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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

A device that is acting as a brick cannot receive commands and is not useful at all. That is the current status of voyager 2.

"Unbricking" will hopefully work automatically, because there is no other option. But that can also fail and there is no way to know, or influence it.

I use bricking in the definition of mobile phone tinkerers .. there are many results for unbricking btw, but I just checked and with the first result it seems that Apple now uses unbricking for activating a new device. Because technically before, it is also just a brick - but here I would agree, that it is not a appropriate term, but rather should be for somehow broken devices.

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What this is telling us is that attempting to condense to "it was bricked" has actually introduced ambiguity, and that "brick" doesn't really explain a technical situation.

The JPL doco (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36941433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942321) calls it "Command Loss".

But you did understood my original comment? I described exactly in what way it "bricked". I used the term in the first place, because this was my first assoziation, when I learned about the situation. That "uppps" feeling when you did something wrong and there is no going back.. (poor guy) "bricking" describes these vibes for me and "Command Loss" does not.

It’s not bricked, it’s operating autonomously for some time. They’re incredibly different modes of operation.

I think it's reasonable to say that it is operating autonomously and is currently "bricked" as a colloquialism. There's a certain helplessness for NASA in this case, which is similar to bricking one's device. Instead of hoping that the repair shop can fix it, they have to hope that their engineering foresight was adequate.

After trying to optimize my laptops energy settings under linux, I once also ended up with a device that was operating low level autonomously for some time. It just would not accept commands from me, nor the power button, nor anything else. The CPU also wasn't running, but something was.

In other words it was effectivly a brick to me.

But since it was not a surface pro (I considered buying instead of that one), I could open it and disconnect the battery.

And in effect, unbricking it. Quite trivial fix sure, but nearly impossible with many modern devices, where the battery is glued in.

My point is, not every mode of operation is desired, especially if you cannot change it. Then you might as well have a brick in terms of usefulness.

No. Your laptop was not operating autonomously, by definition.

It was not making its own decisions, to achieve some goal.

Parts of it were. To make some checks for some hardware (as part of an automatic comand line tool). They just got into an infinite loop. Down on the hardware level.

That's not autonomous that's automatic

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