About the site

“Do you live in a simulation?” — it's one of those questions that starts as a joke and then keeps you up at night. Philosophers have argued about it for centuries. Elon Musk brought it to dinner parties. Nick Bostrom turned it into a formal trilemma. We turned it into a poll.

This isn't a scientific survey. It's not a peer-reviewed study. It's an aggregate of whoever happened to click — self-selected, opinionated, and interesting precisely because of that. Think of it as a living data artefact: a snapshot of what a slice of the internet thinks about one of the biggest questions there is.

One click to vote. No accounts, no signups, no tracking. Your country is detected from your IP address at the moment of your request. The IP itself is immediately discarded for country lookup; we only keep a short-lived SHA-256 hash for rate limiting (auto-expires within 60 seconds). We never store your IP in identifiable form. Your vote choice lives only in your browser's localStorage. What we keep on our servers is purely aggregate: country-level totals for each answer.

The site is built with Next.js, hosted on Vercel, with vote counters stored in Upstash Redis. The map uses Natural Earth data rendered with d3-geo projections. Everything is designed to be fast, minimal, and respectful of your privacy.

Built as a side project to play with AI-assisted development workflows. The entire codebase was developed iteratively, milestone by milestone, with a focus on getting the details right — from the design tokens to the rate limiting.

If you have ideas, find bugs, or just want to say hello: hello@simulated.be