> Tesla is probably at greatest risk here, having recently ditched physical stalks that instead move the turn signal functions to haptic buttons on the steering wheel.
I hate to break it to the article writer, but a haptic button on the steering wheel, while absolutely not easy to use, is a physical control.
This is my wife. She purchased a bunch of USB-A to USB-c cables off Amazon and wonders why her laptop runs out of power while plugged in - it's because the laptop needs 25-30 watts and those cables can only put out 5 watts because they're limited by the USB-A port.
USB-c PD is such a dumpster fire of a standard. Even with supposedly high end cables like Anker you often can't charge a Macbook Pro faster than it can drain it's own battery under load. We can't expect normal people to understand why there are a dozen different cable types that all have the same tip but charge at vastly different rates...
That's true of all things that don't respect standards, not a PD issue. If you buy a wheel and it's not up to spec it'll crack. If you buy a power cable and it has a type-c on one end and a 110/220v plug on the other, that's not going to work well either.
Compliant being the keyword there. Are you saying all of the crappy cheap low-end USB-C cables you find on Amazon are fully compliant? You have to put an effort to find brands that are actually legitimate, and pay more for that. Hence the vast majority of people probably won’t successfully do so. Standards compliance is theoretical in the real world that involves cheap crap from Amazon.
Anyway the GP post is referring to a USB A to C cable and an old-fashioned USB A wall charger, many of which barely output a single watt. My family members have had similar problems due to similar confusion.
As long as the cable isn't completely broken and has wires that actually conduct the current, you're getting 60W over USB-C PD. It's 100% passive. Compliance means "it connects one end with another without causing fire", it only gets more complex at more than 60W.
If it doesn't have the wires inside, you've been scammed into buying a piece of junk that merely looks like a USB cable.
When using a USB-A charger, you're guaranteed* at least 2.5W, and the charging standard (BC 1.2) goes up to 7.5W (though usually you can go higher with proprietary protocols, such as QC, or even PD 1.0, although it's very rare for something to support PD 1.0 and pretty common to support QC or Apple signaling). Sure, you won't be able to charge a laptop from a USB-A port, but it's not a hard thing to grasp.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
* You could probably find some chargers that do less than 500mA, but you'd have to search among 20 years old ones at this point and they wouldn't really work with anything modern anyway, PD or not. The hard requirement is that a port has to provide at least 100mA, but that's only relevant to data ports that can do USB enumeration - for charging-only ports, everything assumes at least 500mA, and it would be really hard to find something with less than 1A or even 1.5A (7.5W) these days. Of course, if you try hard you can find any kind of weird stuff out there - I've got a water fountain for cats with power adapter that has a USB-A port providing 9V, so connecting anything else to it may make it release its magic smoke - but that's hardly a problem with USB itself.
Every conforming cable supports 3 amps and 20 volts.
If you think something's incorrect with that, be specific. But the spec is pretty clear.
The exact details of the faster cables are murky because there's old and new versions of that section of the spec, but very few devices use enough power to care about that.
USB-C spec is not very clear. And even in cases where it is clear. It’s not followed. There’s so many bad cables around. Cables that work on 1 device but not another, cables which do data and not PD, cables that do PD and not data, USB-C has the nicest plug with the worst experience.
The power handling of a basic cable is very clear.
If something breaks that, it doesn't make sense to blame USB. Whatever the manufacturer was doing, it was such a mess that it would fail with any other standard.
Supporting data and PD is just three tiny wires, it's not hard.
In this particular context, a "non-conforming" cable would cause troubles by starting fire or dropping voltage below usable range, not by limiting charging current. The only sane thing to do with such cables is to throw them away.
Really, we're talking about physically broken cables here. As long as there's electrical connection, there's no other way for a cable to not work at 3A/60W with USB PD. Its cable requirements only start when you want to go higher than that - and 60W is plenty of power already.
> We can't expect normal people to understand why there are a dozen different cable types that all have the same tip but charge at vastly different rates
Is the part of the GP comment I was responding to. The connectors form part of the standard. There’s no way to identify a standards-conforming cable from a non-standards-conforming cable by looking at it. They all look the same.
You plug in an HDMI cable, it either works, or it doesn’t. It might only work at specific resolutions, but you get immediate feedback when it’s working or when it’s not, at whatever resolution you try.
You plug in a USB-C cable, you might get a quick charge. You might not. Unless you have a USB-C power meter, you have no way to tell unless you know how quickly your device should charge in 5, 10 or 15 minutes, and hang around to wait and see if it does or not.
I recently discovered that I can use my iPad and MacBook charging brick to test PD of a usb cable. If it’s low wattage, the charging brick will not provide any power to the iPad. High wattage and it will.
It is a bit curious that you immediately jump to PD being a dumpster fire instead of the much more immediate "apple is a dumpster fire and incompatible just to be obnoxious".
This is because you are using SQL Server. Microsoft has intentionally made cloud pricing for SQL server prohibitively expensive for non-Azure cloud workloads by requiring per-core licensing that is extremely punitive for the way EC2 and RDS is architected. This has the effect of making RDS vastly more expensive than running the same workload on bare metal or Azure.
Frankly, this is anti-competitive, and the FTC should look into it, however, Microsoft has been anti-competitive and customer hostile for decades, so if you're still using their products, you must have accepted the abuse already.
I disagree about the F1000's having a highly competent CTO office team. Much less unlimited HC and budget.
Earlier in my career I worked my way up from Linux sysadmin to Enterprise architect and designed a private vSphere/vCAC private cloud (100K+ ESXi hosts, 12PB SAN, US east/west, Canada, EU) for a F15 company and the level of incompetence I saw in tech leadership from the CTO office down was staggering.
Most CTO leadership in the F1000 has determined long ago that kingdom building and protecting headcount is their top priority, so they don't want things to be too efficient. They have to protect their 300 Windows admin HC and 100 Linux admin HC at all costs, so if you give their customers (the line of business unit managers and developers) an API that lets them provision a virtual server in minutes and might automate away the job of 80% of those Windows admins who were doing manual builds, they will slow it down to the point that it is just as slow as the old 6 month long manual provisioning process.
I watched this play out first hand. On my small team we designed a private cloud that could give you a Linux/Windows server in ~20 minutes with as much storage as you wanted, and it was so effective at stealing internal customers that the VPs who managed the server build/run teams made sure to break it apart into their separate storage, compute, and database silos so that the provisioning process got slow again. It still takes them 6 months and a project manager to provision a single server now.
These dinosaurs don't want change. They want to kingdom build and make sure they have hundreds of dead weight server admins so that when they get forced to cut due to budget reductions they won't get cut too deep. They could care less about the bottom line, and the CEO and executive leadership don't know they're being gaslit by their CTO office on down about the "dangers of public cloud."
Who was the gun nut in your fantasy? All I read was guys shooting and not wearing protection, something any 'gun nut' would know and preach. Seems you are inserting your own, unfounded, bias.
Germany is irrelevant to the story at hand, but I find it extremely rich how since Covid many younger workers now feel entitled to a paycheck and full-time employment benefits even if they refuse to show up at work as requested or actually get any productive work done, whether in-person or remote.
Workers who have entered the workforce in the last few years, especially technology workers, seem to have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of.
I hate to break it to those of you in this camp, but life is hard. You have to go to work to make money and build a career for yourself. Your manager will probably ask you to come into the office at a location that is inconvenient for you and involves hours of weekly commuting time, and you'll have to decide whether you'll sacrifice your commute time for a paycheck and a chance at building your future career.
When we eventually get a recession (it will inevitably happen, sooner or later) these workers are going to have the rudest awakening ever when they discover that yes, you actually do have to work for money, and no, your manager is not required to pay you or keep you employed if you directly disobey an order like "please come into the office 3 days a week."
Man, these kids today, huh? Expecting to be able to use PERSONAL computers instead of punch cards. They're lucky they have computers at all. If their managers tell 'em to use slide rules, they should feel privileged, I tell you what. And can you believe that they're not wearing ties five days a week? What kind of wusses are employees today with these polo shirts? Next thing you know, they'll be expecting to own their own automobiles and to have electric lights, refrigeration and air conditioning!
Goddamn, can you BELIEVE that expectations change over time? What kind of bullshit is that?
---
I won't bother to add the sarcasm tag for the humor impaired here, but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working, the problem is not with the remote workers. Bosses can demand whatever the hell they want, sure. But if it turns out that some bosses don't demand everybody come back to the office and those companies turn out to do just fine, well, that's that vaunted market at work, baby. Expectations really do change, and it is not reasonable to assume that every "knowledge" worker has to be in the office all or even most of the time these days.
> but if you don't believe that most remote workers are actually (checks notes) working
I never said that. I'm talking about a very specific smaller group of workers: those that started their careers between 2020 and 2023 and believe they are entitled to a full-time salary and employment whether they work or not. Reality check incoming...
Doesn't each new generation of the workforce have a sense of entitlement and privilege previously unheard of? Workplace expectations change every decade; just b/c this expectation of working remote is new doesn't mean that it's irrational.
Many tech organizations genuinely do not reap the benefits of working in-office like some other fields might.
If I were an automotive design engineer, being in-person in the company's design studio would make sense; if I'm developing a highly abstracted and distributed messaging system, what office resources would I utilizing?
From my experience, in-office interactions are not necessarily more productive than online interactions. In fact, when a team has a good grasp of the remote-working tools, we, more often than not, end up communicating more succinctly and effectively.
"Life is hard," sure, but no need to make it any harder than it needs to be.
Anyone who has done software engineering on a reasonably sized "2 pizza team" would have to acknowledge that it's easier to do software engineering if you're all co-located at the same physical location in the same timezone several days a week.
The fact that we _can_ get work done remotely doesn't mean it's the most effective way for software engineers (which make up most engineering teams these days) to work.
> life is hard. You have to go to work to make money
That's certainly one approach towards living life.
Another might be:
Don't accept it when your employer decides to start tracking your every move and work for a company that values outcomes more than they do asses-in-chairs. When the eventual recession comes, the odds that it'll disrupt you in any significant way will be greatly reduced because you haven't spent the last three years worried about how to present yourself as "productive", and instead have been focused on actually getting things done.
Another reason to expatriate. The entitlement to demand vassal-like fealty from employees can encroach to become anti-personal growth to the individual. A person is more than their job, and the notion that one’s needs are subservient to career promotion is a limiting belief.
If every person instead operated a bit more like a company, rather than a vassal, they’d be a little more assertive in their negotiating of boundaries.
I don't understand why the west, including us in the US, even put up with Erdogan's regime at all. I remember when Erdogan's personal bodyguards decided to start attacking peacefully protesting US residents in Washington DC in open street violence. They didn't even get arrested (diplomatic immunity I suppose) for assaulting US residents and citizens protesting against his brutal non-democratically elected regime.
It infuriates me that this injustice was allowed to stand. Are we just going to let brutal dictators visit the US and cause open violence on our streets against peaceful demonstrators exercising their 1st amendment rights?
Probably against china or any threat as well. Turkey houses nuclear weaponry. I'd imagine its globally reaching vs only being in range of Russia, as having some redundancy between launch sites is probably good for your side of world war three.
I don't see why companies that facilitate criminal acts are not swiftly brought to legal justice. We should not be tolerating companies like NSO group in any sense. If the Israeli government wants to look the other way, we should designate NSO group a terrorist organization and start sanctioning any country that won't bring them to justice.
If Snowden and Assange can be extradited to the US and tried for crimes, executives of NSO group absolutely should as well. Lock 'em up!
Alabama is particularly egregious, and we, as a society, should keep trying to fix that, but does that mean California and New York should try to do the opposite to cancel it out? No, that would be wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say...
I think systems that fix racial inequality and lack of opportunity are generally good but agree that where they verge into potentially discriminatory themselves we need to be very careful with them and design them in a manner that prevents them from deviating from their purpose and allows us to remove them when that purpose is accomplished.
Affirmative action, as it was, deviated from the original purpose into discrimination against Asian students.
There are a few other ways in which it failed, but a lot of it was because it was a general principle rather than a narrowly tailored, well structured initiative.
I'd like to see that kind of carefully built system proposed to fix issues more, but with the political system we have I do not believe it will happen publicly.
