marzhall

Oh dank, I had no clue there was a video. Good callout, the new album was great

Because your information is what a number of services use to make money. Even before VPNs come into the equation, you're undercutting the service's ability to sell you by anonymizing yourself.

That said, as noted elsewhere here, VPNs can be used by bad actors which can get you just put on a massive block list; and in addition, VPNs can be used to circumvent regional protections such as provisions on what countries can watch what content on video streaming services, which those services also want to prevent and so can block known VPN addresses to avoid.

Every Time We Touch in my ass

Someone has calculated the first 100 Trillion digits of pi, so if I understand the equation you're suggesting they means it is possible to know if pi contains all permutations of all phone numbers.

Yep, it definitely means we're above the average chance we could find a given 10-digit number in what's been looked at so far, if we're up to 14 digits! But here's the trouble: that calculation gives the "average" chance.

In the same way you could see the number "1" more than once in pi, you could see "11" more than once in pi, and so on for all sizes of patterns, as long as they're part of a larger not-yet-seen pattern (and as long as mathematicians' as-of-yet unproven guesses about pi are accurate). So if you're unlucky, even if pi does turn out to contain all numbers, we still may not have hit exactly your number yet, because larger patterns have been ahead of it that include things that aren't your number. But the odds are in your favor as far as I know.

Does pi contain my phone number?

We can't yet answer this because we don't actually know whether or not Pi contains all permutations of all numbers. It's conjectured that it does, however.

Didn't say anything about compression.

You didn't, but "compression" using pi actually asks the same question you do, iiuc, of " How far do I have to search in order to find a thing of a given length?" And the answer is - if pi truly does contain all permutations of all numbers - probably 10^length /2 - for phone numbers, 10^10 /2, or half the length of all of the permutations of 10-digit phone numbers next to each other.

Which, coincidentally, and the reason I was aware of this, is why indexing into pi doesn't save you space on average if you're being a nerd and trying to use it for compression.

If you explore compression using pi - i.e., giving an index and a length of pi as your compression method - what you'll end up finding is that the length of the data you want to compress is about the same as the length of the index in pi your data is at.

So if you wanted to "compress" five digits by just linking to its index in pi, you would most likely need a five-digit index into pi to find the spot where pi has that number. So, you save nothing on average.

There's a good blog post that goes into this, but I'm having trouble finding it. The rough explanation I can remember is: if you have every permutation of a given length n in a row with an even distribution, then a random string you choose is likely to be in the middle of that length. Using our numbers 0-9 as our base, that puts you at index 10^n/2. Given our example of 5 digits, that's 100000/2 - 50000, itself a 5 digit number, saving us no space.

In the mean time, you can use pifs to "store" your data using similar ideas.

Y'know you jest, but when I was very young I didn't understand why all the other kids I could just call by their first name, but the girl across the street I had to call "Miss Shell"

I have a take on this that I think no one will have fun with:

In my opinion there is no moral way to keep a cat as a pet.

Allowing cats to roam as they desire results in the aforementioned ecological damage. The opposite - keeping cats locked in a few thousand feet at best for twenty-odd years of life - is cruel.

As someone who was raised in the woods with outdoor cats and couldn't imagine keeping them inside - even though we lost two as I grew up - it's a circle I just can't square. So I figure that if and when I get cats, I'll dodge the question and adopt some older cats who were already raised inside and couldn't be trusted to go outside safely anyway.

Lol, right? I can't even imagine the PDF in my mind, much less rotate it

Thank god I at least can rotate it using a computer or I'd be stuck

We had some that grew right under the faucet outside, and I'd share grab some and throw it in the tea when we were making iced tea. Tried it years later with dried leaves, it didn't compare.