Any conversation

good videogame music is often my coding sweet spot--no lyrics, something familiar

Occasionally silence if I forget to turn on music. Otherwise, death grips and a curated EDM playlist are on rotate. It keeps me moving fast. But also Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians albums go hard for long session, distraction-free music

Often silence, for me. I could create a (narrow) bell curve of problems where I listen to music. If I'm doing light enough work then I don't tend to listen to music, probably just out of habit - but as I approach problems of a certain complexity then I do prefer music. I just find that complexity band is narrow and past it I need to turn off the music. I would like to widen my music band. My preference is usually ambient - I like Gaussian curve and Hiroshi Yoshimura

I think short urls are still memorable and good. My phone doesn't surrogate all of my recall.

The longer the text you need to store, the bigger a QR code needs to be in order to scan reliably. Also, you might be more confident in being able to keep a short URL stable (it's already a step of indirection, so if you want to reorg your site you can just update where the short URL points to). But people don't really take care to maintain short URLs anyway, apparently.