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What annoys me about (new) macgyver... he never has to iterate. No trial-and-error or bug-fixing. His hacks work the first time, every time. IME the ‘tell’ of real tech geniuses is not ideas but that they iterate and traverse decision trees with uncanny prescience and speed.
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A show that portrayed that well was House. A med-student friend told me that the plots were medically ludicrous, but the thinking style portrayed is how tech geniuses should be portrayed.
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Talented tech people give the impression of being bug-wise beyond their years. If you need to have seen a bug at least once to recognize the symptoms, they behave like they’ve logged 100 years worth of bug-fixes by age 21.
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To a first approximation, your engineering ability is the number of bugs you've fixed
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MacGyver gets one thing right, the ability to see solutions to problems in shit just lying around. But it’s stops there. Like showing an OODA loop with just the (re)orientation part and montaging away the looping before/after, which is the actual interesting part.
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I’d love to see an engineering version of House. I bet it would be surprisingly popular. Hollywood underestimates the dramatic potential of the material and the intelligence of average audiences for appreciating it. If House could work so can this.
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Props though, at least there’s real vaguely plausible stuff in the show. Most shows reduce tech to one Hacker God who solves all problems by typing really really fast to hack computers. The tech scene always ends with, “ok, I’m in!”
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