As a hardware product, it’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard about since the shakeweight. A non-rechargeable Bluetooth microphone disguised as a tacky ring.

Who is the customer? Who takes “voice notes” enough to need to add a button for it to their hand? Or, ever?

Buried among all the stupid ideas seems to be the promise of offering a Siri/Bixby/Alexa like experience that runs entirely locally on your phone that doesn’t have a home to phone back to. Does it have to be LLM-based, or is that just all tech bros can do anymore? And why can’t the phone’s own mic, or the mic in a Pebble smart watch, do that job? Why center it on a nearly non-functional device?

Remember those bluetooth earbuds that business jackasses wore all the time back in the 2000s? This does less than that.

I was more thinking about getting one’s shirt caught in a wood chipper.

It is amazing how bloated software has gotten. Used to be, your computer’s OS fit on a floppy diskette.

I remember the original roll-out of USB, things like mice and keyboards very quickly transitioned to USB and came with one of those USB/PS2 dongles for awhile for compatibility with older computers, and then we were into the USB era.

That hasn’t happened with USB-C, large market segments don’t seem interested in making it happen, it’s not getting better, in fact it seems to be getting worse. So kick it in the head and start over from scratch.

Situation: There are 15 competing standards, and they’re all USB.

That’s the winning hypothesis, dumpster diving gooners.

I personally don’t, no. I have it installed on a PC though.

Yeah, “3.0” and “3.2 Gen 1” mean the same thing. Same with “3.1” and “3.2 Gen 2x1”. I’ve bought computer cases in 2025 with the front IO labeled “3.0”.

How are normal people supposed to keep track of this?

Yeah, what was the name of the hilariously clumsy girl they had on that show for awhile?

There was a rotating cast of interchangeable pretty women on that show whose job it was to point at the consumer goods being shamelessly advertised. One of them was hilariously bad at it; while showing off a refrigerator she’d pull out the crisper drawer then couldn’t get it back in so the door wouldn’t shut and solving that problem would pop the freezer open…she had a minor case of Tim Taylor’s disease.

Surely there are people who bought Chromebooks for college? Or boomers who bought the $245 Chromebook instead of the $285 Win10S manufactured ewaste laptop?

Name me a feature SteamOS has that Bazzite doesn’t.

I’m 38, and I remember the last gasps of CRTs in the early 2000s more fondly than the colicky 10-year toddlerhood of digital flat panels that followed.

Apple could remove the audio jack from iPhones because 1. They’re Apple. They could remove the eyes from their customers and 9/10ths of them would stay loyal. and 2. Eliminating the headphone jack mostly locked people out of $20 or less earbuds that might have come free with a previous phone anyway. People grumbled, and carried on using the Bluetooth headphones a lot of them already owned.

AMD doesn’t have the following that Apple does; they’re the objectively worse but more affordable alternative to Nvidia. Eliminating the HDMI port would lock themselves out of the HTPC market entirely; anyone who wanted to connect a PC to a TV would find their products impossible to use, not without experience ruining adapter dongles. We’re talking about making machines that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars incompatible.

I have enough back problems to remember a time when a 32 inch television WAS a big-screen. My family had a 35 inch Sony Trinitron that weighted as much as a motorcycle. You do not NEED a 50+ inch screen.

Mildly spicy take: USB is an unrecoverable disaster and we need an entirely unrelated team to invent something entirely new to replace it because we’re never getting this sleeping bag back in the little bag it shipped in.

USB 1.1 was cool in 1996; it replaced PS/2, RS-232, Centronics parallel, several proprietary connectors, several use cases for SCSI, ADB, Apple’s DIN serial ports, and probably some stuff I’m missing. There was an A plug and a B plug, main problem was both weren’t very obvious which way up you were supposed to plug them. Speed was low but firewire existed for high speed connections.

USB 2.0 was cooler in 2000. The plugs and sockets were identical, the cable was similar but with better shielding, it was as fast or faster than FireWire 400. They did start introducing more plugs, like Mini-B and Micro-B, mainly for portable devices. There were also Mini-A and Micro-A, I’ve never personally seen them. That pretty much finished off external SCSI. Higher speed FireWire was still there if you needed faster than USB but USB 2.0 did basically everything. To indicate USB 2.0 devices and ports, they made the tongues black in contrast with USB 1.1’s white tongues. Didn’t really matter in practice; by the time people had devices that needed the speed, USB 2.0 ports were all machines had.

USB 3.0 took too long to arrive in 2008. The additional speed was sorely needed by then, FireWire was mostly an Apple thing, PCs had but often didn’t use it, so PCs mostly didn’t have anything faster than 480Mbit/s until Obama was sworn in. USB 3.0 is best thought of as a separate tech bolted on top of USB 2.0, they added 5 more wires, a ground wire and two pair of high speed data lines for 5Gbit/s full duplex. The original four wires are also in the cable for power and 480Mbit/s half-duplex. They managed to make the A plug and socket entirely forwards and backwards compatible, the 3B sockets are compatible with 2B plugs (same with micro) but 3B plugs are not compatible with 2B sockets (again, same with micro). Which means we’ve just added two more kinds of cable for people to keep track of! So a typical consumer now likely has a printer with a USB A-B cable, some bluetooth headset or mp3 player they’re still using that has a mini-B plug, an Android smart phone with a micro-B plug, an iPod Touch with a Lightning plug because Apple are special widdle boys and girls with special widdle needs, and now an external hard drive with a 3A to micro-3B plug, which just looking at it is obviously a hack job.

Computer manufacturers didn’t help. It’s still common for PCs to have 2.0 ports on them for low speed peripherals like mice, keyboards, printers, other sundry HIDs, to leave 3.0 ports open for high speed devices. To differentiate these to users, 3.0 ports are supposed to be blue. In my experience, about half of them are black. I own a Dell laptop made in 2014 with 1 2.0 and 2 3.0 ports, all are black. I own two Fractal Design cases, all of their front USB ports are black. Only ports on my Asrock motherboards are blue. I’ve had that laptop for nearly 12 years now, I STILL have to examine the pinout to tell which one is the USB 2.0 port. My Fractal cases aren’t that bad because they have no front 2.0, but I built a PC for my uncle that does have front 2.0 and 3.0 ports, and they’re all black.

USB 3.1 showed up in 2013, alongside the USB-C connector, and the train came entirely off the rails. USB 3.1 offers even higher 10Gbit/s duplex throughput, maybe on the same cable as 3.0. If the port supports it. How do you tell a 3.1 port from a 3.0 port? They’ll silk screen on a logo in -8 point font that’ll scratch off in a month, it is otherwise physically identical. Some motherboard manufacturers break with the standard in a good way and color 3.1 capable ports a slightly teal-ish blue. USB A-B cables can carry a USB 3.1 10Gbit/s signal. But, they also introduced the USB-C connector, which is its own thing.

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to our prayers. It’s almost as small as a Micro-2B connector, it’s reversible like a Lightning port, it can carry a LOT of power for fast charging and even charging laptops, and it’s got not one, but two sets of tx/rx pins, so it can carry high speed USB data in full duplex AND a 4k60hz DisplayPort signal AND good old fashioned 480Mbit/s USB2.0 half-duplex for peripherals. In one wire. That was the dream, anyway.

Android smart phones moved over to USB-C, a lot of laptops went mostly or entirely USB-C, PCs added one or two…and that’s where we are to this day. Keyboards, mice, wireless dongles, HIDs, still all use USB-A plugs, there doesn’t seem to have been any move at all to migrate. Laptops are now permanently in dongle hell as bespoke ports like HDMI are disappearing, yet monitors and especially televisions are slow to adopt DP over USB-C.

Also, about half of the USB-C cables on the market are 4-wire USB 2.0 cables. There are no USB-C data cables, just D+ and D- plus power. They’re phone charging cables; they’re sufficient for plugging a phone into a wall wart or car charger but they often don’t carry laptop amounts of power and they don’t carry high speed data or video.

USB 3.2 turned up in 2017, added the ability to do two simultaneous 3.1 10Gbit/s connections in the same cable, a boon for external SSDs, retroactively renamed 3.0 and 3.1 to 3.2 Gen 1 and 3.2 Gen 2, with 3.2 being 3.2 Gen 2x2, changed to different case logos to match, pissed in the fireplace and started jabbering about Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt was an Intel thing to put PCIe lanes out mini DisplayPort cables, usually for the purposes of connecting external GPUs to laptops but also for general purpose high speed data transfer. Well, around this time they decided to transition to USB-C connectors for Thunderbolt.

Problem: They use a lighting bolt logo to denote a Thunderbolt port. Lightning bolt, or angled squiggle lines, have been used to mean “high speed”, “Power delivery”, “Apple Lightning”, and now “Thunderbolt.”

“Power delivery” sometimes but not always denoted by a yellow or orange tongue means that port delivers power even with the device turned off…or something. And has nothing to do with the fact that USB-C cables now have chips in them to negotiate with power bricks and devices for how much power can be delivered, and nobody marks the cables as such, so you just have to know what your cables can do. They’re nearly impossible to shop for, and if you want to set up a personal system of “my low-speed cables are black, my high speed cables are white, my high power cables are red” fuck you, your Samsung will come with a white 2.0 cable and nobody makes a high power red cable.

USB4 is coming out now, it’s eaten Thunderbolt to gain its power, it’ll be able to do even higher speed links if you get yet another physically indistinguishable cable, and if you hold it upside down it’ll pressure wash your car, but only Gigabyte Aorus motherboards support that feature as of yet.

The “fistful of different cables to keep track of” is only getting worse as we head into the USB4 era and it needs to be kicked in the head and replaced entirely.

I’m reminded of a few projects I’ve seen here and there where a dad with some electronics skills builds a control panel for his kid with a bunch of knobs, buttons, lights, switches, gauges, displays etc. that makes suitably impressive industrial noises as you mess with the controls because what kid doesn’t want that? I want that.

I’m rounding year 15 with a nylon one. I’ve never had a leather wallet last that long.

There is none. These are not made. They should not be made. We will not help you make these.

The reason power plugs/sockets are gendered the way they are is to prevent energized contacts from ever being exposed to touch. A cable that reverses the gender can and almost certainly will expose mains voltage to exposed contacts, which almost certainly will electrocute someone or cause a fire.

Bad stupid wrong reasons people come up with for wanting these:

• Attaching a generator to the circuits in a house. Plug one end into the generator’s outlet, plug the other into a wall socket, and now that circuit in your house, and possibly others, are energized. In addition to the cable being a death hazard if unplugged from the house end, I don’t know how circuit breakers behave when the source is on the load side, and if you don’t throw the main breaker you’re energizing the lines coming out of your house, meaning you’re putting power on the mains. You probably want to do this during a power failure, which means linemen might be working on the lines, they expect them to be cold, but because an idiot bought a generator and some parts from aisle 3 at Lowe’s, it isn’t. If you’re trying to run your generator while attached to the grid to try to reduce your power bill, you deserve the resulting fire. There is a correct way to do this; you can get plugs and sockets designed for this, you’ll often find camper trailers equipped with them, and you need an interlocked switch that prevents both the generator and the power grid from being attached simultaneously.

• You strung your Christmas lights backwards, and now the female end is closest to where you want to plug them in. Okay fine, I’ll just get a male-to-male cable and plug them in backwards, what can go wrong? The male plug at the end of your daisy chain dangling somewhere in a bush, under your eaves etc. in the winter weather getting rained or snowed on is what can go wrong. The correct solution is pay attention to what you’re doing, Clark Griswold.

There’s a lot of "should"s in there that just don’t reflect reality. Because of how so many American towns and cities are built, you’d have to bulldoze entire cities to do things like eliminate small traffic lights from residential neighborhoods. And we’re not gonna do that. We’re not going to tear down the entire fucking nation for some retards on bicycles.

In my area, there are very few cyclists who actually bike to get anywhere. They do it for exercise and/or to be allowed to wear their little padded shorts in public. So get the exercise from peddling away from a stop sign. The reason to choose that route instead of the others? To not get hit by cars.

And what exactly is the pedestrian excuse? Why do people insist on walking on the sidewalkless busy roads when in between them there’s a sidewalkless non-busy road?