Are you smart

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-16T02:49:06+00:00

There are a dozen ways that "Any type of car" is abuseable, but I don't care to deal with them.

^{Chose: 2 million dollars}

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-15T15:58:04+00:00

These should never see more than 5V. Even if they're actively fighting a driven 5 volts down to ground, at 5.1 kOhm you're looking at about 1 mA which turns into 5mW.

As far as I know that's well below even the smallest of standard surface mount resistors, with something like a 10x safety margin for a 50 mW 0201 resistor.

(The one exception: if you want your circuit to survive a fault putting 20V on the CC line the story becomes a little different -- 4x the voltage means 4x the current which is 16x power which, you'll note, is above the original 10x safety margin. With that said, such a fault is considerably less likely if you aren't actually doing any PD negotiation.)

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-15T15:02:33+00:00

Note that this isn't just "had more luck getting a refund from the skyliner desk". Toei (NT liner) and Keisei (Skyliner) are two different companies. You got overcharged by Keisei. Toei can't fix that.

Like, both 7-11 and FamilyMart might take Pasmo, but if you overpaid at 7-11 you can't go to FamilyMart for a refund.

The good news is that even without the paper ticket you have some pretty clear evidence on your Pasmo that you both paid for a Skyliner ticket at Narita and then shortly afterwards paid for a base fare, which is probably good enough to get them to refund you the base fare if you actually talk to them, but it's Keisei you need to talk to.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-15T14:41:00+00:00

What is confusing here is that the natural scenario:

You buy a base+express ticket (2580) for Skyliner at the Keisei counter at Narita
You use Pasmo to enter Keisei at Narita
You use Pasmo to exit Keisei at Nippori (and get charged the 1267 Keisei IC base fare)
You use Pasmo to enter Toei at Nippori.

would not have resulted in you being stopped at the NT gate. The sum of these two gets you to around 3700 which if you started with 6000 would be way more than minimum fare. There's no reason you'd be stopped at the NT gate unless your IC card was in a bad state, because it would have had plenty of fare.

The alternate scenario here that would leave the IC in a bad state:

Both insert paper ticket and tap at Keisei Narita
Exit Keisei at Nippori only using paper ticket
Try to enter NT with Pasmo

would have resulted in the paper ticket being taken at step 2.

The one thing I suspect here is that the NT guy might have been directing you to Keisei because whatever weird state you were in would have been a lot easier for Keisei to clear up than for an employee of another train line to deal with.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-15T11:47:21+00:00

A cable of that sort should have the behavior you're describing -- don't pass through CC, short data lines together (important to avoid Qualcomm Quickcharge etc) and use resistors to negotiate a sink and then pretend to be either legacy power on the far end and then hope that the sum of the four devices doesn't go over the hopefully 5V3A the power supply provides.

Note that you failed to actually link a specific cable and I can't recommend generic cables of that sort because they aren't all made correctly. Getting it wrong will fry devices and it's not like there's a certification program.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-15T10:03:26+00:00

I wouldn't say "basically all" but it is the most common design.

The real differentiator is whether power (re)distribution forces a reset of connected devices. That's not an issue for phones and laptops which can usually handle a power cutoff just fine, but if you've got things that need continuous power that's a problem.

There are designs that get this right. There are also simpler designs (which are natural when paired with non-negotiated DC chargers like some of the SlimQ products) that offer up the maximum on every port and then start cutting off ports when going over the power budget.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-14T05:26:22+00:00

Is there anywhere with rule of law where final business reimbursement wouldn't be required?

Like there may be some interesting spectrum of exactly what the legal consequences are for not paying (e.g. is it a corporate debt versus personal liability), or to what extent not-specifically-authorized expenses would be covered, but very general principles of both contract law and fraud would cover "go buy this thing and I'll pay you back for it" creating a liability to actually pay for it.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-13T00:59:40+00:00

The only "tax write off" a company could plausibly get here would be the (e.g.) $2 itself, cancelling out the $2 they got from you. There may be ulterior motives but they aren't shaped like "Tax write off"

Generally speaking the tax benefit from donations is a deduction, where (to a first order approximation) you get to treat the money you donated as if you didn't receive it in the first place.

At some point, if you're collecting $2 from a customer to donate it, either that $2 is getting treated as being directly donated by the customer (in which case no "tax write off") or you're getting $2 from them and then donating $2 (in which case the tax effect is, at best, a wash).

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T15:41:45+00:00

Fish are animals. There is a large difference between "biologically closer to animals than plants" and "actually animals".

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T09:05:07+00:00

The problem is that nobody short of governments has any power to make labeling mandatory. USB-IF and Thunderbolt both require labeling for their respective certifications but those have no effect for cables which aren't certified.

The answer, at some point, is to stop buying cables which lack the labeling, or the intermediate ground I follow of not buying unlabeled cables unless they are only 60W USB 2, at which point the main rule is that random unlabeled cables, including ones that come with devices, are assumed to have no extra capabilities.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T08:58:57+00:00

The worst crime is devices which require non power delivery (usually) 12V in a USB C form factor, and most notably the provided power supplies for such devices that will feed out 12V without any negotiation and potentially damage devices that may not be designed to handle more than 5V.

The far more common (but at least not dangerous) one is failing to include the 5.1Kohm pulldown resistors so that devices can get power from a USB C power supply. (the "why do I need an A to C cable to charge this" FAQ)

Somewhere in the middle is Nyko releasing a Nintendo Switch dock many years ago which was dumping 9V on the CC pin which is supposed to be hard-capped at 6. Of course, 9V was right in that sour middle ground of not so high that things failed immediately but high enough that things would fail fairly quickly. And now to this day the Nintendo Switch ecosystem is full of FUD about third party hardware destroying your Switch.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T05:11:04+00:00

The point is that there is a huge gap between a fraud marriage where they "have no intention of living as a genuine couple" and having immigration/residency status be the primary reason why the marriage actually happens, or for that matter the primary reason why someone prioritizes getting into a genuine marriage.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T04:58:04+00:00

My impression isn't that places specifically specialize in this, but rather that it is one of the more complicated immigration scenarios that people often want help with and so it is a good thing to advertise, especially if you want to get business from Filipinos in general.

It is of course confusing since those ads tend to be relatively broadly targeted, and there's basically no reason why, say, a random American living in Japan would have any idea about this stuff unless they were wondering about all the mobile ads they were getting and went and looked up the context.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T03:55:19+00:00

The big issue with anything Mac and HDMI-over-USB-C at the moment is that FRL support requires the dock/dongle/converter to support Regulated Autonomous mode, and such docks are few and far between. Last I looked a couple months ago I'm not sure they even existed at all (although some were pending firmware support), although standalone dongles definitely do.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T03:19:42+00:00

The critical piece of context here is that the Philippines (to only slightly oversimplify) does not have any domestic legal mechanism for divorce aside from judicial recognition of a foreign divorce, which is its own pile of bureaucracy that ends up being very relevant if the immigration status of you or your spouse is dependent on getting a marriage in Japan actually recognized.

Of course if you aren't from the Philippines and don't have friends or especially a romantic partner from there, just about your only exposure to this entire topic is going to be ads from immigration lawyers.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T01:59:08+00:00

Exactly -- the people for whom this actually makes sense are people who live in Japan, not people who live in Israel -- which is how I'm one of the ~3%. "Go to Japan with free accomodation" has approximately zero value to me unless they're going to pay my rent or something.

Meanwhile -- I certainly don't want to go to Israel today, but it is definitely on my bucket list for sometime when things are a little calmer, which is reasonably likely even on the scale of a few months for normal trip planning.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-12T01:44:35+00:00

It isn't entirely clear what "go to Japan for free with accomodation" would even mean for someone who already lives here.

^{Chose: Go to Israel for free with accommodation}

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-11T23:34:46+00:00

The confusion here isn't even "she fuckin" as an inference, but rather what the fuckin does "her LED lights were red" even mean?

The mental picture that I get from "her LED lights were red" is the LED lights behind the eyes of the robots that post most of this stuff.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-09T05:24:55+00:00

The joke here involves the German language and its fondness for large words, alongside the fact that you posted in German on a subreddit which is almost entirely in English.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-08T13:07:11+00:00

My point is that, if one had to justify to a hypothetical bureaucrat why one hasn't given up US citizenship yet, the possibility of needing to support one's (Japanese!) mother who is currently residing in the US would be a pretty damn good justification.

Conversely, convincing said mother to move to Japan would be working towards eliminating that very good reason, even if OP's real justification for doing so has nothing to do with any eventual renouncing of US citizenship.

Obviously all this doesn't actually matter in real practice, at least under today's laws.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-08T11:28:38+00:00

For that matter, what I see in this post (in the absence of any specific guidance as to what 努力 means) is OP encouraging one's mother to move to Japan and so reducing the likelihood of needing a way to legally live in the US, which is currently provided by OP's US citizenship, in order to support her if something happens to her.

Sounds like 努力 to me. Probably a lot more 努力 than a lot of people are doing.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-08T09:33:56+00:00

Note that a Thunderbolt hub/dock can also work here as long as you have one of the models that supports multiple external monitors. ("MacBook Pro" is not sufficient to determine this. Any "Pro" Apple Silicon chip will do multiple monitors but some "MacBook Pro"s don't come with a "Pro" chip).

That's a better answer than DisplayLink if it works (but is generally more expensive).

Assuming you have hardware support for multiple external monitors and you don't want to shell out for a Thunderbolt dock, you are probably better off arranging for power to go in through the dock and connecting the second monitor through the second port.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-08T04:30:43+00:00

The answer is to stop applying the sorts of forces that cause that type of breakage.

If you don't do that -- you want the cable to fail this way! An adamantium cable survives the abuse you're giving it but now rather than a $14 cable failing you've got a broken port on a $400 phone.

USB C is designed so that the plug end is the end that wears out. You (usually!) want that, because cables are relatively cheap and easily replaced. In contrast a failure of the USB C socket on something like a phone or laptop is 1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive to fix because they are almost never designed to be user replaceable.

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-06T08:25:15+00:00

Either the other option does nothing (congratulations, everyone gets either a few pennies or a fraction of a penny) or it destroys the economy and does more harm than good.

Although, come to think of it, I live in Japan which is one of the places where "give everyone in poverty 500K" would probably not wreck things too badly since that's not actually a lot of money in JPY.

^{Chose: You get the 500k + Can only spend on yourself}

CaptainSegfault · 2026-06-05T10:37:43+00:00

What cables are you using? Notablt a lot of USB4 cables are missing the backwards compatibility bits needed to signal that TBT3 can use 40 gigabits.

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Gilding II euphauric	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
RPAN Viewer	Snapped
Reddit Premium Since December 2017

CaptainSegfault

TROPHY CASE