I made a simple coin toss app because I can't make decisions

General
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I often struggle with simple choices in life.
I often flip a coin to make a decision.
I often don’t have a coin handy.

So to solve this, I just slapped together a simple bash script that let’s me flip a coin on my phone.

I set out to make this as quickly and simply as possible so I used yad (inspired by a years-old Purism news post). It’s not very pretty and the way the screen refreshes is a little annoying (none of the yad --window-type options seem to make a difference in Phosh :person_shrugging:), but I don’t care and wasn’t looking for perfection here, either :smiley: .

Screenshot:

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How to install:

  1. Save the .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/.
  2. Save the script to ~/.local/bin/ and chmod +x it. This directory must be in your path.

Sharing in case it tickles anyone else’s fancy.

5 Likes
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Ha! Great! I know, ridiculous optimism for a ridiculous idea. I love nonsense stuff like that.

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Sounds like a gamer I know: “Do you take the corridor to the right or to the left?”

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Strange. If I need such a thing, I just “go analog” and use a coin.

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My solution is to just write “heads” and “tails” on opposite sides of the Librem 5 and just flip that in the air :joy:

Jokes aside, very cool! I’ll give this a try sometime. I like introducing some chance into my decision-making every now and then.

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Next versions could have different sided dice, or 1 in a 100 chance for an edge :slight_smile:

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If you really need to flip a coin when having to make a decision in life which you can’t decide about, you want a perfect non-deterministic bet: that is an even distribution 50/50 on a statistical scale of 1 million tries. This is called entropy (as in information theory concepts): e.g, entropy = 0 if the result is always the same and known in advance.
Have you tried to test your app’s performance in this sense? I’d be curious to know the real entropy you can achieve on such deterministic hardware as a smartphone, and I wouldn’t rely on this method if I were to decide if I should marry or not…