Support guy: "M'am, can you tell me what is on the plug of your hub? Is it a sort of pitch fork with three numbers, or is it more like a pitch fork with a lightning bolt and two numbers?"

Customer: "Son, I'm 75, I don't see so well anymore!"

Support guy: "Well, unless we can find out if you have a USB 3.1 Gen 2b compliant with Power Delivery 20W hub or a USB 3.2 Gen 1 DP+ SuperSpeed 10GB hub, we won't know what alternate modes your cable must support in able to connect that mouse to your laptop m'am"

They probably do. It's an industry-driven standard; they added all that stuff exactly because they intended to sell it to consumers.

But the people who worked on the standard directly aren't doing the tech support

How is that different from any other technical standard or product design?

It behooves one to read the conversation before replying. The implication is this: perhaps if the people who wrote the spec personally had to offer tech support for the spec they wrote, they might have an incentive to write less insane specs.

I get that. But spec writers never have to do that, yet there are many other specs that are presumably less insane. So it's unlikely that not-requiring tech support is a causal factor in USB's supposed insanity.

Reading the thread would also explain that you're discussing somebody's 'fantasy', not expectation or belief of causality.

This is classic HN stuff, I find it actually valuable to see an explicit enumeration of all possible interpretations of some statement, also somewhat humorous.

To be honest, I wanted to essentially say that it's a thoroughly stupid fantasy. But in more polite terms.

“We could sell this feature to consumers even though it would confuse them”? That’s not what tech support would do.

I’d pay to watch them connect up a monitor, then try fix the issue when it mysteriously stops working. Then have the replacement also fail. Then find another that works but looks identical.