Chris Smith

Software developer and amateur (but published!) ring theorist. Volunteer K-12 math/CS teacher. Haskell enthusiast. He/him.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@ThePatriotNut @RandomSprint Yes, there are ∞ odd numbers, and there are ∞ + 1 even numbers. But ∞ + 1 = ∞, so there's that...

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@JeffAll35309268 @IanRunkle I think most people live under the impression that their modern day is uniquely dumb, when the truth is just selection bias: you don't hear about most of the dumb things from the past.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@coolcoder56 I’ve given about 100 software engineering interviews. Hostile candidates who walk in prepared to resent being tested on memorization usually do poorly, and I know many of them convince themselves they were failed for forgetting minutia. I am not sure if this is an example.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@fidgetsfive @bryanrbeal Because the defining characteristic of being a parent is letting your child make mistakes and learn and grow beyond what you can already trust them to do, but supervising appropriately to manage the risks?

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@HeLLaTaLL510 If the information was out of date, that's good news, and many people are surely exaggerating for political reasons. But "lying" is a very strong word when you acknowledge that statistics from only a few years ago support many of their claims.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

One major U.S. political party increasingly sees democracy as the problem. The other increasingly sees capitalism as the problem. For generations, these were shared principles that nobody had to defend. That's changing quickly, and it's going to be interesting.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

I just published How to (Almost) Trisect an Angle https://t.co/9WPpj54Wqu

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@michaelmiraflor @mkobach People who disagree with you don't just disagree because they haven't flown before. I have flown hundreds of times, and I always wait until the line is dying down at the end before boarding.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@jeremyisenberg @adamcanthony @rod_mallo Southwest passengers insisted on being in their entitled place in the line to get choice of seats. Without an incentive, people won't split up their families and interrupt their Tik Tok doom scrolling to organize themselves by carefully designed boarding position.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@angerman Without even bothering to look up Facebook Code, which doesn't exist, just think for a second about the claim that 400 million people (more than 5% of everyone alive on the planet, including infants and children) are using ANY software engineering tool. Of course they aren't.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@andre_quentin "Tell me a story"
"Once there was a girl with purple hair..."
"No, she shouldn't have purple hair. Try again."
"Once there was a girl with very normal-colored hair. It wasn't the slightest bit purple. People around the world marveled at how non-purple her hair was."

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

With all the attention I've seen on @flair I feel like I should point out it just doesn't work that well. When part of the home is too hot or cold, Flair's solution is usually to do nothing at all unless you manually set the comfortable part of the house to "Away" mode.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@ropes4goodgirls @IsaacKing314 This isn't about a character being very smart. It's that there is no level of chess where winning in six moves means you're good. There is only it meaning that your opponent did something foolish.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@muddyshutter @kamikazecash If everyone under 50 stops paying, the system collapsed immediately. It cannot keep paying those currently receiving benefits from only the contributions of people aged 50-67.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@YeahYouRight51 @helloitsolly @Wise "Signatures" on these touchpad payment devices are usually just scribbles anyway.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@stalegum @jmhorp If you use the more global definition of state, there are lots of states building data centers. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is on a tear.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@ekamurasi @SebaTheOracle @Freyy_is Also, "does work". "The comparison is doing real work." "That example does a lot of work."

Never says what work it's doing. Just that it's doing something. Also, lots of things are "load bearing".

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@jamesawhiite The one thing you said that has substance is that earlier sunrise promote healthy circadian rhythm. If that is true (for an objective meaning of healthy, not just your a priori decision that people should get up earlier) then you would have the start of an actual reason.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@zacherylayne @hotdamhistorian I always assumed it's common in AI because it reads dramatically, and the RLHF step in LLM training is judged by people with only a surface level understanding of the subject matter and they find rhetorical devices compelling.

[Chris Smith @cdsmithus]

@VetDad25 @prettycritical You don't have a car in New York. A parking spot is like $800 a month in some places, and probably 20 minutes away from you, then traffic makes it not very appealing to drive once you get there.