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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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 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).
I work at a bank. Every bank heist scene makes me fucking cringe lmao. Why would only one person know the code to something??? Why are safety deposit boxes treated as some super special thing? Daredevil just pissed me off with this so much lol
Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing
It is surprisingly difficult to get into a good dance position, especially for the standard (waltz, tango, foxtrot, quickstep, Viennese waltz) dances. Two actors walk up to each other and it’s apparent even before they touch that they have no idea WTF they are doing: they aren’t even standing up correctly.
Hobby 2: Chess
Smart guy walks over and absolutely beats the pants off of anyone else playing like 30 seconds after they get taught the rules or from glancing over the shoulder of someone else playing the game. It’s all “aha! Mate in 4!”.
No way dude. It is way, way not that easy. There’s “good at chess” and there’s “GOOD at chess”. Unless you are part of a very large club or are taking lessons from someone at or above the master level, you probably don’t know anybody in the second category. Dr. House is not going to blindfold beat anyone like that.
My favorite version of the chess one is from the Simpsons when the teachers at the school go on strike. Bart now has a ton of time on his hands and ends up playing chess against 3 people at the same time in the park. A bystander comments on how smart he must be right before all 3 opponents checkmate him. https://youtu.be/zLcAu1VuP0w
Hobby 1: Ballroom dancing
No I’m pretty sure Strictly Ballroom is a completely accurate portrayal of ballroom dancing.
Haven’t seen it, but it’s been recommended to me.
There’s a stand out episode of Burn Notice that always comes to mind as an example, but I don’t have it handy to share.
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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.
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”.
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.
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.
And that’s why the movie Falling Down was so great.
They think programmers are super smart and great at maths.
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!”
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
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”
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
Is your job/hobby bank robbing?
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.
Hobby: Video gaming.
Try to determine what kind of video game a movie character is playing by what they’re doing to the controller.
Few games actually reward button mashing and yet video games are still often portrayed as a mash-fest. For one I’d like to see some media where the actor is playing something turn based.
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.
Silo is absolute pants on head as far as realism. Here’s just ONE example: the light bulbs in the bunker(s). To show what an immense challenge it would be to keep light-bulbs in the bunker, let’s make some assumptions:
Suppose the silo houses 10,000 people and has around 150 floors. If each person uses about 1.5 rooms on average, and each room has two light bulbs, that’s already 30,000 bulbs just for personal and work spaces. Add another 7,500 bulbs for common areas like hallways and stairwells, assuming 50 bulbs per floor. Throw in another 2,500 for things like emergency lighting and equipment. That brings the total to roughly 40,000 bulbs.
Now, consider that the average bulb lasts around 2,000 hours. If lights run about 16 hours a day, a bulb would last approximately 125 days. With 40,000 bulbs in use, about 320 of them would burn out every single day. That means someone needs to replace 320 bulbs a day, every day, just to keep the place lit. That alone is a full-time job for a crew of maintenance workers.
Storage becomes another massive problem. If they want to keep a 10-year supply of light bulbs, they would need 320 bulbs a day times 365 days times 10 years, which adds up to about 1.17 million bulbs. That is a staggering amount of fragile, breakable glass to store in an underground bunker.
And what about manufacturing? Are they making glass, vacuum-sealing bulbs, mining tungsten, and wiring filaments all inside the silo? Are there glassblowing workshops next to the hydroponics farm? Are they running vacuum pumps on diesel just to get replacement bulbs?
This is just one mundane aspect of life in the silo, and it already falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Unless there’s a whole floor dedicated to crafting light bulbs by hand like some sort of monastery of electricians, it simply doesn’t add up.
Silo also has several falls that should absolutely kill people. One that’s like dozens of feet into the pile that they throw all sorts of sharp metal objects on? Dead.
Free falling off a bridge with just a rope tied around your waist that stops you? At the very least your back is fully broken, but that fall looked long enough that you should just be dead. Full Gwen Stacy.
I said it loud too while watching it: “that shit’s over 100°C… and they’re going right in?”
If there is a god to bless people, then people like you deserve it the most.
You act that way because you work in a career that can dismember you if you are careless, so you’ve trained yourself in ways that almost no actor could ever capture, and certainly no screenwriter would ever consider
Or it would be boring to watch them sit around and wait for the thing to cool off
