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

I found this good video by Trace Dominguez. He gives a good overview and also mentions a bunch of new studies that are being done https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpjGLLbWZJ0

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

This truly is the internet of old. Gen Z cower before the might of the old gods

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.

Something I never seem to hear explained: What IS long COVID. Is it damage to lungs, is it a change in the behavior of the immune system, is it something that happens in the cells? Where in the body is it hiding? Is this something we just don’t know yet?

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.

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 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

The thing I worry about whenever someone mentions this angle: What about Lemmy content? As the community moves away from the commercial platforms in favor of Lemmy, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. Then does that lower the legal barrier for AI companies to train on all this content for free? Is that shift in the legal vulnerability of public content something that users consider? Is that desirable to most users? Are people thinking about that?

When the main servers get hit hard (such as lemmy.ml), will users and/or communities using other servers be less impacted by the wave? Or will the wave hitting the popular servers be a problem for everyone?

Will federation save us to some extent?