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Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

I was looking at Yabai [1] as a window manager and it requires SIP[2] to be disabled for advanced features... Is SIP really needed ? I see that it didn't even exist since "since OS X 10.11 "El Capitan".".

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki

[2] https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide#sy...

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Here’s an instance of SIP preventing a Chrome update from bricking computers.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...

Bricking means that the computer is no more useful for computing than a brick (or that you might as well use it as a brick). Don't use it for stuff that can be fixed with software.

Where do you draw the line, though? Something that might be a brick to a web developer would probably be perfectly serviceable to me as a firmware engineer

Meanwhile, something that's a brick to me is often perfectly serviceable to someone who can operate a soldering iron

Something that's a brick to a competent hardware tech might still be serviceable to a 3 letter agency

If you can still boot a Mac from the recovery partition or an external drive, it’s not bricked.

It IS bricked if you're a semi-technical Chrome user whose mac is stuck at the question mark screen, though

Sure, the line is porous, but if it can be fixed by doing something with software that is documented by the manufacturer then I think it's definitely not bricked. In this case booting from recovery.

This debate showed up in the original HN discussion too, which also used the term. I think it’s more appropriate to draw the line at “as useful as a brick without taking actions not exposed as part of the normal user interface”. Drawing the line between hardware and software yields false negatives (corrupted read-only firmware is indeed bricked), false positives (discharged battery is not bricked), and messy grey areas (if it’s non-functional but fixable with a trivial chip replacement, is it bricked?), and moreover is frustratingly antagonistic to non-programmers, who have a computer that is as useful as a brick to them until they take it to a professional, yet you tell them not to say so just because you also have the skills necessary for this particular repair.

Yabai is awesome. You can partially disable SIP, which I believe is required since the scripting extension needs it to interact with the dock. But you don't need to completely disable it.

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I...

I should note that if you care about security, partially disabling SIP is as good as fully disabling it. Especially for those specific flags.

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