• Sometimes you just can’t, so yeah verifying that 2x4 does in fact equal 8 can save a potential headache.

      • You never know, you maybe found the exception.

        I like playing factory games, so lots of little ratio calculations, they tend to blur/blend together with how close some are sometimes.

        Like this one makes 5 every 3 seconds, this one makes 1 every 10 seconds. So gotta balance everything nicely.

  • 13 days

    I’ve actually been using this less, now

    I used to often punch simple summations into google, because it was convenient (I always have an empty tab open on one of my windows) and the risk of getting something wrong is too great to not spend the time quickly typing in “27+14-3+8”

    but now it sometimes sends formulas, that were previously evaluated just fine in the search bar calculator function, to the AI response. and that’s not a calculator.

    • “Well, you see, boiling water on the stove is the past, now we boil water on an engine block by redlining it.”

    • 12 days

      Cmd+space on macos or alt+space on KDE open a floating text input which does math (and currency conversion!).

      On Samsung phones you can have a side-bar one slide away with a calculator as well.

      Take that, school math teacher telling us we wouldn’t have a calculator!

      • 12 days

        yeah my behaviour is 100% a result of the windows calculator being shit

        well that and I don’t want to move my hands off the kb/m to my phone, which I don’t keep in my office anyways

        I’ve started just doing it in any of the Excel docs I always happen to have open, which is often better for making revisions and comparing numbers anyways. then just clear those cells when done / close without saving (well, the times that Microsoft lets me close without saving, anyways - sometimes it saves even if auto save is off and you choose to not save)

        • 12 days

          Macos uses yahoo finance by default (no idea if you can change it). I don’t have access to my KDE box at the moment, sorry.

  • 13 days

    Put your calculator into hexadecimal mode.

    Now, let me tell you a story, three people walk into a café 3CAFE, there they have sex / 6, now tell me, what do they get?

    (Admittedly, the joke works better in the original german, because 6 = sechs, which sounds like sex)

    • Was that funny in English? 9

      (Admittedly, it is funny in German ;)

      In English it’s as funny as asking a German if they know the square root of 81.

  • 13 days

    I once spent 3 hours straight trying to figure out how to make 147 by only using 4 fours. Only to find out that my phone calculator doesn’t even have the required operator key to make it work.

    • 12 days

      I’m not sure what rules you were using, but addition/subtraction and multiplication will only ever give you even numbers and 147 is odd. If you’re allowing division, then 4*37-(4/4).

      • 12 days

        I was using a semi-standard set of Four Fours rules that allows Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Concatenation (i.e. 44), Decimal points ( .4), Factorial, Square root and Exponentiation.

        The operand I was missing was the overline.

  • 12 days

    I checked my kids calculator history but it was just a bunch of arithmetic that always resulted in “67”. Does this mean he’s on the drugs?