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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A 1984 MSX home computer. It was the first computer I had. My grandfather gave it to me in 1985 when he upgraded to a new model. I didn’t have a lot of software for it, but it had Microsoft Basic built-in. With a lot of books from my grandfather, I learned to not only program in Basic, but Z80 assembler as well. I used that thing so much I wore out the keyboard.

    I recently picked up a matching color CRT monitor for it. I never had a color monitor for it and only hooked it up to the family TV infrequently. I saw the color monitor locally for cheap and after doing a lot of repairs and fixing it up it looks awesome. Really cool to see how good of an image my old computer could do. Still love the old black and green monitor though, that’s how I remember it.

    Computer is still running and with a big memory expansion I even have DOS 2.0 running on it. Somebody hacked FAT16 into that, so I can theoretically access 4GB of data. On a machine that only has 64kb of ram to start with.


  • I’ve bought a lot of stuff from AliExpress in the past 10 years. Including some $10.000+ purchases. There have been problems, but overal I’m happy enough with the whole thing.

    I feel everyone is trying their best to make it all work, but in the end it’s pretty complex to get something from the other side of the world to your home. Plus the language barrier can be a thing, where nobody in the chain really speaks any English. Usually the people at AliExpress, the seller and the actual people shipping the goods are pretty far apart from each other (China is a big country) and don’t always communicate the best.

    Now there are of course a lot of scammers, just like on sites like Ebay and Amazon. AliExpress really does do their best to ban the scammers and prevent them from coming back, but it’s like fighting a flood with a broom and doesn’t do much. Recognizing the scammers can be pretty hard sometimes. The trick I’ve used is to either rely on small communities of people interested in the same thing recommending a shop or simply talking to the seller. If the seller is happy to talk to you and willing to do just about anything you ask, it’s probably a scam. If they are kind of grumpy and say this is what we do take it or leave it, you’ve got a proper seller on your hands. Especially with large equipment as I’ve bought, the seller wants to talk shop about the machines all day, but if you have any special requests regarding shipping or customs, it’s a no go. They will also happily provide you a quote for a fully custom machine if you ask, with actual good prices for what it is, but still very expensive.

    If something does go wrong with your order, don’t count on AliExpress doing anything. They are just the platform provider and don’t know you or your order. They aren’t involved in any way and handle millions of orders a day. Just use the tools they provide to talk to the seller, they will often happily help you and every time my shipment got lost, they refunded or sent another. If a part broke in shipment, they shipped me a replacement. And just because the product wasn’t what you thought it was or the shipment got lost in transit or there was something else wrong, doesn’t mean the seller is a scammer. Don’t report them as one, as for small shops this can cause problems and for the larger established shops AliExpress simply ignores the reports. Usually the seller does their best to get you your stuff, but when sending something from one side of the globe to the other, shit happens. International tracking has gotten so much better the past couple of years, so it’s easier to see where it went wrong.

    AliExpress has also gotten very good with customs, they present you a price which is based on what you are going to pay. No hidden fees that get applied later in the process. They discount the product in the shopping cart with an indication of what you have to pay for customs handling and import fees. In the past this used to be a problem, where the price was too good to be true, only to turn out to be exactly that. But these days they are very good.

    So if you have patience, do your homework and be careful out there, AliExpress can be a great source for products. If you want to be a Karen and shout at someone for not delivering the crap you don’t need within 24 hours, please just go to Amazon.

    One thing to note: There is an environmental impact to buying directly from China and there’s no guarantee the products weren’t made by slaves in poor working conditions without mind for safety or the environment. So don’t go buying small crap you can get anywhere from there. Buy locally where possible and if you do order make it something big or buy a larger shipment. But this isn’t really an AliExpress thing, this applies to sites like Ebay as well as other big Chinese shops.





  • Good advice, just to add to this:

    • Comments should be part of code review, having at least two pairs of eyes on comments is crucial. Something that’s obvious to one person maybe isn’t so obvious to another. Writing good comments is as hard or harder than writing good code, so having it checked for mistakes and quality is a must
    • Comments aren’t the actual documentation and aren’t a reason not to write documentation to go along with your code. Often I see larger projects where each class and function is documented in comments, but the big picture and the how and why of the overall structure is completely missing. Remember that in the real world you often have a lot of folk that need to understand how the code works, who aren’t programmers themselves. They can’t read the code or don’t have access to the code. Writing documentation is still important.
    • Please for the love of god when you change code, check if the comments need to be updated as well. Not just around the immediate area, but also the entire file/class and related files. I’ve worked on large codebases before with a high wtf factor and having the code do something different to or even opposite the comments is a nightmare. I’d rather have no comments than wrong comments.













  • Well that would depend on the definition and what you exactly mean by untyped.

    The untyped part is usually referring to the way the programmer interacts with the language, for example not setting a type for variables and parameters. But then there is the question of is the programmer ever allowed to explicitly set the type. And further more, if the programmer explicitly set the type, does this mean the type can’t change at a later point? And another question could be, can the programmer check or enforce what type a variable or parameter is? And the question, if there is only one type of data in the language, would that be a typed or untyped language? But I would consider these to be details and all fall under the untyped umbrella, with untyped just meaning not-typed.

    Then there’s the question of the technical implementation of the language. Defining a language is one thing, actually having it run on a real system is another. Usually technical systems at some point require explicit types. Something somewhere needs instructions on how to handle the data and this usually leads to some kind of typing instructions being added along with the data. But depending on how many abstraction layers there are, this can soon become a very pedantic discussion. I feel what matters is the design, definition and intend of a language. The actual technical implementation isn’t what matters in my opinion.

    I feel like there are so many programming languages and technical systems at this point, every variation and exception exists. And if you can think of one that doesn’t exist, expect a follow up comment of somebody pointing out it does exist after all, or them having started a project to make it exist in the near future.