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.
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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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.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
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
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.
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
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
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.
Programming.
It’s long and actually even longer.
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 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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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 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.
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.
