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A nearly perfect USB cable tester

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Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#161

Post by TeMPOraL »

Telaneo wrote: post #135
ben_w wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 or so years back, one of the Mac magazines had a customer support quote along these lines: "I don't understand, it says 'System Error Type 11', and no matter how many times I type 11, nothing happens!"

Now imagine if that error said 'Error 11: A memory error occurred. Your program may be faulty or misbehaving. Contact your software vendor." That's miles better than what most things provide. That one's a good example of why these things are hard. The user could have been running 5 different programs, any one of which caused this error, and MacOS can't point the finger at anyone. Not to mention that the problem could…

> The user could have been running 5 different programs, any one of which caused this error, and MacOS can't point the finger at anyone.

It's still an example why it's worth giving your users a fighting chance. MacOS may not know enough to point the finger at anyone, but the user knows what they were doing at that moment, and even if they were not paying attention, they might start now. They'll realize if something is off. Or, after 10th time they get this error, they'll connect the dots and realize it's always happening when application X is running and they try to launch Y.

Or maybe sometimes they won't. Maybe they'll form a story and maybe it'll be all bullshit, or maybe good enough. Either way, the important part is, the user retains agency in the process. Giving people information is how they can become self-sufficient users and trust technology more.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#162

Post by TeMPOraL »

ben_w wrote: post #131
lpcvoid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do feel like the industry has taken a nosedive quality wise over covid in particular. Lots of new people only in tech for the money, no deep idea about computers. But I know stories like yours from a decade past as well. A tale old as time, but compounding in recent years - IMHO.

Could be, but I think the rot I see now predates the pandemic, possibly with reactive, possibly even before then: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html

I blame it on "software eating the world" (in general) - at some point, about two decades ago, it started to become obvious to everyone that programming is the golden ticket to life - an easy desk job paying stupid amounts of money, with no barriers to entry. So very quickly the pool of students, and then employees, became dominated by people who joined in for the pay, not because of interest in technology itself.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#163

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, they very much do. But like with everything in technology, they can do fuck all about it, so they resign and maybe complain to you occasionally if you're the designated (in)voluntary tech support person for your family and friends. Regular people hate technology, both for how magical and how badly broken it is, but they've long learned they're powerless to change it - nobody listens to their complaints, and the w…

This is true of basically everything. Even trivial home maintenance people will just put up with things being broken most of the time over learning how to fix them.

[deleted]

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#164

Post by pseudohadamard »

dijit wrote: post #59

I actually purchased one of these as this article has surfaced before. It’s well worth the hype, I used it to audit all my cables (both for home and work) and it’s amazing how many thick and unwieldy cables are actually terrible for data. For example I purchased a pair of B&W Px8 S2 noise cancelling headphones, which boast a DAC if you connect via USB-C directly, the cable it came with though was thick but only rated…

There are a bunch of similar testers around that do more or less the same thing, e.g. a the ChargerLab Power-Z range or any number of dodgy third-party Amazon/Aliexpress clones. The one thing that definitely doesn't exist though outside of $1,000-and-up USB diagnostic devices is something to report on which of the 800 different ways the downstream device has screwed things up, including failing a basic cut-and-paste of pullup resistors from the spec coughRaspberryPicough.

After the publicity a few years ago of bad USB-C cables they've been mostly fixed, but what hasn't been fixed is the infinite number of broken downstream USB-C implementations. So your charging problems aren't due to the cable, which is most likely fine by now, but because the downstream device is telling the upstream one that it can't take more than 5V 1A. One sure way to tell the vendor has screwed up is when your USB-C device comes with an A-to-C cable to charge it.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#165

Post by pseudohadamard »

Gigachad wrote: post #3

The thing that has been bothering me for a while is that the USB spec allows for software detection of capabilities. You can read the emarker data and see the supported protocols, speeds, voltages, etc. But there is not standard for usb controllers to present this data to the OS. So it’s stuck in the low level firmware and never passed up. In theory we could have a popup box that tells you that both your computer and…

Does it matter, for anyone other than hardcore geeks? All the OS would care about is how much power can it deliver and what data speed it provides, not whether the exception handling on page 4,096, section 4(a)2.1, paragraph 4 of the spec, has been implemented.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#166

Post by rationalist »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #121
tetromino_ wrote: post #119

Attempting to access treedix.com (the advertised product) gives me > Access Denied > Sorry, you do not currently have the necessary permissions to access this site, or this site may not be available in your region. Are they geoblocking the USA from even viewing their site for some reason?

It's available on Amazon in the US.

Except that I can't even load the page to see the model name or whatever to see what specific device I should search for on Amazon. I guess I could just search the brand and wade through all the different listings.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#167

Post by pseudohadamard »

Telaneo wrote: post #113
graemep wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most users tend to ignore diagnostic information. "What did the error message say" "I don't know."

This is because error messages have historically been bad, unintelligible, un-actionable, and hard to separate from soft errors that don't actually matter. 'Segmentation fault. Core dumped.' 'Non-fatal error detected. Contact support.' 'An error occurred.' 'An illegal operation was performed.' 'Error 92: Insufficient marmalade.' 'Saving this image as a JPG will not preserve the transparency used in the image. Save an…

  This is because error messages have historically been bad, unintelligible, un-actionable, and hard to separate from soft errors that don't actually matter.
And they've only got worse: "Something went wrong". Well no shit Sherlock, I can tell something went wrong because the thing I tried to do didn't work. Possibly the single most useless error message every created, and it's everywhere. Most of the worst-case error messages in the quoted response are still better than this one.

If you ever run into a developer who thinks "something went wrong" is an appropriate error message, have them killed. Then kill their entire family and pets, burn their house down, and plough salt into the ground where it stood. Finally, put up a sign that says "The person who used to live here thought 'something went wrong' is an appropriate error message to display when something goes wrong. Take note of their current situation when you next add an error message to your software".

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#168

Post by pseudohadamard »

ben_w wrote: post #128
lpcvoid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, most programmers are not curious hackers anymore. They are 9-5 white collar workers with hobbies far outside of programming, systems, hardware, etc. It shows very much as soon as you meet one of them. But, like you said, this is true of any industry. Oh, and pointy jab: these folks are also, in my opinion/experience, the most eager to vibecode shit. Make of that what you will.

"anymore"? Over a decade ago, a coworker had a path for updating some app's files to a database, and it was taking something like 10 minutes on certain test inputs. Swore blind it couldn't be improved. By next morning's stand-up, I'd found it was doing something pointless, confirmed with the CTO that the thing it was doing was genuinely pointless and I'd not missed anything surprising, removed the pointless thing, an…

Obligatory link: https://thedailywtf.com/. It's full of stories like this.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#169

Post by pseudohadamard »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #164
dijit wrote: post #59

I actually purchased one of these as this article has surfaced before. It’s well worth the hype, I used it to audit all my cables (both for home and work) and it’s amazing how many thick and unwieldy cables are actually terrible for data. For example I purchased a pair of B&W Px8 S2 noise cancelling headphones, which boast a DAC if you connect via USB-C directly, the cable it came with though was thick but only rated…

There are a bunch of similar testers around that do more or less the same thing, e.g. a the ChargerLab Power-Z range or any number of dodgy third-party Amazon/Aliexpress clones. The one thing that definitely doesn't exist though outside of $1,000-and-up USB diagnostic devices is something to report on which of the 800 different ways the downstream device has screwed things up, including failing a basic cut-and-paste…

Just to clarify the above, I'm talking about USB-C PD, not data throughput, on re-reading it the text is a bit unclear.

Re: A nearly perfect USB cable tester

#170

Post by prism56 »

Gigachad wrote: post #3

The thing that has been bothering me for a while is that the USB spec allows for software detection of capabilities. You can read the emarker data and see the supported protocols, speeds, voltages, etc. But there is not standard for usb controllers to present this data to the OS. So it’s stuck in the low level firmware and never passed up. In theory we could have a popup box that tells you that both your computer and…

Android must have this in some form. My Pixel phone with a third-party app can show the voltage and current mode selected via the PD protocols.

Using DevCheck might show 2.2A/9V as an example.

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