You do not have to be a genius to be a great chess player. Also, thats not how you properly set up the board.
Aliens connect their nanoprobes to your the main character’s PC and download the Internet so they can judge humanity.
Even if they had magic tech to do this, they’re still constrained by the MC’s shitty 10Mbit DSL. Somehow they can download everything humanity has ever done in 5 seconds, and all while pictures of it are showing up on the monitor for no good reason.
Movies: “What? You’re making robots? But what if they become evil?”
Me: “No, actually you can prevent that easily by…”
Movies: “Ghost in the machine! Bugs! Hackers! Robot becomes self-concious and disables its safeguards! Evil!”
Me: “Our robots are not even that advanced. Also you can easily add an off switch and…”
Movies: “They’ve bridged their off-switch! Terminators kill all humans now. All robots become evil!”
Me: "Whether they become evil or not depends on how you implement it and also … "
Movies: “Evil robots! More evil robots! The downfall of humanity!”
Every. Damn. Movie. For once I would like to see a movie with robots that don’t turn into mindless “cuz evil” killing machines. It’s really annoying how widespread the fearmongering about robots is in movies.
Also, why the fuck do all robots have the worst possible speech synthesizers ever? Heck, even the announcements in subway trains and buses have better natural sounding computer voices than robots in movies.lmao is that Ubuntu?!
BAZINGA!
LAUGH TRACK
My first and only exposure to that god-awful show as a small snipped my GF at the time insisted I watch.
“I’m playing games. On an… emulator”
11 SECONDS OF WILD LAUGHTER
I would like to see ONE person depicted as playing video games (M&K or controller) and have their hand inputs look believable, not just randomly flailing at the device. I would die a happy man if the inputs corresponded to what’s displayed in the game.
I spent my life as a game dev.
This is the gamer equivalent of when you hear music and see someone playing an instrument in a show/movie, and nothing they are doing matches the music.
I wish I could hack into infrastructure in real time.
There’s more to sideshow than sword swallowing, there’s more to fire performance than fire breathing
Accountants actually spend hardly any time doing tax work. And in most countries tax returns are automatic anyway, so no, AI isn’t going to destroy all the accountant jobs.
- My car doesn’t have a cigarette lighter
- My fridge has food in it
- There is/isn’t a guy named Ivan at work
Movies always show engineers and tech programmers as being young asocial nerds. We’re not all young.
We’re also not all asocial, I mean, I am, but I’ve met programmers who are extremely social.
I’ve worked with programmers who actually look after their physical health too - it’s nuts!
It really seems to be one way or the other but never in between.
It’s the mind set/skills and the hobbies you choose. As one of my competition body builder coworkers puts it…he nerds out on his own body. There is a lot of tracking and planning for body building. Not unlike several other nerdy hobbies.
The same problem solving skillset I use with computers helps me with cars…so I work on cars in my free time. Car issues and computer issues are usually diagnosed similarly. It could be any one of a number of things causing your problem. Test and verify…
I started IT thinking it was genuinely telling people to turn their computers off and on again. I feel that’s like a 1% though. Most of the times it’s actual issues. At my work some stuff is hardware, web, databases and I wasn’t expecting this when I first started.
Thanks IT Crowd
They have a good gig in that show, tucked away in the basement, virtually no work to do, no deadlines, no kanban…
I’m an electrician who installs (mostly) commercial electrical systems, including fire alarm systems.
In most cases, pulling a fire alarm pull station doesn’t set off the fire suppression sprinklers. The pull station just sets off the alarm and calls the Fire Department. Sprinklers aren’t automatically activated. The water in the sprinkler pipes is under constant pressure. Sprinkler heads are just nozzles with a little heat-activated stopper in them. When that stopper heats enough, it breaks and opens the nozzle, allowing water to flow (they can also be broken by fucking with them or hitting them with something). But there’s no mechanism that sets off other sprinkler heads when one goes off. Each head needs to be heat activated individually to go off. You see in movies and TV all the time someone pulling a pull station and that setting off sprinklers throughout the entire building, or someone lighting a fire in a small closet and that setting off sprinklers throughout the building. That simply isn’t how they work.
(note: there are some fire suppression systems which do have remote activation, but those are not standard. They’re usually used somewhere like a data center or a lab where there’s extremely expensive stuff that you want to be sure doesn’t get damaged. And those systems usually use a fire suppression foam or powder, rather than water.)
Also, the water in sprinkler pipes is NASTY. It’s been sitting in those pipes for years, sometimes decades. It gets black and sludgy pretty quickly. It stains/destroys anything it touches.
Deviant talked about a movie idea where setting off the sprinklers might actually be a better bet than fire call points when trying to escape a secure hospital in the US.
What was their reasoning? I’m assuming the scenario is a patient in a secured hospital who isn’t supposed to leave trying to escape?
link (story is near the beginning!)
This reminds me of an episode of Taskmaster where a contestant plans to gain extra time by hitting the alarm in the lift (elevator) but instead of slamming to a halt there’s just a little voice message and the lift carries on as usual.
Hackers is a movie without lies and nothing can convince me otherwise.
Most accurate hacking sequences ever. Everyone knows that the most common file structures involve a 3D rendered cybercity.
Also, it’s amazing that the most commonly used passwords are still God, Sex, Secret, and Love. Why would people use anything other than just a single word for a password?
They just have a secret kink for becoming compromised by dictionary attacks, specifically.
Came to make sure this was here… But man the panic when you find out the pull station DOES cause a deluge… All those pretty people getting soaked in that rainbow colored water, the smell.
We almost never uncover accursed tomes or massive government conspiracies.
(Archivist)
almost
Hmm
Hobby: Skydiving
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Free fall is at most 65 seconds on a normal jump. My personal record is jumping from 28,000 feet and I was in free fall for around 85 seconds. That’s it, there is no such thing as a 5 minute free fall, unless you are looking to break an altitude record.
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If you run up to a skydiver and pull their Pilot Chute (PC) out and throw it into the wind, nothing will happen. The gear is designed to work at free fall speeds. A 10mph wind will not pull the main out. If you pull on the PC bridle hard enough to actually pull the main out of its compartment… You will just have a main parachute in its deployment bag closed by rubber bands, or other method and it will just be laying on the ground. You will also get a well deserved punch in the mouth by more than one jumper. If you pull the reserve handle you will probably get murdered and there will be no witnesses, especially if the hanger was full of jumpers. They will just hide your body and you will have deserved your fate.
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BASE jumping and Skydiving are as related as Hockey and Figure Skating. Sure there is some overlap, but one cannot do the other without training. Also BASE is an acronym. Building, Antenna, Span, Earth. Bridges fall under Span BTW. No, I am not a BASE jumper, although I have jumped the Bridge in WV. So yeah, I guess I have my S.
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Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.
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You cannot talk in free fall. The old movie trope of talking back and forth is simply not possible. How difficult is it to talk in a car with the windows open going down the road at 70mph? Now, remove the windshield and drive the car 120mph…
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The “parachute not opening” is not even in the top 10 concerns when jumping. The gear works and we jump with two chutes. There is a whole lot of bullshit that can happen before we get to deployment altitude. Not the least of which is just getting to the DZ in the morning. I always considered my drive to the DZ my most dangerous part of the day. Second most dangerous is being in the airplane. I’m actually relieved to exit the aircraft as at that point I have a better chance of making it to the ground safely than the pilot.
I’ve been skydiving once, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’m in Arizona now, so there’s probably a couple places to do it.
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Aside from Mr. Robot, almost every show that features software or computers completely butchers the details. My favorite offender? Mythic Quest. The main cast supposedly runs a massive MMORPG, yet their day-to-day activities have almost nothing to do with how game development or even basic software work actually functions.
It is like if ER was about hospital staff moving random boxes labeled “coils” back and forth while claiming to perform life-saving surgery. That is how far off it feels.
What really gets me is that Mr. Robot proved it is possible to do it right. If you treat the subject matter with respect, you can absolutely make something compelling and realistic. But since it is all just “nerd stuff” to most writers, and none of them are C++ goblins, we get tech scenes written by people who probably think JSON is a fitness drink.
I’d give shows like Mythic Quest / Silicone Valley a pass, they are comedy shows so some creative liberty is expected
Mythic Quest is to game dev what It’s Always Sunny is to bartending
Yeah I still enjoyed the show but it required some huge suspension of disbelief, and I never even worked in game dev, just with what I know as an outsider…
Ever see the famous NCIS episode where two of them share one keyboard to fend off a super hacker?
No, that one was actually pretty spot on. My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me it’s pretty similar there.
I like how the QA department for Mythic Quest is always just two people. A game as supposedly huge as MQ would need way more (unless they mentioned outsourcing QA and I never caught it).
