It's easy enough to tell someone to click on https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ, but how do you transfer that URL verbally, over a phone call or some other voice-only medium like podcasts with out resorting to an equally hard to memorize url shortener?
For podcasts the answer is to use the show-notes feature to post the URL.
For phone calls the answer is to send a text message.
If you're communicating by audio and have no textual 'side-channel' then yes things are more awkward, unless it's a simple and memorable URL (e.g. example.com).
In BTC, they have devised a way to transform the private key, to twelve words. I don't know how that technique is called or where on github it is, but there is for sure a way to for a YT url to be made into words.
You got me curious- so I looked into this. Its called BIP39[1]. I made a quick proof of concept to generate 6 word phrases from a youtube url using the same wordlist[2]
you can make an url shortener that uses short phrases; the s/key word list represents 11 bits per word, so two-word phrases like ode-beam, halo-cham, or jail-heal cover the first two million urls. in my own password generator http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords.... i use a custom '12-bit words of 5 letters or less' list which does 12 bits per word, so phrases like acute-doc, cups-forms, or crypt-swap cover your first 16 million shortened urls. these options also give you some degree of error correction
using an url shortener has the advantage that it takes you to the thing the podcast wanted to take you to instead of what a search engine chose to sell you
Do you speak this way? I notice a lot of "an" usage online which is not in line with how people speak, e.g. "an horoscope". "An url" is likewise not reflective of normal English pronunciation.
Well, twelve words can certainly be transferred verbally, even though the generated words are not that memorable.
Encoding a link to a much better memorable scheme could be done through a url service which parses a web page through an LLM, generates some tags, and creates custom routing using the tags. Rails or a more modern tool like Actix-web can do that easily.
For example i asked Llama-8B to suggest tags for this HN thread using the title and the first 2 comments, and it suggested: web, URLs, hyperlinks, online-identity, permanence, flexibility, referencing, resource-management, web-architecture.
