[WalterBright]

It's not a "trick".

And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions. You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the gas in your tank.

It goes on and on.

Calculators are great for getting an exact final answer. But you'd better already know approximately what the answer should be.

[shiomiru]

> it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error.

Humans are much better at pattern matching than computation, so the safest solution is probably to just double check if you've typed in the right numbers.

[boredhedgehog]

> recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error

It might be counterintuitive, but the cheaper (and therefore successful) solution will always be more technological integration, not less.

In this case, better speech recognition, so the user doesn't have to type the numbers anymore, and an LLM middleman that's aware of the real-world context of the question, so the user can be asked if he's sure about the number before it gets passed to the calculator.