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.

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.

You do not have to be a genius to be a great chess player. Also, thats not how you properly set up the board.

lmao is that Ubuntu?!

BAZINGA!

LAUGH TRACK

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.

I wish I could hack into infrastructure in real time.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.