> Unlike many URL shorteners, this one does not need a database and can be entirely hosted on GitHub pages.
it does need a database though. it just uses someone else's database
it does need a database though. it just uses someone else's database
This is terrible and so computationally wasteful. But it's interesting to think about.
A well-known example of this is bogosort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort
In the Turing machine model of computation, algorithms that use O(1) space are theoretically equivalent to finite state machines (potentially with a very large number of states). Logarithmic space is where things start to get interesting, because it's enough to store a constant number of pointers into an arbitrarily large input.
Also, conceptually, it seems like you're not so much using pi as a database as you are using it as an encoding mechanism: turning "abc.com" into a string of numbers whose length is relative to the original string. At that point you might as well pick an easier encoding, like base64. :)