5 ms·

Seems to me the word has a clear sense of permanence built into it. The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment.

Seems to me the word has a clear sense of permanence built into it. The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. A device is said to be bricked when it is no more useful than a brick. If you drop your smartphone into water, and it shows no signs of life even after a couple of weeks of drying, you've bricked it. The average user is not competent at repair, as that's a specialized skill. They might not know what to do with a laptop if you blanked its SSD, but we wouldn't call that laptop bricked.

avmich 6y ago
> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. This makes term "bricked" somewhat theoretical, as in practice almost any state of electronics can be turned back to functioning. In extreme cases you'll have to replace vital parts (if imagination forbids actually fixing broken microchips with a lab equipment), but in many cases it's still possible.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  You're essentially using a sorites paradox/Ship of Theseus argument to attack the idea that a piece of electronics can ever, even in principle, be said to be 'permanently broken'. In common usage, we consider 'permanently broken' to be meaningful, we draw the line somewhere reasonable, and don't worry too much about giving a legalistic precise definition. I think my earlier examples stand up ok here. The phone is bricked, and the laptop is not. There may be edge cases where it might not be clear whether we can say whether a device is 'bricked' or not. That's not a problem. There might be an edge case in furniture where it's not clear if it's a chair or a table, but the categories of chair and table are still worth keeping. ...anyway it looks like a promising ARM-based computer ;-P
  - avmich 6y ago
    I think we'd agree that term "bricked" is somewhat relative. Different people can define it - slightly or not - differently, which of course makes communications more difficult, yet for now that's where we are. The point was that the original nitpick can be questioned.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    > You're essentially using a sorites paradox/Ship of Theseus argument to attack the idea that a piece of electronics can ever, even in principle, be said to be 'permanently broken'. Dude, setting aside the argument itself, I never expected to see the Ship of Theseus busted out to win an internet debate... well done!
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      In the proud tradition of people lacking a formal education in philosophy, I think I got it slightly wrong - the continuum fallacy is the better fit.
- bigiain 6y ago
  <adjusts Make America Pedantic Again fedora> Surely a typical brick contains a significant amount of silicon and sufficient trace amounts of germanium/boron/phosphorus to dope it into useable semiconductors... (That’d make for an awesome YouTube channel project. How I melted down and refined a brick into pure enough elements to make semiconductors and working electronics, in my backyard... I’d totally subscribe to that Patreon.)
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Working title: Bricks into bits, or Bits of bricks.
interestica 6y ago
> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. I've got a dictionary full of terms for you that arose from one concept to mean something else. Literally. Also figuratively.
- npongratz 6y ago
  Just because people can, or have, redefined things illogically doesn't mean they should. I fully support efforts to gently nudge deviations of the vernacular toward reason and rationality, especially before it it crystallizes into some abomination like "literally" has become. That way lies muddy thinking, and madness. The price of language-reality congruence is eternal vigilance and kindhearted pedantry.
  - justincredible 6y ago
    > kindhearted pedantry lol. You can be as kindhearted as humanly possible and some people will still get pissed.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Yah, but let's leave some room for some meaning to evolve and not be some kind of robots based on historic meaning and roots. E.g. It's OK for "decimated" to mean "destroyed/removed a sizable part of" and not "killed precisely 10% of". It's also OK for us to disagree on when the exact place an object becomes no more useful than a brick and to think that this could be a gray area. To me, something is slightly/soft bricked when it requires specialized, non-garden path recovery procedures to fix (e.g. a firmware flashing tool). It is hard bricked when it requires tools and processes only usually found in depot maintenance or manufacturer facilities, even if my home workshop happens to be capable of these things. Of course, this means some things that are hard bricked could become soft bricked or even not bricked at all, if the manufacturer releases a tool or updates the normal software to deal with a situation.
mlyle 6y ago
So if Ring fucks up my doorbell's firmware, in a way that I can't fix it... But they have tooling on one test bench somewhere that could load new firmware and bring it back to life... Is it bricked? Is it bricked if they release those tools, but they require specialized repair skills? Is it bricked if they release those tools and it's easy?
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  The existence of tricky edge-cases does not show that the categories are meaningless. Please see my response to avmich's comment.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative. To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknown. Sitting with the drive powered for an hour without a data connection to let its firmware do internal housekeeping and maybe have the drive come (partially?) back, in an undocumented recovery procedure, is definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definitions. We'd all agree that a severely water-damaged smartphone counts as permanently broken, and as bricked, regardless of whether it would be possible in principle for the device to be repaired at great expense. > Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". I agree that the availability of tooling can impact whether we consider something permanently broken. A failed hard-disk in an old games console might be enough to write off the whole machine, if the machine is hostile to replacement hard-disks and official repair services are no longer available (and their special tooling/software not made public). A failed hard-disk in a desktop computer, though, can easily be replaced. > definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum Again, of course there are edge cases. This is true of just about any categorisation we use, outside of mathematics. To refer back to my earlier example, it's not possible to give perfectly precise definitions of chair and table, but this doesn't much matter, the terms are still useful.
craftinator 6y ago
Well if bricking is permanent, then it's only bricked if it falls into a black hole; and in that case I vote that we change the term to "holed", because at least that is a term that's worth being misused, unlike "bricked".
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  You're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. avmich already did this, and it doesn't hold water. Please see my response to avmich's comment.

avmich 6y ago

> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. This makes term "bricked" somewhat theoretical, as in practice almost any state of electronics can be turned back to functioning. In extreme cases you'll have to replace vital parts (if imagination forbids actually fixing broken microchips with a lab equipment), but in many cases it's still possible.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
You're essentially using a sorites paradox/Ship of Theseus argument to attack the idea that a piece of electronics can ever, even in principle, be said to be 'permanently broken'. In common usage, we consider 'permanently broken' to be meaningful, we draw the line somewhere reasonable, and don't worry too much about giving a legalistic precise definition. I think my earlier examples stand up ok here. The phone is bricked, and the laptop is not. There may be edge cases where it might not be clear whether we can say whether a device is 'bricked' or not. That's not a problem. There might be an edge case in furniture where it's not clear if it's a chair or a table, but the categories of chair and table are still worth keeping. ...anyway it looks like a promising ARM-based computer ;-P
- avmich 6y ago
  I think we'd agree that term "bricked" is somewhat relative. Different people can define it - slightly or not - differently, which of course makes communications more difficult, yet for now that's where we are. The point was that the original nitpick can be questioned.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > You're essentially using a sorites paradox/Ship of Theseus argument to attack the idea that a piece of electronics can ever, even in principle, be said to be 'permanently broken'. Dude, setting aside the argument itself, I never expected to see the Ship of Theseus busted out to win an internet debate... well done!
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    In the proud tradition of people lacking a formal education in philosophy, I think I got it slightly wrong - the continuum fallacy is the better fit.
bigiain 6y ago
<adjusts Make America Pedantic Again fedora> Surely a typical brick contains a significant amount of silicon and sufficient trace amounts of germanium/boron/phosphorus to dope it into useable semiconductors... (That’d make for an awesome YouTube channel project. How I melted down and refined a brick into pure enough elements to make semiconductors and working electronics, in my backyard... I’d totally subscribe to that Patreon.)
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Working title: Bricks into bits, or Bits of bricks.

interestica 6y ago

> The term arose because a brick cannot be transformed into functioning electronic equipment. I've got a dictionary full of terms for you that arose from one concept to mean something else. Literally. Also figuratively.

npongratz 6y ago
Just because people can, or have, redefined things illogically doesn't mean they should. I fully support efforts to gently nudge deviations of the vernacular toward reason and rationality, especially before it it crystallizes into some abomination like "literally" has become. That way lies muddy thinking, and madness. The price of language-reality congruence is eternal vigilance and kindhearted pedantry.
- justincredible 6y ago
  > kindhearted pedantry lol. You can be as kindhearted as humanly possible and some people will still get pissed.
- mlyle 6y ago
  Yah, but let's leave some room for some meaning to evolve and not be some kind of robots based on historic meaning and roots. E.g. It's OK for "decimated" to mean "destroyed/removed a sizable part of" and not "killed precisely 10% of". It's also OK for us to disagree on when the exact place an object becomes no more useful than a brick and to think that this could be a gray area. To me, something is slightly/soft bricked when it requires specialized, non-garden path recovery procedures to fix (e.g. a firmware flashing tool). It is hard bricked when it requires tools and processes only usually found in depot maintenance or manufacturer facilities, even if my home workshop happens to be capable of these things. Of course, this means some things that are hard bricked could become soft bricked or even not bricked at all, if the manufacturer releases a tool or updates the normal software to deal with a situation.

mlyle 6y ago

So if Ring fucks up my doorbell's firmware, in a way that I can't fix it... But they have tooling on one test bench somewhere that could load new firmware and bring it back to life... Is it bricked? Is it bricked if they release those tools, but they require specialized repair skills? Is it bricked if they release those tools and it's easy?

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
The existence of tricky edge-cases does not show that the categories are meaningless. Please see my response to avmich's comment.
- mlyle 6y ago
  I'd seen your response before. I didn't find it informative. To me, bricked means "requires exotic recovery procedure (or more) to repair." Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". Making it so that an ordinary user can do it makes it "not bricked anymore". When we say something is "bricked", the permanence is unknown. Sitting with the drive powered for an hour without a data connection to let its firmware do internal housekeeping and maybe have the drive come (partially?) back, in an undocumented recovery procedure, is definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > Existence of tooling in one manufacturer lab doesn't make something not "bricked". I didn't say otherwise. Again you're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. You've shifted from attacking the term 'permanently broken' as unworkably imprecise, to attacking it as unknowable. Neither holds water. In real-word use, we just make do. It's not practical to give perfectly precise legalistic definitions. We'd all agree that a severely water-damaged smartphone counts as permanently broken, and as bricked, regardless of whether it would be possible in principle for the device to be repaired at great expense. > Releasing that stuff to the public makes it "soft bricked". I agree that the availability of tooling can impact whether we consider something permanently broken. A failed hard-disk in an old games console might be enough to write off the whole machine, if the machine is hostile to replacement hard-disks and official repair services are no longer available (and their special tooling/software not made public). A failed hard-disk in a desktop computer, though, can easily be replaced. > definitely somewhere murky on this spectrum Again, of course there are edge cases. This is true of just about any categorisation we use, outside of mathematics. To refer back to my earlier example, it's not possible to give perfectly precise definitions of chair and table, but this doesn't much matter, the terms are still useful.

craftinator 6y ago

Well if bricking is permanent, then it's only bricked if it falls into a black hole; and in that case I vote that we change the term to "holed", because at least that is a term that's worth being misused, unlike "bricked".

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
You're attacking the idea that 'permanently broken' is meaningful. avmich already did this, and it doesn't hold water. Please see my response to avmich's comment.