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A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

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Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#51

Post by madethemcry »

Content wise a nice idea, but I also like the conclusion about how AI made this possible in the first place. The author itself mentions this motivation. AI is undoubtedly perfect for utilities, small (even company internal) tools for personal use where maintainability is secondary as you can ditch the tool or rebuild it quickly.

> Two years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with the rewrite, let alone creating the script in the first place. The friction was too high. Now, small utility scripts like this are almost free to build.

> That’s the real story. Not the script, but how AI changes the calculus of what’s worth our time.

Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#54

Post by NelsonMinar »

lsusb will get you this info in Linux, but I like the idea of a little wrapper tool to make the output easier to parse.

480 vs. 5000 Mbps is a pernicious problem. It's very easy to plug in a USB drive and it looks like it works fine and is reasonable fast. Right until you try to copy a large file to it and are wondering why it is only copying 50MBytes/second.

It doesn't help that the world is awash in crappy charging A-to-C cables. I finally just throw me all away.

Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#55

Post by shepherdjerred »

bediger4000 wrote: post #4

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with the rewrite, let alone creating the script in the first place. The friction was too high. Now, small utility scripts like this are almost free to build. This aligns with the hypothesis that we should see and lots lots of "personalized" or single purpose software if vibe coding works. This particular project is one example. Are there a ton more out there?

I spend an embarrassing amount of time on my homelab with Cursor

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab

Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#56

Post by lxgr »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #54

lsusb will get you this info in Linux, but I like the idea of a little wrapper tool to make the output easier to parse. 480 vs. 5000 Mbps is a pernicious problem. It's very easy to plug in a USB drive and it looks like it works fine and is reasonable fast. Right until you try to copy a large file to it and are wondering why it is only copying 50MBytes/second. It doesn't help that the world is awash in crappy charging…

I remember hearing it’s even possible to plug in a USB-A plug too slowly, making the legacy pins make contact first, which results in a 480 Mbps connection – despite the cable, the host, and the device all supporting superspeed!

Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#58

Post by Tepix »

Why does it mention USB 3.2 (i.e. 20 Gbps) at all if it's for Macs? I thought Macs only support 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps, but nothing inbetween?

(which is inconvenient because USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps external SSD cases are much cheaper than USB 4 cases for now).

Also, he is calling a binary a script, which i find suspicious. This task looks like it should have been a script.

Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad

#59

Post by lloeki »

lxgr wrote: post #56
NelsonMinar wrote: post #54

lsusb will get you this info in Linux, but I like the idea of a little wrapper tool to make the output easier to parse. 480 vs. 5000 Mbps is a pernicious problem. It's very easy to plug in a USB drive and it looks like it works fine and is reasonable fast. Right until you try to copy a large file to it and are wondering why it is only copying 50MBytes/second. It doesn't help that the world is awash in crappy charging…

I remember hearing it’s even possible to plug in a USB-A plug too slowly, making the legacy pins make contact first, which results in a 480 Mbps connection – despite the cable, the host, and the device all supporting superspeed!

Can confirm, was victim of this.

Couldn't figure out why my 5-disk USB enclosure was so ungodly slow. Quickly I saw that it was capping suspiciously close to some ~40MB/s constant, so 480Mbps.

lsusb -v confirmed. As it happened I did some maintenance and had to unplug the whole bay.

Since the port was nearly tucked against a wall I had to find the port by touch and insert somewhat slowly in steps (brush finger/cable tip to find port, insert tip at an angle, set straight, push in) but once in place it was easy to unplug and insert fast...

This was driving me "vanilla ice cream breaks car" nuts...

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