Matisyahu's Blog

If you’ve been following recent news regarding a Windows update that was released for the month of August there were claims that it ‘bricked’ their SSD (even though it doesn’t fit the definition of ‘bricked’ given that simply turning it off and back on again addresses it) or their computer crashed. Here is the problem, correlation doesn’t equal causation, we don’t know what drivers they use, what modifications to the system they’ve made, whether they have any kernel level drivers such as easy anti-cheat that cause all manner of problems etc. nor do we know the chipset, the NAND brand because you may have an SSD vendor with a single controller but flash chips provided by multiple suppliers. The below video touches on the problem when people try to equate “this is the last thing I did so therefore it is caused by that”.

It reminds me of when I worked in the hospitality industry and hearing a customer claim that they got sick and say that the last thing they at was from our establishment. The problem is that it can take up to 24 hours (or more in some cases) for food related illnesses to kick in – in other words it could be something you ate at breakfast or lunch or even the late night snack before you went to bed or the midnight snack when you got up and had a bad case of the munchies.

There are people reporting based on reports based on reports which go all the way back to some random tweet from X. It reminds me of the ‘Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)’ where anti-vaxxers will make references back to it but what they ignore is the fact that anyone can report anything they want even if there is no cause and effect. For example, a person is vaccinated and the next day they have constipation then report it to the reporting system. Any evidence to demonstrate cause and effect? hope, it is the equivalent of someone scribbling an opinion on a toilet cubical wall.

This whole situation reminds me of the iOS 17.5 bug that was reported where there was an element of truth but it grew into something well beyond what actually happened (link) because an individual posted to Reddit claiming that he had reset his phone and that the photos came back. The problem? the guy lied, later admitted that he only removed his account but hadn’t done a full phone reset, then he deleted his original post and the follow up post. The net result of that spreading of misinformation and disinformation? weeks of speculation and even to this day people bring up this debunked claim – it is almost as though lies seemingly live forever even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What are the chances that when the issue is gotten to the bottom of that we’ll see Microsoft vindicated and we find out that it’ll be something as silly as people not updating their SSD firmware or a kernel driver that was causing the problem the whole time.

Btw, it isn’t as though Apple is immune to it – years ago there was an extension a vendor included which relied on private APIs (something you should never do because there is no guarantee that compatibility won’t be broken in the future or not cause issues in the future) which resulted in the macOS having to have a built in check to remove the app before the install went ahead. Many ‘tech YouTubers’ live up the old adage “enough knowledge to be dangerous but not enough to be useful” where they’ll have that toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance thus giving their audience the appearance of knowing what they’re talking about but in reality they’re as clueless as their audience with the exception that they know a few tech sounding words they drop in a sentence that make it appear as though they know what they’re talking about.

I tend to live by the basic rule – if something is setup a certain way and the only way to change it is to go poking around in the inner workings of the system then it is clear that those who developed the system didn’t intend on someone like me to fiddle with it. When you fiddle with something that the developer hadn’t intended then you may get lucky that there are no negative consequences but then again it may bite you in the backside at a later date.