The way he says it makes perfect sense to me from a programmer point of view.
First, type of drink Second, subtype Third, whether its hot or cold
Although technically, you wouldn’t have a cold earl grey tea, but still. It makes sense.
Iced earl grey is actually really good
It is very good, the coffee bean and tea leaf can make it for you in a 32 oz cup. Back when I was getting them it was like three dollars and change.
I’ve had an iced earl gray.
But people can ask the replicator for an item any old way and it seems to work fine.
Yeah but did replicators work the same way when Picard was a young lad having his first cup of Earl Grey?
No replicators. Only the real thing.
Fake mother, notwithstanding.
'course it’s 'ot, what you want in it?
“Hot Earl Grey tea.”
*saucer section rotates 180 and reattaches*
If you order English Breakfast the computer schedules your next transporter “accident.”
Is it the computer or is it this proud Irishman?
Who do you think set up the computer?
Always make sure to conspicuously order Irish breakfast tea when the O’Brien is around to ensure proper transporter safety protocols.
Would Irish coffee be ok too? I gotta stay alert when I’m driving the ship…
If he finds out that you ordered a pint of Guinness cold instead of room temperature, he’ll just stab you himself to be sure.
Find hot-tea grey-earls in your area!
Type/variant/temp
Makes sense to me 🤷♂️
I would think a computer that can make a living person on the holodeck just by telling it to beat Data can handle “tea, Earl Grey, hot” or “Earl Grey tea, hot” or “hot Earl Grey tea.”
Edit: Really, it should just know what Picard means when he says “tea” after he’s done it multiple times.
It’s also a show from the early 90s, when talking to the computer was a fantasy. Remember how they walk around delivering tablets to people for the mail?
Little details about how technology would actually develop stand out super bad when they get close but just miss how things actually went.
It’s also a show from the early 90s, when talking to the computer was a fantasy.
Yeah TNG pilot literally has a character go “Oh you’ve never been on one of these Galaxy class ships” to Riker, after which she shows that you can ask directions from the computer. And then helpful arrows start blinking to direct Riker to the holodeck. (I don’t know if those guiding lights are ever seen again in the canon. Might be, I’m too lazy to find out rn.)
Majel Barrett sounded so young, I just watched that episode a couple of days ago.
One episode of Voyager made me giggle a bit. It’s a ship with “bio-neural circuitry”. One cold open, there’s some phenomena they want to look at, so Chakotay tells Seven who then assigns an ensign to take a pad to B’elanna in engineering with the turbolift, and then B’elanna sends a “power requisition” through another person, via a pad, to the theoretical physicist somewhere in the bowels of the ship, who then has a bit of a chat with the person delivering the pad and then enters the changes into his work station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ud8HJgUoQs
I get that with ships that complex, you might have people at different points verifying the commands, so that it’s not just automated, but since they’re all connected, what’s the point of physically walking the pads there?
And that episode aired in 2000.
In what I suspect was an unintentional callback, there’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where the computer guides someone as well. No arrows this time, it just blinks the hall lights in a pattern.
Huh. Nice.
I’m gonna get around to it after I finish TNG rewatch.
And it wasn’t arrows on TNg either, same the blinking lights
early 90s
Aliasing has been available in UNIX since the C Shell in 1978.
I doubt the makers of TNG knew a lot about UNIX.
Even if they did I doubt they would’ve used aliases. Picard’s tea “routine” is right in-line with his character.
Unfortunately (/s) plot and character development trump diligent technical details.
I was just highlighting that the technology had been invented over a decade before.
Alright? And how often do you talk to talk to bash?
The point is it’s a TV show from the 90s. They had a few misses regarding how technology would end up looking.
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Aliases are not the same as natural language processing, so saying that it already existed for a decade is kinda missing the point, because what they were describing didn’t.
They were very clearly imitating how people would find the beverage via a menu driven interface, but using voice. It’s similar to how real world initial attempts at touch driven computer interfaces had an otherwise unmodified interference mounted on a wall with a touchscreen, and immediately ran into issues with arm fatigue. They didn’t show the arm fatigue in Star Trek either because it’s a TV show and they didn’t predict the future perfectly.It wasn’t a loaded question. I meant literally how often do you speak to the bash prompt via a voice interface.
The tools and technologies that are used for a textual medium don’t port to voice interfaces, so it makes about as much sense to invoke shell scripting in this context as it does to invoke algebraic variable substitution from the 1500s.Yeah but a problem with having too many things aliased is that you eventually forget the underlying commands and when you’re on a terminal that doesn’t have your alias you can’t do anything anymore.
Picard is a guy that gets around the galaxy and probably learned the menu on replicators when he was young. And it’s possible that there’s some weird alien food that sounds like hot earl grey tea. Some older replicators are probably still in operation on some planets, and he’s found that the order of “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” is the most reliable command that works on nearly all replicators. Given how much gets around he got used to always saying it that way so even when he’s in his ready room, he still says it that way without even thinking about it.
Obviously they have to keep the tablets in airplane mode or it might screw up the navigation system causing the Enterprise to crash into a star.
“the same procedure as last year, miss sophie?”
-“the same procedure as every year, james!”
I mean, yeah. It’s just like selecting from a menu. And it’s disambiguating for the parser, which after using gpts is helpful. I mean he could have bound tegh to any thing I guess, so maybe it just makes the most sense to his logical mind
This should so have been a plot point in an actual episode… saying “hot Earl grey tea” sends an encrypted distress signal on all federation frequencies
The Enterprise uses the same drinks machine as the Heart of Gold, I see
I just assumed that he’s in the habit of doing it this way after the time he said “Hot Earl…” and suddenly there was a ripped British nobleman sitting on his replicator.
So, having seen exactly 0 episodes of Star Trek… Can someone please explain?
Bald guy (captain Picard) always orders his tea in a way that kind of sounds odd given how voice interfaces actually turned out. (Tea, Earl grey, hot)
Another character orders tea how we would do so now, and we learn that he orders it that way because otherwise the ship explodes.
But why would ordering it the other way make the ship explode?
Your confusion is justified because using the explanations given, it’s not a good joke.
There was an earlier similar joke posted that made much more sense. In a different episode of Star Trek, Beverly tells the computer to define hot as 1.9million Kelvin. This was shown in a panel of the earlier joke. So the Picard Earl Gray Hot joke becomes when Beverly asks for Hot Tea, the computer generates 1.9M Kelvin temperature tea causing the Enterprise to explode.
Unless the joke is you already have to know that whenever Beverly says “hot”, the Enterprise explodes. In which case it is a very good subtle joke.
redacted
A better joke would be if there was some sort of double meaning that the other order of words had
Charles Grey, boiled in water, appears in the replicator.
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Yeah but the subverted expectation actually has to make sense with some double meaning or unintended logical resul. If it doesn’t then nothing was subverted and no such joke occurred.
That’s what they’re asking about.
No it doesn’t. 😊
The outcome can be total nonsense and it still subverts the expectation that 1) you get tea, 2) the outcome makes sense.
If they had available footage of a stream of puppies being forcefully ejected from the replicator, that would also work.
But nothing else. Only the explosion and the puppy hose work.
OK. So, let’s just assume, just theoretically, someone in your future let’s you know you don’t have a great sense of humor, feel free to come back and read those comments again.
So, you don’t understand how a non-sequiter can be amusing, and so … I’m not funny because I understood a joke?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(literary_device
There’s something deeply weird about people insisting that humor has to be logical.
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I’ve seen every episode countless times. My reaction to this was “huh?”
Jokes need to make sense in context, or else they’re just nonsensical. That is how humor works. This does not work.
I’m sure OP has plenty of other good ones, but this one didn’t land. Just like the Enterprise!
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It’s okay to not find a joke funny, but jokes also don’t have to make sense. Sometimes the nonsense or silliness of it is what makes it funny.
Hahaha I get jokes.
Having seen the the first 639 episodes of Star Trek, I also don’t get it.
I’m imagining that the other way is the ship’s secret self destruct command.
It’s explained in a technical manual.
Be very precise with the replicator.
Captain Picard always orders tea from the computer this way (Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.) The meme makes fun of why he might do that by imagining that saying it a more “natural” way is some kind of self-destruct cue.
I’ve seen all of them, and I’d also like an explanation.
Turns out the replicator is based on Stable Diffusion.
How about just “tea” and the computer figures out the rest
Yup, just tell it that whenever he asks for tea, he wants hot Earl Grey. Maybe he liked saying the whole thing every time.
Like a vocal alias
I could see saving presets, but having the computer assume would be like when you search for something online and it returns a bunch of results that are ALMOST what you want.
Maybe if you just say “Tea” the most common result is a T-shirt or a T pipe. It feels a lot like adding “buy” to a search to clarify you want to purchase something instead of researching it.
Having the computer intuitively know what you want when you request something would require a perfect understanding of your mind and how it operates. Now do that for every single person who may use the device. Yikes!
Lately, I have to add “Wikipedia” in order to research something, because otherwise Google throws seller ads and seo optimised totally-articles-and-not-ads my way.
I think it would just replicate the whole plant.
Jade Citrus Mint, coming right up
I’ve been perusing the technical schematics of the Enterprise and I noticed something odd.
There’s no bathrooms.
When you think about it, the replicators need some kind of material to make food out of.
Put it together…
The tea earl grey is POOPIES!!!
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