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