:a-guy:
https://nitter.net/clare_eliza/status/1619819420465131520
At one job we had an ultra sensitive camera that could detect single photons of light and you could see cosmic rays interact with the media and emit a photon light. Driving home that day, I took comfort in knowing that my old car had physical linkages for breaks, gas, and I could turn the key at any time to turn off my car.
Meh, sometimes phones need to be level to calibrate shit, and this phone has a built in car
No phone needs to be set on a flat surface to update. This is horribly unsafe.
It’s great that it’s saying it will potentially disengage the parking brake during the update.
It feels like the engineers at Jurassic Park designed all of the failsafes
It feels like the engineers at Jurassic Park designed all of the failsafes
At least that went down due to deliberate sabotage on the part of the programmer, although part of the failure (in the book) was the usual Crichton trope of "silly soyboy engineers not thinking about [weird edge case] unlike the strong smart unorthodox thinker protagonist patriarch!" where the raptor counting program stopped counting when it reached the desired number of raptors because it was only built to determine if some had died, not if there were more than expected.
Although the entire premise is silly since basic earthworks and other mundane barriers would be sufficient, because the dinosaurs aren't any stronger than extant megafauna and so don't require ridiculous inch thick electrified steel bars. If you can contain a fucking tiger with chickenwire, you can contain raptors with it.
Writer could have made it way better if the Dino’s broke out because of cost cutting measures
That was the plot, but it was like a dumb guy's idea of cost cutting since the whole project was absurdly overengineered with all these wildly expensive safety features and it came apart because they hired a bad programmer for cheap. Like the plot of the book is they buy an island and do this absurdly lavish and worldchanging tech magic bullshit, except they cut corners to make all the cheap parts horribly substandard and that still wouldn't have materially mattered despite the active sabotage of their control systems if it didn't turn out the dinosaurs were fucking magic juggernauts that can plow through solid steel and correctly operate doors.
As much nostalgia as I have for the movie, the plot is 100% Crichton tripe in all the dumbest ways.
Also can I rant for a moment about how the end result is that because a few people (IIRC
34 in the movie,56 in the book actually I'm not sure now, I'm trying to remember them all: the ranger, two tech guys, the programmer, and the lawyer in the movie, and all of those plus jeff goldblum and the old guy in the book?) died during extraordinary circumstances during a natural disaster, a park full of ludicrously valuable literally extinct animals is just abandoned and brushed under the rug? Fucking theme parks kill people under normal operations and keep trucking without issues, zoos sometimes have deadly breakouts and just put the killer animal down afterwards and pay some fines, cruise ships are *gestures wildly at literally everything to do with cruise ships*, but a technological marvel that is functionally operating on literal magic has one comparatively small catastrophe and it gets shut down and buried? If the circumstances behind it were a dumb guy's idea of cost-cutting then the end result is this bafflingly idealistic vision of corporate accountability.But then that's every Crichton book: he's an entertaining action writer, but his plots are always complete nonsense with this bizarre mix of cynicism and idealism, both in all the wrong places.
I've had that exact same thought about Crichton for a long time. It's very telling that he was big in the 80's and 90's. I will say though, it's always amusing how most of his plots are based on some actually strange historical event and then the fantasy outlet just goes buck wild after that.
Yeah, that was another of his things where he would do some degree of research about a subject that caught his attention in order to do this sort of "hard low-sci-fi" thing that tries to ground itself in a few reasonable details before bringing in the literally magic technology or pure fantasy elements. Like Jurassic Park is full of the sort of things that might have shown up in National Geographic articles about genetics research or newspaper articles about biotech companies in the 80s and 90s, it just then takes like the pop science journalism ideas and extrapolates them into a world where the most wildly ideal possible circumstances are true and all the messy bits aren't an issue because you can just science them away.
It's an interesting style and I think it does make for cool worldbuilding, though I can't help but feel like it's also irresponsible in a way, like there's a real danger of spreading disinformation through it intentionally or not because so many consumers really do just absorb whatever they're fed and that attempt at faux-realism can shape their worldview in dangerous ways. I think the worst offender from Crichton in particular was about how climate researchers are a murderous cabal carrying on a hoax for funding which formed one of the go-to chud talking points, like I literally had a teacher in high school who repeated that conspiracy theory during class as a fact.
I've often said that if an author has a point to make they shouldn't just imply it or try to show it through a story, they should beat the reader over the head with it and textually tell it to them repeatedly; the corollary to that then is that one should avoid textually stating and making clear points which are harmful and wrong because people absorb things through repetition and even ideas in fantasy can worm their way into the broader ideas of the reader and contribute to their worldview (see things like "trying to change the status quo just causes more harm than it solves" and "revolutionaries are either silly and misguided or cynical would-be despots" that get beaten into Americans by pop culture plots that show these things over and over again).
Stem nerds in the oil companies at least did climate change on purpose
"Yeah, but earthworks sound expensive. We want it to look safe, not cost safe."
Elon musk decided to have his company build the worst, most dangerous car software just to prove all the expert software engineers that said, "don't put proprietary software blobs in charge of important things" right.
If you think about it, he's a hero.
