alt Hacker NewsThey mean bad USB-A to C cables with no resistor on CC line. Of course this is broken junk which will work with some devices and won't with others. I've also seen cables with resistors on both CC lines, which is also broken but in a slightly subtler way.
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Right. That phrase "standards-compliant" in the above comments is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A lot of devices are not actually standards-compliant. Some are close. (This may actually be worse.)
My experience has been that if the source and sink are broken, they are often hilariously badly broken and it is pretty easy to figure out that they are the problem, if not quite exactly what they've done wrong. But if things are flaky and weird and don't really make sense, it's probably the cable. Try a known-really-seriously-actually-standards-compliantly-good cable and many problems go away, even if the source and sink aren't perfect.
(Many sources and sinks aren't standards-compliant because, even though they easily could be, they're trying to work around the other end not being standards-compliant itself, because that's what you've got to do to sell a product. So they're close but not quite there. This is not always ideal.)
But it’s not what anyone was talking about. Such a cable should be really quite rare because it’s unlikely to work at all in most situations, whereas devices with USB-C ports that don’t work with PD chargers (due to a cent’s worth of missing Rd resistors) are irritatingly common, because they do work with USB-C to A cables!