Levelling Up

Pseudo-Nerds who make the argument “exercise is like levelling up!” are not very good players. Not Meta.

After sleep, food, life bullshit, email, meetings, etc., you get at best 8 XP (hours) and more often just 4, per day to work on whatever skills you like.

If you spend 1-2 per day on PE, you’re wasting 12.5-25% of your potential just to multiclass as Nerd/Jock, rather than those who spend all of their XP levelling Nerd skills.

MP3 Considered Harmful

People bitching about “death of MP3” articles made me look:
NPR on MP3

Which is actually quite reasonable. I haven’t deliberately touched MP3 in a decade, because AAC sounds better in 2/3 the space (typically 256k AAC is better than 320k MP3). I keep some original rips or purchased music in FLAC, but that’s still unusably large on an iPod or iPhone.

MP3 was designed to encode “Tom’s Diner” and sounds worse the further you get from that.

The MP3 patents expired in April 2017 (maybe: with continuations and overlapping patents it’s hard to be sure), which means ideologues who don’t want to pay for software other people invented, can now use MP3 instead of the noxious OGG format which sounds like a backfiring car; they still won’t use AAC or anything else from this century. But for everyone else, it means we continue using better formats whenever possible.

Apps

It weirds me out that people say “apps” for anything except iOS or Mac programs, because their application bundles have a “.app” extension inherited from NeXTstep.

Windows programs are exes. Linux (as if anyone uses Linux) are bins or binaries. Web pages that do something are CGI or DHTML. None of those have application bundles, a coherent structure for binary and support files.

And until the iPhone got popular, only the nerdiest of Mac nerds ever said “app”. But most people can’t remember their language changing, because they have no introspection.