ads can track what you talk about whether or not it’s true.

I wouldn’t say I “like” the idea, since it’s one of the most doomed ways for a universe to be, but Greg Egan’s Arrows of Time is a good exploration of this idea.

One can justify it however they like but it’s going to end up making the experience worse for competent users anyway. Much like this Android 12 security change that made it permanently more annoying to manipulate files.

“The crusades are an example of capitalist oppression” sure is a hot take.

I can’t tell if this is a joke or real code

Yes.

Will that repo seriously run until it finds where that is in pi?

Sure. It’ll take a very long while though. We can estimate roughly how long - encoded as ASCII and translated to hex your sentence looks like 54686520636174206973206261636b. That’s 30 hexadecimal digits. So very roughly, one of each 16^30 30-digit sequences will match this one. So on average, you’d need to look about 16^30 * 30 ≈ 4e37 digits into π to find a sequence matching this one. For comparison, something on the order of 1e15 digits of pi were ever calculated.

so you can look it up quickly?

Not very quickly, it’s still n log n time. More importantly, information theory is ruthless: there exist no compression algorithms that have on average a >1 compression coefficient for arbitrary data. So if you tried to use π as compression, the offsets you get would on average be larger than the data you are compressing. For example, your data here can be written written as 30 hexadecimal digits, but the offset into pi would be on the order of 4e37, which takes ~90 hexadecimal digits to write down.

You generate it when needed, using one of the known sequences that converges to π. As a simple example, the pi() recipe here shows how to compute π to arbitrary precision. For an application like pifs you can do even better and use the BBP formula which lets you directly calculate a specific hexadecimal digit of π.

Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.

Have you considered just not watching shortform video like tiktoks and youtube shorts?

How did you notice that?

People have already said how to fix this, but I’ll add this different piece of advice: start using FreeTube.

If you actually read the article, this is just a normal-ish (although peer-to-peer, which is interesting) free VPN, it isn’t actually oriented towards cheating. The funniest part is that if the article is to be believed, the “cheating” consists of simply increasing your ping. Which… you don’t really need a VPN for.

I know this is a joke, but in the interests of pedantry, lemmynsfw.com, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works are all bigger than lemmy.ml.