this is nostupidquestions, not /g/. take your meds

Yeah, I don’t think Spooner is identical to Elijah Baley, but I see they connect on the technophobe aspects, if nothing else. It’s been a while since I’ve read the books, in other aspects they’re probably vastly different.

Do people not like I, Robot?

I haven’t heard anyone personally that outwardly disliked it, I picked it based on the RT/metacritic score and me enjoying it despite that. I was way too young to remember fresh reactions to the movie when it came out.

Ah yeah, the Chuck Taylor reference, it was brief, but considering how it had been criticized it must’ve stuck out in how obvious it sounded. It’s at least a far cry from being Hawaii 5-0 tier, thankfully.

I, Robot, especially after reading the books. It functions as a combo of the books, but set roughly where the first book took place in, using a variant of the protagonist from the sequels. The robots taking over as they did, though, wasn’t really accurate, even just regarding the laws of robotics, but it worked for the movie’s conflict. In the books, they get a larger hold on humanity, but to help them go past Earth to become an intragalactic society. For a one-off, though, I can see the directions the movie took to give it that close-ended feeling. Also, the implications of robots and humans, and Spooner as a chracter were pretty faithful to the source material, IMO.

Not exactly. When it comes to calculations that could be super unreasonable and impractical to do by hand (think multiple exponents on a number, or cosine, sine, and tangent as simple examples), they help reduce that tedium in the overall process of what you’re trying to do. There comes a point where it’d be absurd to do certain kinds of math by hand primarily. I’m not largely math-oriented, but even with calculators one could understand the reasoning behind certain concepts despite using a calculator to work through them. People who take calculus can understand it but still use a calculator.

To have a calculator to do your times tables instead of knowing them, or any basic stuff in the four units would be detrimental I feel, because you’d benefit in knowing those up front, and how to process them mentally.

There’s something that a person close to me said about certain tech/features that stuck with me and seems to click here, it was: “A lot of it just stops you from using your brain.”

Thank you for reminding me of Librewolf, I haven’t brought myself to install it yet. I wanted to move my profile over, too, though I’m unsure how seamless that would be (it’s worked with other forks I’ve tried, so maybe it’s easy).

Thankfully, I’ve been about Firefox since 2006. People can use what they like, but it does ache me inside seeing someone use Chrome, logged in with the yellow “Update” icon at the top right, an unholy trinity.