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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2024

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  • Multilingual users have multiple keyboard layouts, usually switching with Alt+Shift or similar key combo. If you’re multitasking you might not realize you’re on the wrong keyboard layout. So say you’re chatting with someone in Russian, then you alt+tab to your source code and you spot a typo - you wrote my_var_xopy instead of my_var_copy. You delete the x and type in c. You forget this happened and you never realized the keyboard layout was wrong.

    That c that you typed is now actually с, Cyrillic Es.

    What do you say, is that realistic enough?








  • Okay, I’ll grant you brainfuck… As for assembly, I don’t think it’s inherently spaghetti. You can split it up into functions just like you can with an actual programming language. It’s not impossible to make structured code.

    That said, I never coded assembly outside of a mandatory university course, so I don’t feel super confident in saying that. But I don’t think of it as a programming language anyway - it’s a 1:1 translation to/from machine code, and machine code isn’t meant to make programming easy or scalable.


  • I firmly believe that every language has an equal proportion of spaghetti code to clean code. The only factor that might screw with this is how much a language is used in industry, which I’d expect raises the ratio. However, there’s plenty of hobbyists writing spaghetti code too so I don’t think even that factor has much effect.






  • Ooh, I did guess wrong! That is an interesting specimen.

    My suspicion is that they are experts in ergonomics, not in electrical engineering, so they probably aren’t aware of how silly and possibly dangerous what they did is. Or perhaps they simply don’t care because “it gets the job done”, standards and specifications be damned.

    Anyway, in this case I’m happy to be proven wrong. Thanks.


  • It makes sense, if I remember correctly the older USB cable (i.e. everything before Type-C) are passive, so as long as the pins are wired symmetrically it wouldn’t matter which side is which. But whoever made your keyboard really blundered, there is no reason in the world why anyone would do this. There’s so many options: the B connector, mini USB, micro USB. All would make sense to put in the keyboard. A just doesn’t.

    Let me guess: you got it from an ultra cheap online store? AliExpress/Wish/Temu?


  • I think the biggest problem I see with A to A is: who’s delivering power, and who’s receiving it? Maybe if you use it only with the device it came with then it’ll be fine, but if anyone tries to just hook up that cable to two random computers, it might actually cause a short circuit and fry something.

    Whereas Type-C was explicitly made to handle such situations.

    Or a shorter reason: Type-C cable is allowed by the spec while Type-A is not.