filiph

Happy to answer questions and receive feedback here (my blog doesn't have a comment system).

I'm mostly a front-end person so some of the Ansible/Kamal stuff, I'm sure I did pretty badly. The gamedev / CLI UX stuff is closer to my expertise, but of course that doesn't mean I didn't bork it.

Hi, I'm the original author of unsure calculator. Let me just say thank you! I love the code and the fact that people are having a go at this stuff.

I'd argue this is WAI.

It's hard for me to imagine _dividing_ by -1~1 in a real-world scenario, but let's say we divide by 0~10, which also includes zero. For example, we are dividing the income between 0 to 10 shareholders (still forced, but ok).

Clearly, it's possible to have a division by zero here, so "0 sharehodlers would each get infinity". And in fact, if you try to compute 500 / 0, or even 500~1000 / 0, it will correctly show infinity.

But if you divide by a range that merely _includes_ zero, I don't think it should give you infinity. Ask yourself this: does 95% of results of 500 / 0~10 become infinity?

I think I was looking at this and several other similar calculators when creating the linked tool. This is what I mean when I say "you'll want to use something more sophisticated".

The problem with similar tools is that of the very high barrier to entry. This is what my project was trying to address, though imperfectly (the user still needs to understand, at the very least, the concept of probability distributions).

It's all computed in the browser so yeah, it's JavaScript. Still, 8 seconds is a lot -- I was targeting sub-second computation times (which I find alright).

Something I should have probably addressed in the article but didn't get to it for brevity: there are at least two kinds of immersion, and people tend to conflate them. (I'm not immune to this.)

There's intellectual immersion. Flow. You can be intellectually immersed reading a book or playing chess.

Then there's sensory immersion. Put a VR on, you're immersed this way.

> Before I had gaming hardware I wasted the exact same amount of time by re-reading books and comics, and it was quite immersive.

If so, you are in the minority. For most people, it is easier and more natural to put down a book and go do something else, than it is to quit a video game. Media consumption metrics seem to corroborate this.

> That sounds an awful lot like the good old "why do we build space rockets when people are starving".

If you want to simplify the article this way, sure, but then it's "why do we build ever-more immersive entertainment when we could build space rockets or try to address starvation". I think there's a difference. (And of course, even then we're losing all nuance of the actual article, but I guess there's no way around that.)

I think that quote confuses intellectual immersion with sensory immersion. Those are separate things. Yes, you can be immersed in a chess game or a good book or a PacMan game, but it's not the same as having a VR headset on?