June 18, 2026
Nature is healing... into a database
Flip TABLE: storing arbitrary data in iNaturalist
A coder turned a wildlife app into a chaotic to-do list, and the internet is losing it
TLDR: A developer turned a wildlife logging app into a working to-do list by hiding information inside species observations. People loved the absurd creativity, but the comments also erupted with the usual fight: brilliant hack or deeply cursed example of tech gone feral?
The internet has officially found its new favorite "because we can" project: a developer used iNaturalist — an app people normally use to log plants, bugs, and birds — as a place to hide a working to-do list. Yes, really. By picking specific wildlife observations and stuffing them into a project, the demo app YouDidIt.Bio turns nature sightings into data storage. The crowd reaction was immediate: half the room shouted "this is genius", while the other half looked like they had just watched someone make soup in a coffee maker.
The strongest opinions were gloriously split. Fans loved the sheer chaos of it, calling it "beautiful," "cursed," and exactly the sort of weird internet creativity they miss. Critics, meanwhile, rolled in with the classic "just because you can doesn’t mean you should" energy, joking that every harmless app eventually becomes a database if you squint hard enough. The biggest mini-drama came from the app’s delightfully awkward workaround: when a task is marked done, it doesn’t always change from "f" to "t" like a normal person would expect — sometimes it becomes "T" or basically anything else that means "close enough." Commenters absolutely feasted on that, with jokes about computers achieving enlightenment and to-do lists evolving into new species.
The meme energy was strong: people compared it to hiding secrets in birdwatching, making spreadsheets out of moss, and "storing my taxes in raccoons." In other words, the article explained the trick, but the comments made the real point crystal clear: the community is obsessed with weird tech stunts that are equal parts clever, ridiculous, and a tiny bit upsetting.
Key Points
- •The article describes YouDidIt.Bio, a demo app that stores arbitrary data in iNaturalist using observation IDs in a classic project.
- •The technical challenge is that iNaturalist project observations are effectively an unordered set, so encoded data must be recoverable without relying on API ordering.
- •The encoding scheme divides integers into sequence bits and value bits, allowing data values to be reconstructed in the correct order during decoding.
- •Some observation IDs cannot be used because they are deleted or cannot be added to projects, so the app skips unavailable IDs by advancing the sequence counter.
- •To mark tasks complete, the app treats any value other than `f` as true and searches for an alternative usable observation ID if the exact `t` value is unavailable.