That does make more sense, and I'll even give it to Donnie this is what he meant. But as usual, his communiques are not clearly articulated.

All files are made up of "text", or rather, numbers. How each program interprets those numbers differs depending on the kind of work they do. Any program can open any file, but the way it translates those numbers won't make any sense if the file wasn't intended to be opened by that kind of program. So, if you opened an MP4, you might see a little bit of metadata that was encoded in a way the text editor can understand, and then you'd get a ton of random symbols, some that are numbers and letters you recognize, but a lot of them would be specialized characters from farther on in the list of characters whatever font is being used might have.

Think of it this way: take two human languages that use the same writing system, like German and French. Suppose you ask a Frenchman who also speaks English to translate and write down a few specific sentences. You then take those sentences to a German who also speaks English (but not French) and ask her to translate it into English. Obviously she can't. She might be able to sound out the words, but neither of you will know what it means, and it probably wouldn't sound right to a French speaker. Or better yet, you can ask her to try and guess what each word means. She'd likely come up with mostly nonsense (minus a few cognates and loanwords). This isn't an exact analogy, but that's basically what's going on.

Get out of here with your reasonable suggestions!

It was just continuing in the finest tradition of the N64. At least the GameCube controller's was in a position reachable by human thumbs.

You ate the Parks and Rec onion...

I'll just write thousands of lines of code inside a global object... I'm sure I won't put a semicolon where a comma should be...

Yeah but they wouldn't know. It wouldn't be news.

Given that it's the SEC being asked to investigate, it's not so much that the monkeys died gruesomely, but that Musk may have lied about it.

Yeah but it's not some big mystery why Margaritaville sucks. The lyrics are asinine and empty. What's worse: it's catchy.

Hehehehehe

It's worth noting though that the shitty music of yesteryear doesn't persist in the public consciousness. When we think of music from previous generations, we're thinking about the stuff that was good enough to last (or bad enough, I suppose, if it's notably bad). So the popular music of today may seem to be dominated by shit, but you'd have to examine what else was on the airwaves of a given era to really make a good comparison.

I also think there's two major factors brought on by technological advancement and they both have a positive side. There are a lot more avenues to discover music than there have ever been. Musicians no longer have to be extremely talented and have broad appeal to reach an audience. From the listener's point of view, it's much easier to find good music that fits your particular tastes. And I think that in turn leaves more room in the mainstream avenues for lower quality but broadly appealing music.

The other factor is the accessibility of the technology to make and share music, which I think makes it easier for both "good" and "bad" music to find it's way outside of the artist's bedroom, so to speak.

It's like people overcorrecting and using "whom" when "who" really would be correct. Ditto "you and I" vs "you and me". People get corrected enough times to be embarrassed, but still don't have any interest in correct usage, so they just blanket apply what they think is the rule rather than trying to actually learn any of its nuances. It's not a perfect analogy, but I can imagine people just reverting to "African-American" as a no-thought safe bet when referring to brown people.