Ask Lemmy

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.

Movies always show engineers and tech programmers as being young asocial nerds. We're not all young.

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.

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.

Hobby: Skydiving

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Yes, wing suites are cool. Wish I had more jumps on them.

5. 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...

6. 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 wish I could hack into infrastructure in real time.

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

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.

lmao is that Ubuntu?!

BAZINGA!

LAUGH TRACK

I work in IT so basically everything

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.

Hobby: Telescopes upside-down or back-to-front, pointed through windows, with aperture caps on, without eyepieces, under heavy light pollution and glare, magically show Hubble-level images of something only visible from the opposite hemisphere.

Job: The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds. Ffs we can't even get two departments to cooperate on a common database format.

I used to work in organ transplants, and like literally everything related to organ transplants in film or tv is entirely wrong. Every medical drama, even the ones that pride themselves on realism, always try to make transplants and donation more dramatic, which is absurd when you consider how dramatic the reality actually is.

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.

There's more to sideshow than sword swallowing, there's more to fire performance than fire breathing

Programming.

It's long and actually even longer.

If any of the detectives from Law and Order come in to my bar I absolutely will not remember that random patron from five days ago.

They think programmers are super smart and great at maths.

Click click clickety-click... I'm in! Click click click... okay, I've hacked the corporate security system and unlocked all the doors, click click... here's the floor plan.

Can you disable the cameras?

Hang on... click click... okay you're good.

1. My car doesn't have a cigarette lighter
2. My fridge has food in it
3. There is/isn't a guy named Ivan at work

MRIs

Far too many movies and TV shows use the magnet to cover for their lazy writing by treating it like something that can be turned on and off like a light.

The magnet in an MRI is one of the coolest things in medicine, and writers get it wrong all the time. In the vast majority of cases, it's always on.

In simple terms, an electromagnet works by running a current in a circle and creating a magnetic field. In an MRI, the current is flowing in what is essentially a closed loop of wire. However, in this case the wire is cooled with liquid helium so it becomes a superconductor.

They induce a current in the wire which creates the magnetic field ("ramp up" the magnet). Because it is superconducting, the current doesn't stop. Once it's ramped up, it no longer requires any external power. As long as the current is flowing the magnetic field remains.

There are only two ways to "turn off" the magnet.

One way is to "ramp down". Essentially the opposite process that is used to get it running in the first place. That's what they do if they need to stop it for service.

The other way is to quench the magnet. You hit the emergency stop and vent off the liquid helium. Without the helium, the wire warms and resists the current and the flow stops.

Quenching a magnet is a magnificently dramatic process. Someone hits the panic button, and there is a loud roar as the helium escapes. Clouds of condensation form around the exterior of the building as the cold gas escapes. In the event some construction crew screwed up and accidentally sealed the vents, there could be an explosion from the rapidly expanding gas.

If writers want to use an MRI as a plot device, have an accident and require someone to quench the magnet to save a life. You'd have the immediate drama from the accident and the quench, and then you'd have the long term drama of the hospital trying to figure out where the money to fix the MRI would come from.

https://youtu.be/9SOUJP5dFEg

it's neither a hobby or a job But the trope that a very complicated, very dangerous situation can be solved by just one person and a gun.

It's unfortunately so ingrained into the Hollywood story lines that people, especially in the US, think that that's reality.

The idea of the rugged individual has destroyed the idea of societal support to the point that some people are actually terrified to ask for help in anyway.

We almost never uncover accursed tomes or massive government conspiracies.

(Archivist)

You don't need a huge wrench when working with the p-trap under the sink and water wont start spraying everywhere either as drains aren't pressurized.

Sprinklers react to heat, not smoke.

Not all spriklers go off at the same time in most systems. Only the sprinkler heads affected by heat.

The water coming out of sprinklers initially isn't clear but dark, rusty sludge. Sometimes even black as ink.

there's a scene in "Silo" where a character needs to repair a massive steam-powered turbine that is off-balance, scraping at the housing, and heading towards collapse. all fine and we'll, it's sci-fi, so whatever, they can make magic quick fixes to move the plot along.

what really bugged me, for some reason, is how characters started touching the internal components immediately after it powers down - I have to wait for significantly smaller motors to cool off before handling them, especially if they're rotating poorly with a bad bearing, and burning from friction.