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
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