Comment by AlotOfReading
7 months ago
I've "bricked" many automotive systems where they weren't truly unrecoverable, but doing so involved another team disassembling them. The parts were cheaper to throw out instead.
Being strict about the word "bricked" and limiting it to the truly unrecoverable situations just makes it nigh-on useless.
Very few things can make a modern system truly unrecoverable if one is willing to pour unreasonable resources into them. It's incredibly common to be in a situation where a system is unrecoverable by you though. There's no practical difference between these two except that one depends on the surrounding context.
There are a thousand ways to describe this without misusing and ruining a word like “bricked”.
Being strict about a word makes it more useful, not useless. A useless word is one with no identifiable meaning, one which requires copious clarifications, or one which invites confusion and debate instead of delivering meaning.
I actually think your first sentence is a spot on definition for 'bricked'. However, this specific scenario does not meet the criteria you've defined. Nobody is throwing out their car because it was only temporarily disabled. Another OTA update fixed it minutes later.
The first sentence is an example that also conflicts with a strict definition of "bricked", not something comparable to the situation in the article.
The definition I was offering just appends "by you" to the strict definition and encompasses both in some contexts.
I think the reasonable extent of "bricked" is: can you plug in a USB cord and use publicly available software to fix it? Or wireless equivalent.
Most automotive systems would be bricked by this definition. Very little of the tooling is open source/publicly available, reprogramming is usually a specific, non-default mode gated by passwords or cryptography and inaccessible to end users.