Sad that this is true, though. It's "dated" not because mp3 format is dated, but because people no longer maintain their own music collection - outsourcing it instead to legit (e.g. Spotify) and illicit (e.g. YouTube) SaaS businesses. Which do not guarantee you that the song you bookmark today will be there the next year (as I myself experienced many times on both Spotify and YouTube) - but I guess songs get missing randomly and slowly enough that people don't notice.

The point of it is to discuss handling and parsing binary data. You could replace it with any binary format you want and have similar pedagogic value. FLAC, Vorbis, h.264, Matroska, etc.

Yes, that's a good point. Many binary file formats will also be quite complex, so it makes sense to restrict oneself to a useful subset of the data in a file. Otherwise one would be busy to explain complicated data representation specifics.

Another example could metadata in image (jpg, ...) files for example.

I wonder what would be a great replacement topic nowadays. Ruby on Rails era was the blog in 5 minutes. What is "the project" now?

For front-end the community seems to have landed todo lists as "the project".

Todo lists lack so much basic app functionality. They are only low-hanging fruit for a common article pattern.

Building a data pipeline? Some kind of CV problem? Async chat server?

async IRC with ring buffers was one of my last school C project. It was really interesting and straightforward, and despite its "obviousness", it still made me understand better some C and unix key principles. I think it's a great idea for discovering a new language.

The chat bot?

Blockchain in five minutes?

Chat bots have been in Lisp textbooks since 1960s, kinda dated too!