They make a hardware device for this, it has several usb plugs on it, and two rows of LEDs that light up if the wires are all connected.
yes. not that expensive.
A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
71–80 of 197 posts
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#72Vibe coding. Producing code without considering how we should approach the problem. Without thinking where exactly is the problem. This is like Electron, all over again. Of course I don't have any problems with the author writing the tool, because everyone should write what the heck they want and how they want it. But seeing it gets popular tells me that people have no idea what's going on.
if the author knows what they're doing and understand the model of the code at least, i don't understand the reason mentioning that it was vibe coded. maybe declaring something is vibe coded removes part of the responsibility nowadays?
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#73Guys, please, don't upvote this. If this topic will beat the "Physics Nobel Prize 2025", I will lose my faith in HN.
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#74It's more complicated than "this cable is good/bad". I had a suspicion about one of my cables for months, but just last week I confirmed it with a device that shows the volts/amps/watts/total kwh passing through it: I have a USB-C cable with orientation. Plugged in one way it transfers about 5x more power than the other way, and in the lower orientation it's low enough for the earbud case I use it with to not charge.
Could you elaborate on "orientation"? Let's say for C-to-C, are you talking about swapping the head/tail? Or simply connecting at a different angle (180 degrees)?
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Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#75i don't understand why do competent people need to mention that they vibe coded something.
It's just because vibe coding is still "new" and various people have mixed results with it. This means that anecdotes today of either success or failure still carry some "signal".
It will take some time (maybe more than a decade) for vibe coding to be "old" and consistently correct enough where it's no longer mentioned.
Same thing happened 30 years ago with "The Information Superhighway" or "the internet". Back then, people really did say things like, "I got tomorrow's weather forecast of rain from the internet."
Why would they even need to mention the "internet" at all?!? Because it was the new thing back then and the speaker was making a point that they didn't get the weather info from the newspaper or tv news. It took some time for everybody to just say, "it's going to rain tomorrow" with no mentions of internet or smartphones.
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#76It's more complicated than "this cable is good/bad". I had a suspicion about one of my cables for months, but just last week I confirmed it with a device that shows the volts/amps/watts/total kwh passing through it: I have a USB-C cable with orientation. Plugged in one way it transfers about 5x more power than the other way, and in the lower orientation it's low enough for the earbud case I use it with to not charge.
Could you elaborate on "orientation"? Let's say for C-to-C, are you talking about swapping the head/tail? Or simply connecting at a different angle (180 degrees)?
Probably 180 degrees rotation in the plug (on either end). It commonly happens if one of the contacts or conductors for USB-PD signalling is not working correctly. (because of the way the pinout is designed to work either way around, the conductors that are used for signalling swap roles depending on the orientation)
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#77i don't understand why do competent people need to mention that they vibe coded something.
It's a disclaimer that they have no idea what they code does.
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#78It's more complicated than "this cable is good/bad". I had a suspicion about one of my cables for months, but just last week I confirmed it with a device that shows the volts/amps/watts/total kwh passing through it: I have a USB-C cable with orientation. Plugged in one way it transfers about 5x more power than the other way, and in the lower orientation it's low enough for the earbud case I use it with to not charge.
Wait what. I thought half the point of usb c was to not rely on orientation. Is there any way to check this other than experiment? My "solution" so far has been to not buy cheap cables and just hope I get quality in return.
I believe USB C cables actually do have an orientation - it's just that the negotiation both ends do usually makes that orientation irrelevant.
Maybe the negotiation can fail & the plugged in orientation is then the only one that works?
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#79Vibe coding. Producing code without considering how we should approach the problem. Without thinking where exactly is the problem. This is like Electron, all over again. Of course I don't have any problems with the author writing the tool, because everyone should write what the heck they want and how they want it. But seeing it gets popular tells me that people have no idea what's going on.
if the author knows what they're doing and understand the model of the code at least, i don't understand the reason mentioning that it was vibe coded. maybe declaring something is vibe coded removes part of the responsibility nowadays?
Someone once told me that their mistake wasn’t theirs, but rather it was ChatGPT being wrong.
I think you have a good point about why people say it was vibe coded.
It might also be because they want to join the trend -- without mentioning vibe coding, I don't think this tool would ever reach #1 on Hacker News.
Re: A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad
#80Why 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.
On a somewhat related note, I like the IO shield of my new MSI motherboard - the USB ports are tersely labeled "5G", "10G", "40G" (and a few lingering "USB 2.0").