Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

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If you go that route, "bricked" is now indistinguishable from "broke," and we already have a word for that. Broke. We would have then gone from a situation where we had two different states and names for each of those states to a situation where we have two words for the very same, very fuzzy state and no way to talk about the other state.

It makes a mockery of the idea of advice. Imagine your parents calling you and telling you that their machine is bricked. Well, I guess they must buy a new one and the old must go to electronic recycling. No need for a diagnostic of any kind, it's bricked.

Linguistic descriptivism will be the death of communication and standards. Only pushing back at the creep will allow people to discuss anything technical. Imagine the trend should it overtake medicine. If a certain kind of stroke is suspected, the patient should take aspirin right away. No, aspirin-aspirin, not ibuprofen. Then you have someone who says, "Well, ibuprofen is an aspirin sure!"

As much as I would like precise and accurate language, the reality is that people have varying degrees of knowledge of any field. That is why computer technicians and doctors alike have to ask deeper questions when making a diagnosis.

Even within a field, people may have slightly different interpretations of what a word means. Take consumer electronics. Say someone plugged in the wrong power supply and blew an inductor. If you don't know what a power supply filter is, it's garbage. If you do know what's going on, it's a simple repair. Now look at the case of a bad firmware update, where the device cannot reach recovery mode. Someone with a knowledge of embedded software development may know how to fix that, particularly if they have connections with the vendor. Most people will consider it damaged beyond repair. The thing is, you can have one person who is knowledgeable about software and another about electronics having entirely different interpretations of what bricked means. The only real commonality in the definition is, "I cannot repair it." For someone with negligible knowledge about how consumer electronics, that is going to have a very broad application.

Personally, I think that bricked means that it can only be repaired with specialized tools (including soldering irons or JTAG interfaces). But hey, I'm sure a lot of people would beg to differ.

EDIT: missing don't.

I agree with your definition of bricked- the specialized tools is the key part. However, even the definition of specialized tools can be ambiguous!

Machinery standards at least define this mechanically as a screwdriver or above. The software equivalent may be a USB cable.

Bricked, to me, means it is physically just fine, but it doesn’t work due to some kind of software issue.

“I bricked my phone and had to spend a whole day reading obscure guides to three different levels of embedded software before I could get it working again” feels like a perfectly valid sentence. You can fix a bricked thing, just like you can fix a broken thing, but both require some investment of time and possibly the use of tools that you won’t usually find outside the hands of specialists.

I don't agree.

imo "Bricked" means you turned your piece of electronics into a brick, it cannot be recovered. Otherwise as mentioned before, it's just "broken", which can be recovered from in most cases.

> a brick, it cannot be recovered.

A bricked device usually can be recovered using only software tools and sometimes a special cable. Sometimes those tools or cables are only possessed by the manufacturer, which frustrates consumers and makes it seem like the devices are unrecoverable, but they’re not.

A broken device, on the other hand, can’t be recovered using software tools or a special cable because it contains broken parts that must be repaired or replaced.

A physically broken device might still be functional though, so personally your terms are backwards.

A bricked device has a slight chance of recovery, if you have the tools/skills/training. It is a brick until that repair with high applitude is completed. Something that is broke doesn't mean it is functional or not, just not at a perfectly working condition to worse. it might be repaired by doing a reset of a device, or something more advanced.

This is from my experience dealing with non-technical people who are mechanically inclined, but not technically inclined. they will call with a "broke" device that just needs a reset since they have too many users in a system all attempting to run the same device on different things. (Sorry keeping vague to keep me out of hot water). They will also call in with something "bricked" because the device won't function due to a damaged USB port, and they don't have the skill set/components to solder a port on something electronic. And then further down the scale it is a paperweight when it won't boot and is a piece of hardware they hate.

I disagreed with GP's use of the term bricked to mean unrecoverable. You seem to agree with me because you wrote that a bricked device can be recovered with the proper tools/skills/training. I hadn't considered partially-working devices, but I think you're right that they shouldn't be properly called bricked.

The threads here show that even highly technical people disagree on what conditions should be considered bricked versus broken. To a non-technical person whose device isn't working, however, there is no practical difference.

I actually changed my mind a little after posting that comment. I think it was mentioned elsewhere also, but even something that I would consider "bricked" could still probably be recovered by someone with access to the right tools (ability to reflash via JTAG, replacing chips etc.)

I would refine my definition to be that a "bricked" device is something that has occurred via a failed software update making the device inoperable to all but the tiniest subset of users.

This is also how I've always understood the two terms.

So...I generally agree with the idea that it is more useful to have two terms that mean something distinct than two terms that both mean a fuzzy version of the same thing. In that, despite linguistic history, or the common parlance of whatever time or place, I think "literally" is useful as a concept that should disallow it from use as a term for exaggeration. Because sometimes context does not expose "I am literally going to kill you"'s meaning, and it is useful to know if that's literal or not.

However, I think the situation you might find here is that, if you define "bricked" as a situation which is literally unrepairable, almost nothing is ever bricked. Which similarly makes it a not very useful term. Bricking would be a term exclusive to devices which have been...exposed to an intense EMP, or run through an oven. Situations which, while they may occasionally happen, happen so rarely that no one would ever use the word.

Bricked specifically means it’s unrepairable (ie: it’s now a paperweight, a brick).

It’s fair to say “bricked” is a sub-category of “broke” but if something is software repairable then it isn’t bricked.

Also aspirin and ibuprofen are very different chemicals. I wouldn’t advise conflating the two. The resulting effect could be worse than the brick/broke problem we are discussing ;)

No it doesn’t.

The term unbricking also exists, which directly contradicts the idea that a bricked device cannot be recovered.

If a device requires extraordinary measures most people cannot or will not take in order to "unbrick" it, then it's possible for the usage to be correct even if such a procedure exists.

For example - years ago, NVIDIA got in some hot water over some of their mobile GPUs getting so toasty some of the solder points broke, leading to bricked systems. If you were the adventurous sort, you could heat the laptop enough to reflow the solder and end up with an unbricked system, but that's not an approach most people are going to take.

The term "undead" also exists but if a person is currently alive it implies they were never really dead to begin with.

Anything can be recovered with enough effort, technical knowhow and the right equipment. The distinction is what can be realistically repaired. Generally the term “unbricking” only exists because people overuse the term “bricked” (eg a phone stuck in a boot cycle isn’t a “brick”, it’s just “stuck in a boot cycle”. However if you do manage to fix a device by specialist hardware repairs then yes, I think it’s fair to say you’ve “unbricked” it.

You mean advil? Aspirin is most definitely not ibuprofen. Or is this just proving the point note that language does matter a lot.

You're all just messing with that n-gate.com guy, right?

(FWIW: If the terms are to be interpreted relative to the device owner's competence level, we also need to prosecute people saying "You're dead to me" for murder)

I agree. We already live in a world where many people use the phrases "hard drive", "CPU" and "computer" interchangeably when talking about a desktop computer.

Good comment here.

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