The USB type C connector itself is amazing. I’ve never broken the physical connector, the problem is electrical only. The connector is capable of delivering a very high 240W of power, but the device/charger negotiate the power and voltage requirements to find the highest both can support.

But there are actually four parts of the system limiting the negotiated power:

• The maximum power the charger can deliver
• The maximum power the charging device can receive
• The maximum current the cable can deliver
• The signaling protocol used to negotiate the highest supported power across the link

The problem ultimately comes from the negotiation as many devices don’t use USB-PD (the theoretical “standard” for this) to save cost or allow different electrical configurations. This can lead to chargers incorrectly identifying devices as capable of accepting higher voltages than they can. Or devices can incorrectly identify themselves as capable of accepting higher voltage than they actually can.

If you’re using reputable decides from reputable companies using the included charger/cables, this will never be an issue. It’s only problematic when you want one charger for all your USB type C devices, as it now needs to support multiple communication protocols and voltage standards, hoping that no device identifies itself incorrectly.

PC lacks portability and battery life. The many generic ARM Linux game consoles fix both of those problems.

Nah a generic “K36” game system I bought for just under $20 in China. It played everything up to PS1 games flawlessly with a beautiful IPS LCD which was extremely impressive for the price. It even did one full recharge from a dumb charger without issue before I tried using my normal USB-PD capable charger on it, releasing the magic smoke.

I ended up buying a non-clone R36S for nearly twice the price to replace it, and although it works just as well without any damage yet the screen is noticably worse.

Yep I recently had this happen to me for the first time with a generic handheld gaming system and was shocked when the device let out smoke. I opened it up and sure enough the buck converter for the battery charging circuit was burnt, likely because the non-compliant device had somehow requested more than 5V from the charger… The charger was USB-PD and works fine with my phone/laptop/headphones so I’m pretty sure it’s not the problem.

Nah, USB-C is plagued by non-standard electrical configurations, non-standard charging protocols, and non-compliant cables. Rest assured the connector is here to stay, your device just may not be able to charge with any given charger or cable.

I think they may have confused some terms here. Among my peers in engineering it’s quite common to take a few months between jobs to travel or relax. They usually call it funemployment. I totally get why one would want to take a longer break assuming you have sufficient savings before you quit. What this article seems to be describing is just unpaid vacation because we don’t have real vacation policies in the US.

I’m an American often in China for my job. If you want to be in a tier 1 city rent relative to income is insane even compared to Canada (and by extension the US). If you’re a foreigner in a skilled profession who can secure a job there, this would be pretty easily avoided as your salary will typically be far above average and housing likely even paid for by the company sponsoring you.

The downside is that the expectation of workers and office culture is also drastically different than in the US. Your savings also won’t go as far should you ever choose to leave. Mandarin is pretty difficult to learn, particularly for reading characters which is more or less essential to get around New areas efficiently.

People are surprisingly quite nice to foreigners. I’ve never had a problem with the complete lack of privacy personally, since everything in public is tracked/recorded crime is incredibly low. But I have the ability to make that choice while others don’t, so I can get why it’s an issue for some. It’s a weird contrast from the US where the police are most certainly not your friend and the government is too disorganized to help even when they have all the relevant information. The urbanism is everything you’d imagine it to be, even in tier 2/3 cities it’s incredibly easy to get around without a car. If I weren’t tied to my family in the US I’d likely consider spending a few years working there while still young. But even then it would be hard to justify such a huge pay cut from US engineering salaries.

Do people not budget? Like for the meme it’s funny but frivolously spending on payday to the point you can’t get groceries the next 1.5wk is a completely avoidable situation. Compared to rent food costs are nearly nothing if you’re meal planning. And if even that’s stretching the budget you’ll be less stressed getting (maybe another) roommate.

What’s wrong with IONOS? Their VPS prices are some of the best out there and reliability has never been an issue for me.

How? I’ve been noticing buffering the last few days with 1080p60 videos and up even using the suggested app version in Revanced.