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.
