“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.

Oh, the lab leak/zoonosis debate is a good thought, but I don’t think it counts as a conspiracy - if I search for news articles from before 2022 mentioning it, I immediately find, say, this BBC article from 2020 that treats lab leak seriously, so it was a mainstream-ish idea quite early on. This seems to match with my own memories, I’ve seen lab leak being discussed in 2022 and I think even earlier.

In general, though, there’s probably some good COVID-related example, even if I can’t think of one immediately (I think it’s pretty disingenuous how media demonized every prospective COVID drug, especially ivermectin - but they did turn out to be ineffective against the virus itself, and I don’t think there were any conspiracies about the drugs that ended up actually working, like Paxlovid).

Thanks, that’s a nice askreddit thread. A lot of these have the same problem though, which is that I have trouble believing (and have no idea how to find evidence, since they were well pre-internet) that these were conspiracy theories before they were revealed.

(I note now that I didn’t actually mention, in my comment, that by “was a conspiracy theory” I don’t just mean “sounds crazy” but rather “sounded crazy and there were actually people saying it”. I’m not interested in every insane thing secret agencies did (well, I am, but it’s not what the question is about), I’m interested in stuff people successfully predicted.)

I’m not sure what you mean. Arresting random intelligentsia is not a “well reasoned response” to foreign interference. And it’s also unrelated to the topic - I’m asking about conspiracy theories that were later validated, and “foreign governments are trying to sabotage us”, in Stalinist USSR, wasn’t a conspiracy theory - if anything it was the party line.

Sure, the fact the US government spies on every single citizen without warrant or cause.

Ah, that’s true, I totally forgot about Snowden. Technically I don’t think I’ve heard of there being a conspiracy about it before 2013, but it’s a good example.

Stalin wasn’t crazy nor did he overreact with his actions against ‘enemies if the state’

Very questionable phrasing (I have some Soviet ancestors who spent years felling forests for the crime of being too educated and teaching things that didn’t quite align with the party line; that’s not an ‘overreaction’ to anything, but just tyranny), but anyway, this doesn’t count - it was definitely not considered a conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union to think that foreign states were doing espionage there.

Are there any examples of something that was a conspiracy theory being validated by confidential documents later? I can’t think of any, even though secret agencies sure did do a lot of crazy stuff.

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?

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.