Atemu

You activated my trap card!

It's entierly based on the excellent org-mode for Emacs.

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.

And a ton of historical content.

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.

I am not. Read the context mate.

They were mentioned because a file they are the code owner of was modified in the PR.

The modifications came from another branch which you accidentally(?) merged into yours. The problem is that those commits weren't in master yet, so GH considers them to be part of the changeset of your branch. If they were in master already, GH would only consider the merge commit itself part of the change set and it does not contain any changes itself (unless you resolved a conflict).

If you had rebased atop of the other branch, you would have still had the commits of the other branch in your changeset; it'd be as if you tried to merge the other branch into master + your changes.

The thing is, you can get your cake and eat it too. Rebase your feature branches while in development and then merge them to the main branch when they're done.

Certainly better than the U.S. in that regard but I wouldn't consider Germany "resilient" either.

Note that I didn't say that you should never squash commits. You should do that but with the intention of producing a clearer history, not as a general rule eliminating any possibly useful history.

you also lose the merge-commits, which convey no valuable information of their own.

In a feature branch workflow, I do not agree. The merge commit denotes the end of a feature branch. Without it, you lose all notion of what was and wasn't part of the same feature branch.