It would make sense that eventually you could do both real-time and after-the-fact calculations depending on whether real-time communications is available. Presumably it will depend on the specific application

Mm indeed. Types to the rescue.

Are there any projects/tools that turn the types into Java-style web html documentation? If you need to know something while you’re working on a non-typescript project that could be more convenient.

The issue I see a lot in the JS ecosystem is laying out documentation like a reference guide, but then not including all parameters or functions. These types of documentation are very helpful if what you need to know is included, because they have nice friendly explanations and examples. But eventually you will run into a parameter that is mentioned on Stack Overflow, or is in a code snippet in the documentation, but then has no further explanation in the documentation, as if it doesn’t exist.

Projects where the README is the only documentation seem to suffer from this problem the most. They give examples of the most common parameters and functions, and then that’s it.

In JS this is a big issue because there may be no way to know a parameter even exists, or what values it accepts, unless it is documented.

A lot of documentation in the Java ecosystem has huge auto-generated monstrosities with absolutely no explanations. In Java this is usually not useful because that information can be found in the types. But in JS it would be incredibly useful. Unfortunately it isn’t as easy to automatically generate that type of documentation for JS.

Python in my experience has the best of both worlds. It has the friendly explanations and examples. But also has all of the parameters, even if explanations for some are a bit less detailed. And all of that is combined into a single place.

Indeed. It seems this wouldn’t be useful for applications where real-time position is needed. You would most likely do the calculation at a later time like in the Miikshi video. It’s a little confusing from the article, but the video actually does a good job of explaining this limitation.

I think the most amazing part about this is the video at the bottom of the article: Miikshi: Cosmic Rays (4K). The caption calls it a “charming fictional animated video to explain their muon-based systems”. But I cannot emphasize enough how much this undersells it.

It’s like a weird charming mashup between Thunderbirds, Muppets and a real muon science team. You really have to just watch it.

If you had trouble understanding what the muon positioning system from the article might be used for or how it works there is a short explanation from Professor Tanaka at the end of the video.

I’ve been using Jerboa so far. It’s pretty nice. At first I was a bit sceptical because it seemed a little half baked. But it’s growing on me. Also now that I’ve used it for a while I think it’s relatively well rounded feature wise. It is quite minimal, but I think a lot of people probably like that. I think long term if other apps come up that are more similar to the existing 3rd party Reddit apps I will probably switch though.

My main issue so far is not being able to follow links to communities inside the app. I imagine this will probably be more difficult to implement than on Reddit because of federation, but hopefully apps can get that working eventually.

Also it can be difficult to add new communities from other servers even via search. Which is also a federation issue.

I also miss the features from Reddit Is Fun which let you choose which content is displayed in-app vs in a web browser. But that’s only a minor annoyance so far.

I find I am getting used to the visual style of comments. I initially didn’t like it, but it’s growing on me.

I think the metaphor is great. Calling an adult cat dead would indeed be extreme. But calling a perfectly working piece of hardware dead is also extreme. I wouldn’t call my toaster dead because the people who made it don’t make toasters anymore.

We’ve become far to accustomed in this day and age to accept that because something has software on it that it’s expiration date is decided by the company that made it. Cats don’t work like that, toasters don’t work like that, and neither should game consoles.

In practice that means modding is very important. And unfortunately many companies make that very difficult or impossible. But we should celebrate any product where that is possible, even at launch and its estore equivalent is still around.

Edit: dead cat not alive cat