sharksonaplane

sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

@sharksonaplane

Sharyna Tran

Sharks are cool and comfortable!

Elden Thing | Back & Body Hurts Platinugggggh Rewards Member

Profile pic and banner credits: sharkaeopteryx art by @superkiak! eggbug by eggbug! Mash-up by me!
[Alt-text for pfp: a cute sharkaeopteryx sat on the ground with legs out, wings down, jaw ajar, and hed empty, looking at eggbug and eggbug's enigmatic smile.]
[Alt-text for banner: a Spirit Halloween banner with eggbug and the sharkaeopteryx that Superkiak drew for me looking at it with inscrutable expressions]

I'm a Vietnamese cis woman born and currently living in the U.S. You may know me from Sandwich, from Twitter or Mastodon (same username), or on Twitch as Sharkaeopteryx. I do not have a Discord or Bluesky account.

Ask me about language learning/teaching, cooking/eating food, late diagnosis ADHD, and volunteer small business mentoring. Or don't, I'm not the boss of you.

I think people deserve to be young, make mistakes, and grow without being held to standards they don't know about yet and are still learning. So, if you are under 22, please don't try to strike up a friendship or get involved in discussions on my posts.

Please don't automatically assume I follow/know/co-sign someone just because I reposted something from them—sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Also, if you think being removed as a follower when we're not mutuals is a cardinal sin, please do not follow me.

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sharksonaplane
@sharksonaplane
Thew
@Thew
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

hahaha fuck usb fuck thunderbolt fuck intel

i have never used thunderbolt before, because I knew it was a joke that you couldn't rely on. i have ignored all suggestions that i should solve this problem or that one with a thunderbolt peripheral because i knew it would be a waste of my time and literally any other solution would be more sustainable. i have been fully vindicated.

Thew
@Thew

my favorite example of this

particularly the "99% of usb cables are counterfeits" bit, is trying to plug in a cintiq

so a cintiq is a pen display, right. They use a breakout box to connect displayport and USB to the computer, and to an external power supply. The breakout box connects to the cintiq using a single USB-C cable, which means that cable needs to carry

  • 4k 60hz displayport
  • HID data from the pen input
  • enough power to run the display itself

This is fully within recent-ish USB specs. You need a cable that can do 10Gbps (corresponding to "USB 3.1 Gen 2" apparently)

VIRTUALLY EVERY CABLE SOLD ANYWHERE WILL FAIL

Doesn't matter what brand, doesn't matter what the description says, doesn't matter how many 5-star reviews it has: The cintiq needs 10 gigabit usb and THE CABLE DOES NOT DO THAT

The only way to find cables that aren't fraudulent is to buy ones specifically marketed for the oculus quest, because VR headsets are the only consumer product that cannot function without an actually-real cable. THEN you can read the reviews and hope you can find one that actually works. Also they cost $20

OH YEAH ALSO

Supposedly if you have a macbook you can just plug the cintiq directly into a thunderbolt port and it'll work without a dongle. This is, again, fully standards-compliant, but as far as I'm aware this will fail on every PC motherboard ever manufactured

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

plumpan
@plumpan

old TB support being dropped on a bios update is REAL shitty. I don't think there's any TB3 firewire adapters so that just straight up kills firewire support, unless TB1/2>3 adapters fix this (doubtful). Good to know.

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UnderpaidVillain
@UnderpaidVillain

I don’t know if it’s Dell’s fault or Intel’s fault, but they are actively making their USB3 support worse with newer generations. I have a Precision 7740 for work that plugs into their dual cable dock (which is barely above trash quality on a good day), and it does mostly fine if I don’t look at it wrong.

If I plug that same dock into a Precision 7770, it loses the ability to actually put the machine to sleep. Sure, the monitors and fans turn off, but the processor doesn’t. It just sits there, getting hot with no fans running in the hopes that someone wakes the machine up before the processor causes Windows to blue screen from a thermal event.

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in reply to @Thew's post:

MisutaaAsriel
@MisutaaAsriel

It's more or less because Apple was the only one who actually cared about making Thunderbolt work.

Point & Case: I owned an AMD eGPU from Sonnet when I was still using a 2017 MacBook Pro. Plug it in to macOS, it works. Software support varied, but that's a different issue.

I dual boot the machine with Windows, because I want to play PC games.

It doesn't work. Not enough memory it says, which is absurd because this machine has 16GB and barely any of it is being touched.

Specifically, Intel, in their infinite wisdom, decided that Thunderbolt devices in their chipset driver were mapped in 32-bit address space for the particular chipset this Mac used.

Now, anything POSIX, from Linux to Mac, don't care what address space Intel says to use; they will map drivers accordingly based on the RAM available. So if you're trying to run a GPU over it, they won't care if the first 4GB is full as long as you got enough RAM elsewhere.

Windows doesn't. It trusts the hardware when it says "I can only be mapped to the first 4GB and drivers are limited to [X]GB!" like the fool it is. I had to add an EFI pre-loader to my system partition to patch the chipset to allow use of the full 16GB of RAM with external Thunderbolt devices, then hand off to the Windows bootloader.

And there's more issues like that too. Not to mention that, at least once upon a time, You couldn't add Thunderbolt to AMD & older Intel systems. Intel refused to allow the TB3 controllers to be put onto a PCIe card — Motherboard only, modern Intel chipset only. — TB3 PCIe cards were just a glorified port, and you had to hook a little extra cable up to a special port on the motherboard that connected it to its controller.

Icing on the cake is, unlike TB 1 & 2, Intel was hella stingy with the licensing with v3. On their website, they once listed how they would provide access to the specifications, materials, and purchase information for Thunderbolt & its controllers to hobbyists and educational institutions for non-commercial purposes. Im thinking "Thunderbolt enclosures are expensive; surely making my own would be cheaper, right?" So, I contact them, and things start off well, but the minute I mention I'm looking at Thunderbolt 3? "Sorry, we do not provide access to materials, documentation, or other information regarding Thunderbolt 3 at this time for the educational and hobbyists markets. Ciao!"

It's probably why TB3+ shit is so fucking expensive.

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MisutaaAsriel
@MisutaaAsriel

That is hilarious if true. I assumed it was just corporate greed1 trying to extract licensing fees out of everyone and force Intel supremacy right around the time eGPUs & other high-performance external PCIe devices were getting popularity.

If it was more so just "we can't reliably make these things and our drivers are shit" that'd be much more amusing, albeit also more mundane.

  1. At the time, TB3 enclosures were, like, 2x the price of their TB2 brethren.

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Mayabotics
@Mayabotics

That they had previously made the offer to provide documentation and pricing to hobbyists and education is what makes me think that way. If they intended to keep it unavailable for licensing reasons, they wouldn't have made the offer to begin with.

The exception being if someone said/posted something without getting clearance from legal, but generally, I would be very surprised they made an offer like that without having the necessary 'take it or leave it' NDA & end use agreements drawn up by legal to be used with hobbyists.

That suggests to me that they thought that hobbyists and education putting those chips into a design wouldn't be a drain on their application support engineers' time or risk diverting significant amounts of chips.

When chip vendors are having yield issues, they start doing things like restricting who is eligible to purchase, and requiring customers to contract with specified design partners for board design and prototype production before the chip vendor will authorize the sale of parts needed for full-scale manufacturing.

The other thing that just occurred to me as an alternate possibility, is that export controls have been ramped up over the last several years. Doing the necessary end-use & end-user due diligence is much harder & expensive for potential hobbyists and education customers.

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MisutaaAsriel
@MisutaaAsriel

Maybe I wasn't clear initially but the gist was they would only provide access to information for versions 1 & 2. The website never specified which versions you'd get access to; they merely implied you'd get access to all of them. So I contacted them in hopes of getting documentation for Thunderbolt 3 (the one good for GPUs) only for them to straight up send me to a different department that insta-rejected me the moment I mentioned it was for the third generation stuff.

And that was probably the weirdest part. Thunderbolt 3 was not the normal Thunderbolt people's department. It was like it was under lock and key at Intel, as if it were the liquor cabinet in culinary school.

You might be right though.

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rosieposie
@rosieposie

i literally got a larger cintiq - which separates out all the functions into individual wires - because i couldnt stand the CONSTANT cable problems on the smaller one. i gave the smaller cintiq to a friend (for free because it is a hunk of junk without that cable!!!) hoping that they could solve the problems and they COULD NOT. usb is HELL

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lapisnev
@lapisnev

I haven't run into this problem with USB cables. I've had them outright fail but I've never had the cable be the reason a connection is downgraded. I've seen a flaky USB 3.0 controller that would lock up and reset if you tried to push an entire 480 Mbps...

I HAVE run into problems with Firewire cables funny enough. If you have a shit FireWire cable devices will blink for a split second when you plug them in and then not work. It's always the four-pin cables. If your Firewire camcorder cable is flaky then it will work some of the time or in one computer but not another, and changing the cable magically fixes it. There are no compliant Firewire 4-to-6 cables you can buy new today, you must find them in vintage computing lots on eBay and the like, thick and beige with chokes at both ends like mama used to make.

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