Security as in cybersecurity, yes. Security as in not getting caught violating government bans, not so much - if you’re in a country where getting repressed by your government is a real possibility, it helps a lot for it to not be possible to see exactly what sites you visit. Reminder: even over HTTPS, the domain name (like lemmy.world) is normally not encrypted. Encrypted Client Hello can solve this, but it has only started being commonly used a year ago or so, and more importantly requires the host to support it.

I’m not aware of how exactly blocking works there, but if it’s similar to China and Russia, consider subscribing to a VPN provider that supports stealth proxies (e.g. Shadowsocks or VLESS); that’s harder to block.

There are minor feature differences there’s also a convenience factor: youtube-dl people for some reason stopped doing releases, so you can’t get a fresh version from pypi (only installing from github or their site). Yt-dlp is on pypi, including nightly builds.

Works much better with fzf, but even just default bash it’s useful.

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.

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?

No linux user ever leaves home without their… piss minigun??

How did you notice that?

Thunderbird definitely does have autosync nowadays. No tray icon, true, but it can send native notifications which isn’t much worse.

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