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Never, in any engineering field, have I EVER seen anyone simplify pi to 5. For that matter, I have never seen anyone simplify to 3. It is always 3.14. I feel like pi simplification is a weird meme that people think engineers do but is never practiced anywhere.

It’s like if there was a meme about chefs saying they always replace eggs with grapefruit. No they don’t, and it’s nonsense to think they do.

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bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There’s less and less reason to do it (and it’s never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to do round it a bit, but only if the specific thing you’re doing allows it, and even then you’re more likely to do a fixed-point approach by using e.g. 314 and dividing by 100 later, or adjusting that value a bit so you can divide by 128 via bitshift if you’re on a chip where division is expensive. However, in 2025 you almost certainly should have picked a chip with an FPU if you’re doing trigonometry.

And while rounding pi to 3 or 4 is certainly just a meme, there are other approximations which are used, like small-angle approximations, where things like sin(x) can be simplified to just x for a sufficiently small x.

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qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).

The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.

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Kaboom@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
There’s a lot of weird stereotypes out there that make no sense. Like the whole “programmers wear thigh high socks” thing. Where did that even come from?

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- BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Bet that one was started by all those dastardly programmers that wear knee high socks!
  
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mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
you’ve never seen anybody simplify it to 3 when doing head calcs without a phone nearby?

it doesn’t happen often, in fact I’ve seen it once. in a decade.

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- I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The only time you should be doing head calcs as an engineer is to double check that you have a reasonable answer with the actual calcs on your actual calculator.
  
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