It seems like it’s alive again. You saved it OP!

Memes of the past!? Isn’t this meme like 4 years old. I feel old now

Including a Cessna apparently (if you don’t get that reference you should definitely Google it)

This is bizarre. Snap has improved a tiny bit over time, but it continues to not be that great. Meanwhile, flatpak is miles ahead. Things are generally just smoother and less annoying, even when Snap is working as intended.

Personal anecdote: I was having no end of trouble with Inkscape, it was just not working, very unreliable, all sorts of very odd issues. It got worse and worse over time to the point where it didn’t even seem to understand paths to open files anymore, if it even felt like opening that day. I tried reinstalling, clearing the config, all sorts of things. I suspected maybe the version of Inkscape Snap was giving me might have a bug in it so I was looking around for alternative ways to install an older version and then for some reason I tried Flatpak. It was like some kind of magic. Totally night and day. All of a sudden Inkscape had absolutely none of the issues that the Snap version had. It just worked. After that I realized that it hadn’t been a bug in that version of Inkscape at all, it was just Snap.

I haven’t had any issues with any other Snaps, but that incident really opened my eyes to just how bad things can get if a program isn’t packaged correctly.

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

Yeah Android CAN run the app if you have the APK. But also the play store won’t let you if the dev hasn’t updated the app in a couple of years. Older games are especially bad.

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 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