Heh, back in the early 2000s when I was busy reading up on computer history I was very surprised that a lot of Internet standard pioneers and computer science giants were still alive. Like, people from the stone age. This is such a young field.
I seriously thought John McCarthy (creator of Lisp programming language) had reached such a status of existence that he would probably never die. (sadly, he did.)
I have boatloads of MP3s and at least they can pretty much be played by all imaginable software and hardware imaginable, and since the patents have expired, there’s no reason not to support the format.
MP3s are good enough for its particular use case. Of course, newer formats are better overall and may be better suited for some applications. (Me, I’ve been an Ogg Vorbis fan for ages now. Haven’t ripped a CD in a while but should probably check out this newfangled Opus thing when I do.)
Despite him not posting, I visit his Mastodon profile from time to time. It has such a cute sea turtle banner. Glad to see that despite him being a kernel developer titan, he still spares a thought for the humble shell programmers too.