It's not a movie, it's a game!
Trump's fascination with Alcatraz was spurred by watching "Escape from Alcatraz" on PBS.
I suspect the "Golden Dome" was inspired by playing too much "Missile Command"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command
1149 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2015
Worked for a major CAD company, many years ago, doing API development. One particular API, written by a long departed predecessor, took a single string as a parameter with all sub-parameters separated by spaces. For the non-technical, this is very poor practice & only something a complete novice would do. The only thing we could do was to document the sub-parameters & point users to better designed APIs.
Later on, we got hold of our major competitor's product, which also had an API. They also had an identical, stringly typed API! They had a chance to do it properly but deliberately chose to copy our stupid mistake!
Worked for a company (c2010) whose main app allowed a user to drop icons on a virtual canvas. Think of something like Visio. Anyway, they decided to update the icon set for a major release. There were some 300+ icons and each one was lovingly redone in 3D with shading by a specialist company at a cost of 100 GBP per icon. There were all sorts of icons for man, woman, policeman, policewoman, male+female lawyers, car, truck, boat, etc. We showed an initial version to some customers and their response was: "We like the icons but the women's breasts are too large!"
Visited some friends who had an Alexa:
[Me] Alexa! Tell me a fart joke.
[Alexa] The fart skill is not enabled by default. Would you like to enable it?
[Me] YES! YES! YES!
[Alexa] [tells fart jokes]
After a few glasses of wine:
[Me] Alexa! What is a schlong?
[Alexa] Schlong is a river in Italy.
[Me] Err, I they she got that one wrong...
Having been a professional mechanical engineer in a previous life, there are some things ChatGPT will never be able to do:
- placate client about project being late
- make sense of customer's conflicting requirements
- explain to boss why project is over budget
- beg workshop to drop everything and do 'urgent' job
- drink beer with fabricators on site
Years ago, a software company I worked for was looking at buying another software company. The other company's developer had died (!) and I was asked to look at their source code. First off, there were no project files, just a mass of source files. It went downhill from there with loads of missing files and masses of compiler errors. How they managed to build it was beyond me as the only person who knew how was, err, 'permanently uncontactable'. We passed on that acquisition.
Worked at a patent attorney's in the days before computers. This industry wastes paper like you wouldn't believe. Even the small practice I was in had rooms full of filling cabinets, stuffed with correspondence. Anyway, one of our overseas associates had a fire in their building and lost *everything*. The only way to recover was for them to write to everyone and ask for copies of all communications ever. This generated even more paper. It took a few months but they mostly survived.
When it's 5 bugs! Worked on a very late, very over budget project doing some testing for the prime contractor. The system was so unstable that I literally could not write the bugs fast enough! After about a week of constant bug logging, I was called into the manager's office. They were really pleased about the work I was doing but the bug numbers were making them (prime contractor) look bad. Instead of logging a bug per problem ,their solution was to roll several problems into one 'bug report'. That way the issue was recorded but their bug numbers were acceptable. I left shortly afterwards.
'Security professional' turns up late and is a middle aged, overweight man in a dirty tracksuit who hasn't seen a gym or soap for quite some time. He's 'forgotten' his gun, so has brought his son's Nerf blaster instead. Apparently, his Escalade is in for a service and the 'courtesy' car is a filthy, tired, beaten up sub-compact. The area is new to him, so he gets lost several times trying to take you to your function before accosting random strangers for directions because the battery on his smartphone has died. You eventually get to the venue several hours late but he says he'll have to leave you at the corner because that's all he's been paid for. His parting comment is a request to give him a 5 star rating. It is now starting to rain and you've left your umbrella in his car.
Borland C++ Builder which used the same compiler back end as Delphi. You could even use Delphi pascal code and controls seamlessly with Builder. It was truly a killer combo. Used it a few years ago on a small project. It was like meeting an old girlfriend after many years - still looking good, still got it and you still would.
Was an engineer in a previous life and was in the weekly meeting. There were about a dozen or so people in the meeting, so we were burning about $1500 AUD per hour. Someone raised an item about stainless steel bolts. This soon degenerated into an extended, 15 min discussion about grade of stainless steel (304 vs 316 vs 316L), size (M8 vs M10) and head (hex vs allen). From the time they were spending on it, I though we were talking about serious quantities of bolts ie 100k+. Turns out it was just 10 bolts, total value < $10 AUD. We'd just burnt $1000 AUD on something which could have been paid from petty cash.
* 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
* 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates.
* 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.
Still better than BoJo