No, there really is an intrinsic orientation, at least once a cable is plugged in.
The receptacles are symmetric, but a full connection is not. The cable only connects CC through end-to-end on one of A5 or B5, but not both, which lets the DFP detect which of A5 or B5 should be CC. The one not used for CC is then used to power the e-marker in the cable, if any.
This is also true for legacy adapters; for example, for C-to-A USB 3 adapters, the host needs to know which of the two high-speed pairs to use (as USB 3 over A/B connectors only supports one lane, while C supports two).
I think that I have a specific cable-device-orientation that is broken. Meaning, I think a particular USB C cable won't charge my phone if it's plugged in 'backwards'.
I always assumed that USB C cables use different pins depending on orientation, and that some pins on the cable wore down.
My guess would be they used a one-sided pcb to connect the cable to and used half the wires. Some sockets internally link the power and ground pins, so it works both ways, but you get no resistor network and thus only standard 5v which gives you 500ma max (at best). With the resistors connected by the cable it's about 900ma to 3a which is probably what happens plugged in "correctly". Or some other magic happens on one side of the PCB to fool the charger into pushing the full 3A.
Shouldn't a compliant USB-C DFP not supply Vbus without the resistor network, though, so there should be no charging at all? (Not that all DFPs necessarily do the correct thing, of course.)
It's CC2/VCONN used for eMarker. That pin may be terminated inside the cable and used to power eMarker chip. It can also be used for orientation sensing. I think.
I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. I bought a mac and iphone a few months back because I wanted to look into iphone development and there was a lot of cursing involved.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
Yeah, as somebody who switched from Linux to Mac recently, I feel that MacOS is a nuisance. Yet it's a nuisance I can tolerate with some tweaking, when in return I get much better battery life, screen and keyboard compared to any other options provided by my company.
I know I’m pretty much repeating what the GP said, but it’s crazy how far they have strayed.
Around 20 years ago (which, on reflection, is quite a long time) I, as a developer, moved to mac, as the way it all just worked without having to wade through the weeds was unbelievably refreshing. Couldn’t be more different to the experience you describe.
I bought my last Mac over a decade ago now - I’m now back on windows, as if I’m going to be nagged in an adware UI, I may as well use the one that gets in my way less.
> I've been a software engineer for quite a number of years now. ... I bought a mac and iphone a few months back ... and there was a lot of cursing involved.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.
Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.
What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.
[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.
On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.
I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.
I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.
I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.
> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there!
I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bastardised.
I insisted on a full size Mac keyboard for nearly a decade afterwards. Then I realised that, barring the niceness of full height cursor keys, it was a useless appendix that meant I had to move my hand ~8 inches more every single time I needed the mouse/trackpad.
And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.
What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.
Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.
The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.
And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.
On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.
Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.
I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.
The keyboard issue when switching from Windows/Linux to Mac is understated. It's a pain and I think it's worse for non-english keyboards/characters. You have to use plugins/3rd party software and relearn new keys.
No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
>funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS
That "funky" command key makes it so you can copy paste into/out of a terminal with the same keyboard combo you use everywhere else. Ctrl being used to send signals to the terminal and also all over the place for different thingsin the GUI stinks.
Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa. Same as in the terminal.
Methinks you're just annoyed because it's different than what you're used to. There's nothing wrong with that, but arguing about subjective preferences as if they are objective facts is silly. There's nothing wrong with the Mac's keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and they can all be customized with a NeXTSTEP style plist placed at ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeybindings.dict (There's a default set inside of the AppKit framework bundle's Resources folder, or grab a commented copy here https://github.com/ttscoff/KeyBindings/blob/master/DefaultKe...).
Like, I'm annoyed X and thus all of desktop Linux just copied Windows' dumb keyboard combos that put everything on Ctrl, but that's hardly a reason for me to slag off the entire platform, because its minor, and I can just change them if I really wanted to.
> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.
Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.
The OS supports all of those keys still. Yeah you don't get them on a laptop keyboard but I rarely use the laptop keyboard as is, it's docked 80+% of the time for me at my desk so I have a nice full size keyboard I use.
Never missed a dedicated screenshot button though, I always just Cmd+Shift+4
Control key is easy to reach for me when it's placed in the bottom left corner instead of where it doesn't belong, beside a worse-then-useless Fn key, which is in the control key's place in the bottom left corner, which decides to make random (undocumented, even) functions of so many of the normal keys, and those normal keys don't even have labels for what the Fn key does in that combination like other keys with eg sound, brightness, etc controls.
Fn + A, for example. What the hell is that doing? It opens a fucking emoji window. Do you know how many times I've accidentally control-A to select all and then... oops no more keyboard input unless I press escape, and by the time I realize the mistake, I've already typed a bunch of other things and even more unwanted things happen.
And the control key is where the power key belongs, the command key is where the alt key belongs.
On linux I can type 120+ words/actions per minute on a bad day, around 160 on a good day. On a macbook air? I'm lucky to do an even dozen per minute because I have to slow the fuck down and soooooo many features are missing that I have to actually move a hand to the mouse to figure out a workaround.
Oh speaking of mouse, I literally detest touchpads. Apple's touchpad is not really much better despite the hype. Nothing like trying to position your cursor somewhere then try to click on something but moved the cursor off of it instead. Rinse and repeat until you finally press the touchpad in just the way it likes to activate a button click without also moving the cursor off of the object I wanted to press.
I'm only just now using a Mac again after not using them since elementary school. Tucking my thumbs under the rest of my hand to press the command key is a motion I'm really not used to, while as before I was really used to using my pinky to press/hold the control key often.
I do have to say though, its nice not having to worry about situations where I need to remember some odd shortcut for something that actually supports control characters like text consoles. I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?" They're just different button presses. I get the logic these days of having those things be different keypresses than control key logic.
A lot of keyboard shortcuts I use daily now feel quite alien because of tucking my thumb under to reach the command key. And boy is it sometimes annoying having so many shortcuts using number keys in them. And the common jump between words or jump to the end or start of a line seem to be backwards in my mind (command+arrow versus option+arrow), I tend to get mixed up on those a bit right now.
The weird thing about "tucking your thumbs" is that you get used to that after a while if you mostly use Apple keyboards, and then you end up trying to do Cmd+C in Windows or Linux.
This is one case where I feel that Apple's take is genuinely more useful for largely historical reasons related to terminals, but at the same time Windows also can't change for legacy reasons of its own, and Apple ends up being this special flower that doesn't work "like most everything else" (i.e. most desktops around - which aren't majority macOS even in countries where it has strong penetration). Basically as soon as you introduce it into the equation, constantly switching back and forth becomes painful.
Its definitely already happening. I almost have to think about hitting Ctrl+C these days when I'm wanting to send a sigint as I'm hitting Ctrl much less than before.
> I never need to worry about "does ctrl+c actually copy here, or does it kill things?"
I've never had that trouble. Terminals are the only place where it's something different, for historical reasons. Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals is shift-control-click, which is easily pressed when the control key is where it belongs. Pinky on control, ring finger on shift, index finger on C.
Terminals are the most common place, I agree. I spend a lot of time in terminals, definitely more than an average user.
> Copying/pasting in well-designed terminals
This implies there are less well designed terminals.that do it otherwise, which is kind of my point. I don't think I've ever done the shortcut you mentioned. Some would copy on select, some on a click on the marked area, some other ways as well. Pasting has been a click, or shift+insert, or Ctrl+shift+v, or a few others.
On a Mac, it's command+c/command+v, everywhere. It's a shortcut that doesn't change.
I'm far from a Mac fanboy but that's a nice little thing.
So the biggest thing is the laptop keyboard layout isn't great, and not every input field is tabbable? And that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
> that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?
Prevents? No. Hinders? Absolutely.
I only have a mac because it was issued by work as a loaner while they set up my new Linux laptop. I wouldn't want to use it as a daily driver at all because I still exclusively use Linux at home, and likely would never get over the keyboard differences.
Don't forget how some of the default shortcuts can't be typed on a keyboard layout that uses alt-gr to type things like @.
How the fuck did that get past QC? KDE on Linux has a reputation of being janky, but I have never had to put up with things being actually unusable by design.
I'm worried the AI valuations bubble will collapse, pull the mag7 with it, that'll pull the us stock market with it considering they represent the vast majority of the value gain over the last years. That in turn will pull the dollar with it, even more than today. It'll make 2007 look like a picnic.
I'm worried about demographics vs retirement. I doubt retirement will be a thing for the children my generation has, I'm middle age now. I might get to retire because I've been lucky. Also related worries about the welfare state model overall.
I'm worried that Russia won't collapse quickly enough due to Chinese backing and pull us, northern europe, with it. They won't stop until someone makes them stop.
I'm worried about all the men struggling to find their place in society, the lack of constructive role models for young men and the right wing nazis happily channeling it.
I'm worried about climate change, it's basically gone of the agenda but that doesn't mean the problem has gone away. The chance of the gulf stream collapsing seems to increase for every new model they release.
The Gulf Stream is new to me. Are you doing anything to position yourself for it or any of the other stuff?
Not trying to be dismissive, really just trying to be optimistic/prepared if things go south. Ideally, someone gets inspired to build solutions to all the things that got us here.
Drone warfare seems to be where things are headed. I hope any work you or anyone else might do in defense can get people the lasting peace they deserve.
This is how I started working out regularly. "I can quit 5 min after warming up".
Five minutes after warming up I've changed, in the gym and a couple of sets in. I quit maybe 1/20 sessions, and it's shrunk more over the years since, but it was an easy way to fool my brain.
I'm guessing this is different because the main threshold is starting to do the thing. Once you've started it's much less mental effort to keep going and just do the full workout.
If people are looking for an alternative I have a ~3-4 year old Supernote a5 that's still going strong and still get updates once in a while. No subscription, cloud sync is included, mounts via usb if you want to, no faffery.
The hang up for me is the second hand market for the supernote is rough, even the old a4 and a5. People really do seem to love them.
Are you willing to part with yours haha
I used live patching of the function byte code to enforce type safety in python as an experiment. It was quite fun, took about a weekend or so :) not something for production though, due to the performance hit.
A security review was the first real eye opener for me in my Claude code use.
I opened a Claude prompt in my server folder and wrote something along the lines of "Review this codebase from a security perspective. Think deeply about the implications of the code and produce a report". Nothing advanced, very straightforward.
It was my first experiment with triggering a larger review and it was way above expectations. Found a couple of things I had missed, found some things that were on my todo list, and then I asked it to create a phased implementation plan based on that report, and then after looking over the plan too claude fixed it.
I think a larger house like she's living in makes it a lot easier to mitigate "the bad room mate" problem mentioned in a lot of comments. They likely have some filtering and process to kick someone out if they turn out weird. And recruitment is hopefully easier if you have 4 other people looking for a 5th than posting an ad somewhere.
This does seem like a potential solution for the male loneliness epidemic. I think it would be harder to check out if you're around other people. Their house seems _very_ women-styled with cooking dance parties, twerking in the garden and the ingredients. But that's just one house, each house has their own style.
Before I met my partner I looked into communal living spaces, and if this doesn't work out I might do so again, and give it a shot. I don't think living on my own is good for me long term. I get too isolated.
Author of the post here - fwiw all the houses I've lived in have had a good gender mix, though it's true none of the men wanted to join for the hip hop dance workout. In general though the men have been the better cooks!
I wanted to note that a lot of houses I've lived in have had couples. Two of our housemates in PR were a married couple who rented out the apartment they owned to come live with us. The husband was more extroverted than the wife and loved the company - and the wife loved that we kept him entertained and she got the room to herself more often :)
All this to say I simply think it's great to live with (good) roommates, whether you're male, female, single, coupled, or anything else.
Companies report my salary to our version of the IRS, banks report my loans etc. Before I started a company my yearly tax session took about 2 minutes.
The refunds are automatically sent to the registered account, you can pay outstanding money directly online after clicking submit.
Obviously you can report additional income also on the website. For example, I report income from Github Sponsors every year so that I can pay my taxes on that. The same would apply if you got paid for something in cash, for whatever reason.
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.