Does it work if you enable VRR via xorg config?
Which xorg driver are/were you using, amdgpu or modesetting?
Then for a day and a half after I was working on that spreadsheet, it showed up at the top of the suggested videos.
Again, which applications had access to your clipboard and user files at that time? If any of the applications running on your computer was stealing your data and selling it for financial gain, Google would likely be buying it and obviously using it against you.
You also have to consider side-channels. Were you or your friends talking about that spreadsheet project via Discord or some other known abuser? Did you talk about it with a person in your room while daddy Google or Amazon were listening? (Alexa in the room, Google assistant on your phone etc.)
in short: years of nothing, nothing, nothing, TWO DAYS OF TRANS VIDEO SUGGESTIONS, and then since, nothing, nothing, nothing.
This might simply be expectation bias. You may have been shown such suggestions in the same pattern before and simply didn't notice because, contrary to the present, the topic wasn't on your mind and simply forgot about it because you're being shown irrelevant suggested topics all the time.
Even after reading a lot of people telling me that it is just The Algo^TM^ at work, that incident seems so razor specific to activity I was simply doing on my computer at the same time Youtube was open rather than anything that could be related to my personal interests.
That's how "The Algo^TM^" works. Google gathers data on you directly through its applications, from 3rd parties selling data they stole from you and indirectly through the same process from people you associate with.
It's even possible that some data broker simply made up the fact that you're trans. Google could have then assumed it's true because you associate with trans people here. I could very well see that happen in an enshittified system such as Google.
internet chromesplorer
I'm stealing that.
Edge is so privileged you can't remove it... well, you kinda just can't remove it..
That will have to change with the DMA becuase otherwise M$ will get ...a really big slap on the wrist or something.
This reads like a phrase from Half as Interesting.
And a ton of historical content.
It's too early to tell; you must investigate further.
The process for this is that you want to set your prefix to the /boot partition in the (hd1, gpt1) syntax (use ls) and then load the "normal" module. From then on, you should have regular GRUB again and should be able to boot your OS to properly fix GRUB.
Typing anything in another window that is not my browser
Which windows exactly? The apps you're typing things into might be spying on you.
M$ and their 738 parters really value your privacy, so if you're typing things into Excel...
copypasting the words "trans" and "talking"
What applications were running on your computer while you did this? Any of them could be recording clipboard history; it requires no special privilege.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Windows itself was recording this and sent it to daddy M$ to train LLMs and maybe sell it as a little multi-billion side hustle.
transgender videos about "How to change your voice" start popping up in my feed. Please know I have zero interest in transgender politics/culture/anything, it is not something I have ever searched for or engaged in online.
Maybe Google knows something you don't? JK.
A more plausible explanation is that Google knows that you're in the Fediverse (ever Googled it?) which has a far above average concentration of queer people.
What is also plausible is that someone living with you (i.e. your family) or a friend is trans and you're obviously associated with them.
Google doesn't recommend queer content because they think you're queer but because it's what their data-defined statistical algorithms (""AI"") predicts you are likely to be interested in and therefore watch ads for. If you know a queer person or are often in contact with them, you are simply quite a bit more likely to be interested in queer people than the average and therefore more likely to click on queer content.
Possible that Youtube is reading my clipboard? Reading my keystrokes?
Youtube itself? Near impossible.
Other applications? Possible but likelihood unknown.
Listening to an album via VLC, while Youtube is open in my browser. Suddenly, more tracks from that album start showing up in my suggested feed. Possible Youtube is reading the titles of other apps current open on my machine? (VLC changes its active title to the name of whatever file is currently open)
Again, Youtube itself directly isn't doing anything like this. If that album is related to what you were listening to on YT or is even simply also popular with people who listed to the same things on YT as you do or are just generally similar to your person; that's all it takes for YT to attempt to show it to you.
Also note again that any application on your Windows or Linux PC can read the window titles of any other application or even simply scan your media library or other files.
Discord does this for instance for their rich presence function for instance and I would again not be surprised if there was a little multi-billion side-hustle going on.
I use Youtube all the time as my personal version of Spotify.
If you're not reliant on YT's recommendations, I'd recommend you to download the songs you want to listen to and listen to them on a local player.
XZ is a slog to compress and decompress but compresses a bit smaller than zstd.
zstd is quite quick to compress, very quick to decompress, scales to many cores (vanilla xz is single-core only) and scales a lot further in the quicker end of the compression speed <-> file size trade-off spectrum while using the same format.
I don't like the Piped bot at all.
What should be posted on the internet should be the canonical source of some content, not a proxy for it. If users prefer a proxy, they should configure their clients to redirect to the proxy. Piped instances come and go and the entire project is at the mercy of Google tolerating it/not taking action against it, so it could be gone tomorrow.
I use piped myself. I have client-side configurations which simply redirects all Youtube links to my piped instance. No need for any bots here.
Monitor I/O on the drive; is anything using it while your system is idle?
What's I/O like when loading an album?