Movies always show engineers and tech programmers as being young asocial nerds. We’re not all young.
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…
Having really unhealthy co-workers can be, uh, eye opening
We’re also not all asocial, I mean, I am, but I’ve met programmers who are extremely social.
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.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.
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.
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!)
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.
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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I work in IT so basically everything
So two people typing in one keyboard doesn’t make the hack faster?
I loved that entire scene for all the wrong reasons
I believe that was what they were going for.
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…
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.
I have facial blindness so I’d be a cops worst nightmare as a witness. Yeah I know the guy left literally 3 minutes ago but I could not pick him out of a lineup.
I worked in toxicology. Likewise, if any detective showed up in my lab for results, let alone talked to anyone anywhere near their samples, they can say goodbye to their case.
Why’s that?
We were unaffiliated with the department of safety (cops), they have no business being in our building unless it’s to drop off samples or for training. Cases are usually handled by prosecutors by that point, so if any defense lawyer got word that a cop was in there harassing us about results that would be highly unusual and they’d have a pretty strong case for tossing it due to tampering.
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.
Not necessarily, if they have “magic tech”, they could be uploading a virus that rapidly spreads across the entire internet, making every machine broadcast its data through electromagnetic waves or something like that, picking up all those transmitions with said magic tech.
It would still take longer just to read the data off off all the storage, but theoretically not DSL
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.
This is so informative.
And it reeks
Don’t drink the sprinkler water. Got it.
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.
I had no idea that once the current was in the magnet, no more power was required to keep it going.
Superconducting magnets… superconductors are one of those areas where science gets weird.
I remember reading an article from a few years ago a cop brought a handgun into the room after ignoring staff warnings… Then, hit the quench button.
EDIT: it was last year. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/lapd-officer-lost-gun-in-mri-machine-during-mistargeted-raid-report-says/
The magnet in an MRI is one of the coolest things in medicine
Literally and figuratively!
That is insanely interesting never knew that
I used to install and maintain MRIs (as well as some other medical imaging modalities) and this seems to be wrong any time I’ve ever seen it in media.
- people will be shown in the magnet room with steel wheelchairs/patient tables/chairs/etc. or even their phones. None of that should be entering the room at all.
- the images shown on the diagnostics will be like a radiogram or PET or something that would not show from an MRI.
- the scan only takes a minute for a “picture”, when in reality having an MRI scan can easily take an hour. You may have some people taking only 15 minutes or so, but those are the quick ones. Clinicians will order a whole list of scans and each one takes several minutes.
Years ago where I work a resident decided to be helpful and move a patient into the room with the MRI.
Of course, the patient was supposed to be transferred off the ferrous metal gurney before coming into the room. The resident didn’t know that.
The MRI pulled the gurney into the room and it slammed into the scanner. Luckily it didn’t actually flip up and crush the patient.
They told the patient to stay where he was and they loaded the gurney down with a bunch of full five gallon water bottles. Once they had enough weight on it, they transferred the patient off the gurney. A bunch of guys pulled the gurney out of the room, amazingly without any damage to the scanner.
Yes I had two separate occasions of having to remove a ferrous table from a magnet. One was able to be removed with 5 of us pulling (using a tie strap for safety to make sure it didn’t fling when we repositioned it), but the other we had to ramp down the magnet to remove from the room.
How about small things like paperclips and staples? My guess is that it won’t be too hard to pull but not so easy to get a good hold.
Unfortunately they did get in the room sometimes. For the most part, techs are really good about keeping the magnet room clear and not bringing ferrous items inside. However, even when things like that did get inside they really aren’t a problem to just pick up with your hands (or sometimes our titanium tools like pliers or a screwdriver to get a better grip on them). The pull is strong, but based off the amount of ferrous material so those things that are just a few grams are not really notable.
I had an MRI recently for a Kidney stone, and I don’t remember it taking very long.
For a kidney, they probably used the body coil and it would have taken around 15 minutes. Does that sound right?
that is SO cool, can you write dick wolf
Dick won’t accept my correspondence!
It wouldn’t be nearly as fast, but why would you not just stop the condenser pump so the helium stops cycling through, causing the freezing, instead of venting it off? Sure, venting it off would be faster, but in the lack of an actual emergency, you’d think you could wait like 5 minutes.
If it’s not an emergency, then you let the vendor follow the procedure they have in place for shutting down the magnet.
Edit:
For example: We had a flood in an MRI room. The vendor was called out to ramp the magnet down so that they could deal with the flood.
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.
Also the images they show are only possible with a camera and a slow shutter and image processing; what you see through the eyepiece is completely different and usually just a bluish smudge.
The Government knows everything about you and any employee can pull up any info on anyone in seconds
DOGE is working on that
It helps when you don’t care if the answers are true, just that you have “answers”.
Yeah working on making it worse
Once the second department is eliminated, the problem will be solved!
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.
Oooh. I love medical dramas, I seem to love to ruin them for myself by finding out what’s real and what’s not. That said I desperately want to know the details behind a real organ transplant, now that you’ve mentioned it in that way. Are you able to elaborate?
Sure, I can share non-confidential stuff of course.
Like one thing tv and movies always get wrong is how much information is shared about who gets what. Donor families wait years to send or receive anonymous communications through the org, because both parties need to approve even the anonymous letters. If both sides are interested after a few more years, they might be able to eventually meet. I don’t remember the recommended waiting periods off the top of my head, but it was exceptionally rare for donor families to ever meet a recipient.
Another thing everyone gets wrong is who is in charge of care and when. You’d never have the same doctor treating the patient, declaring them brain dead, and then recovering and transplanting the organs. I understand tv shows can’t have hundreds of actors, but any hospital will have a team of dedicated transplant surgeons, and there will be dozens of transplant hospitals involved in the organ allocation. Having one small group of people involved in both the care and the transplant is like having the farmer who grows corn also be the grocer who sells it, the chef who cooks it, and the busser who takes away your dishes. Those people barely communicate if they even know each other at all. They certainly aren’t getting involved in each of the others’ jobs.
Unfortunately that one spills into the real world. People will say “don’t put Organ Donor on your license, or they won’t try to save you.” If you just think about that for even a moment, you realize how absurd it is.
There’s plenty more, but those are the ones that tend to pop up every time.
From the emergency medicine perspective on that last bit…we don’t care if you have a DNR somewhere on file. If you show up in cardiac arrest and someone isn’t shoving an official POLST into our hands, we’re running the code. We’d rather someone try (and fail) to sue for malpractice for saving them than accidentally let someone die that didn’t want to.
Exactly, and that’s your job. Like, people who think that doctors will murder them for organs also work at a job where they won’t hold the elevator for anyone pushing a mail cart. How long would you keep a job where you intentionally suck at it to help someone else do their job?
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.
The floor plan thing, in particular. Every time I change jobs, I search the company intranet for a layout so I can find my way around. The amount of hours I’ve wasted, to no avail…
And somehow those plans always open up in some 3D render that shows everything like the HVAC pathways.
Imagine the character saying, hang on I gotta spend the next 3 hours trying to convert this into a modern format, post all my research to reddit begging for help, ultimately give up, manually replot everything and in 19 months finally get a reddit reply that says “solved it”
On the rare occasion a company sends an email with a floor layout, a save the shit so fast.
It’s never just on the network somewhere but clearly someone has it. There are layouts on the wall for fire code.
Guarantee it’ll be called FloorPlanFinalCopy2.ppt and will be for the company’s previous office.
To be fair there are a few Unify router setups in even big corporate settings that use the default passwords, and if you can get into the control panel, you pretty much could disable basically anything in a few keystrokes
I have changed annoying PA music in public venues from my phone, for example
But yeah, movies almost never get IT or secops correct
Of you don’t mind explaining, how? I can only code for maths purposes, but this sounds cool
So out of the box a lot of equipment has a set of standard default passwords, you can usually get them from the company’s own manuals or websites
A lot of people also never bother setting up their own passwords, so a lot of these devices are insecure.
If you are walking around a place, and see they offer free wifi, you can connect and the landing page usually gives you an idea of the manufacturer of their equipment. You look up the manuals and it will tell you the default IP address and login passwords for the management console. Try them. If they work, congrats you are a hacker and technically a criminal (so don’t do this at all ever even in minecraft)
If the site is REALLY STUPID none of these have changed, and from any web browser you can do anything you want to the network. You’ll need to learn how those kinds of devices work because the UIs aren’t designed for ease but you can still navigate them from a phone.
Unify is the most common midgrade equipment used by small to medium sites, and even as part of larger networks for campus style mesh networks but it’s unlikely a team with the skill to set that up would leave default passwords on
ubnt / ubnt is unify.
Deal with network equipment a few times and that stuff will start to stick.
Finding defaults is easy, search for vendor name followed by “default username password”
Is your job/hobby bank robbing?
LOL I’m thinking of shows where they infiltrate evil headquarters. The nerdy computer whiz Asian girl with the green side ponytail goes click-click-click, and then before you could find a song on your own computer she’s like oh look, here’s the incriminating evidence that proves they’ve been dumping toxic waste into the river for 30 years!
I don’t know about OP, but I remember reading and watching a lot of videos about blue hat hacker, whose sole job is to break things then report to secops so they fix it. They test everything including social hacks and physical ingress testing (getting in and out of a place they aren’t supposed to be in). One described their job as professional trespasser. The crazy shit they did was simple and could get them walking right into data centers without anyone noticing.
Programming.
It’s long and actually even longer.
And involves a lot of sobbing
Ah, the rollercoasteg of “I’m an idiot fraud” and “Oh my god I’m actually really good at this!”
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.
