Chris Smith

I just published Athena Loses a Bet medium.com/p/athena-loses…

@RG_Leachman A few years ago I thought about wanting a keyboard sight reading trainer that generates a continuous stream of realistic sheet music in your zone of proximal development in terms of complexity, key, range, etc., adjusting as you play based on your accuracy.

I asked Claude to build my daughter an app that plugs into our piano, can read live key strokes, can show her sheet notes and key view and ends with a Guitar Hero style game. All while giving progressively harder songs. Today she’s using It and crushing It.

@OverlyTrev @MarkBurnside13 The reaction you're getting isn't to the 5 to 10 minutes of taking a small detour and pumping gas. It's to the absolutely laughably ridiculous claim that anyone would EVER drive 45 minutes to a gas station just to fill up and go home.

@MarkBurnside13 Even if you stop for 5 minutes while you’re out that’s still 5 minutes that a person with an EV doesn’t worry about charging at home. Charging at home I plug in takes a second and it charges while I sleep. You HAVE TO travel to get gas, this is not the case with EV’s.

There is a huge misconception when people claim it only takes 5 minutes to fill up a gas tank versus charging an EV. Here are the key considerations: 1. The typical time spent at a gas pump is 8–9 minutes, but it varies: - Circle K: 8.9 minutes - Sheetz: 11.5 minutes - Wawa: 11.4 minutes - Buc-ee’s: 20.3 minutes 2. Filling up requires driving to the station, which can take 10–45 minutes depending on your location and the nearest station. 3. Oil changes and maintenance take time and money (even if you do them yourself, you still have to buy oil and perform the work). EVs eliminate this entirely. 4. Home charging takes seconds to plug in, and you wake up to a full charge the next day. 5. In March, I spent $9 on electricity while current gas prices are $3.49/gallon—a savings of over $60 in fuel for the month. 6. Adding up time and money saved over a year comes to roughly 15–30 hours and over $750, and I don’t even drive that much. EV’s save you time and money and once you have one you’ll never go back to gas.

@OverlyTrev Yes, if you park near a power outlet and drive little enough and park at home often enough, electric cars are very convenient. If you drive long distances or don't park near an outlet, they are a bit of a pain. Tech will advance, but it's not all there yet.

@DrDominicNg Chess and large language models are solving very, very fundamentally different problems, though. Not saying you're wrong, but appealing to chess engines as "evidence" is pointless.

Chess is 30 years ahead of every other profession in dealing with AI. The best case study we have for what's coming. 4 lessons: 1. Human-AI collaboration had a 15-year shelf life in chess. "Human in the loop" is a phase.

@mainfxy @DudespostingWs It's a pair of dice. But still not a normal distribution. It's a triangular distribution.

@DudespostingWs Surprisingly, if it is a die, the probability of each outcome is equal, and there is no normal distribution.

He rolled dice 10,000 times over 17+ hours and documented the results, an almost perfect normal distribution.

@PeterBorbe I've seen this. It was in New Jersey, though, not China. Seemed like a cool idea until I realized I left my phone in the car and couldn't just walk back and get it

Ein Park-Roboter in China. Irgendwie verschlafen wir gerade das 21. Jahrhundert, früher wäre sowas von uns gekommen.

@nomeata Since I wrote this, I've been told that most sports betting has the option to cash out your bet at any point during the game, where you make money based on the current odds. That's pretty similar

@cdsmithus I wonder if a still simple but better judge (not quite your Optimal Judge yet) could offer you the expected value under some decreasing valuation. Is there any real-world gambling that follows this idea?

I just published To Flip Or Not To Flip medium.com/p/to-flip-or-n…

This game is fascinating to me. willowdale.online/flip Taking the offered "deals" is always mathematically a bad idea, yet often very emotionally comforting.

@jaideeparashar @JonathanRoss321 AI has already changed most of those things, though. Maybe not always for the better, but they are definitely changed.

@JonathanRoss321 AI will change a lot, but it won’t change everything. Some parts of human life are much harder to automate or replace. 1. Human relationships 2. Curiosity and exploration 3. Values and moral decision 4. Physical human experiences 5. Human meaning and purpose

What won't AI change?

@oyster_brain @jevonduve Lots of programmers know about functors. They just don't agree on what they are. To a C++ programmer, eg, a functor is an object that overloads the function call operator.

@jevonduve Imagine talking to someone who doesn't know functors... lol

not listening to programming opinions from someone who doesn't know what a homomorphism is

@prajdabre @yudhiesh1997 How many words are in the sentence "Dr. O'Neill's state-of-the-art AI/ML start-up—re-branded as 'e-Commerce 2.0™'—filed a §501(c)(3) co-op’s pre-IPO S-1 on 03/01/2026 at 12:00 a.m."?

@yudhiesh1997 Exact.

Technical interview question: Suppose you have 5 TB worth of text data and you want to count the total number of words, how will you do this?

Bad UX story: Went out to eat, machine only offers 18/22/25% tip buttons. I hit "custom" but it hides the bill. I hit Cancel to go back so I can calculate the tip. It just charges my card with no tip. I ask the server; they have no way to accept a tip now. They are upset...

Asked Gemini to plan a basement room renovation concept, and it knocked it out of the park! I'm seriously impressed.

@Queen_primis The U.S. doesn't even have one education system or curriculum, so it's meaningless to say the U.S. teaches one way. The method labeled "China" isn't even fully general, so clearly that's not the only method taught in China. The labels are just provocation.

Who is the smartest 🤔?

@kerckhove_ts I suppose it would save a lot of time to stop having friends who want to do things together.

@cdsmithus Fun fact: you can do this with people too, and it saves SO much time.

When talking to AI, one learns to stop reading as soon as it says something wrong. What comes next may not be worth your time. If it is, let AI say it again once it's not wrong. This is exactly the wrong way to interact with people, of course, but I have to remind myself!

@T0NI_K @SolaireWTS @financedystop I'm having trouble following. You don't have to learn division to know that 20 is 2 x 10. Factoring of small recognizable numbers is just remembering basic multiplication facts. This is one exercise, not a "system". The standard algorithm for multiplication is still taught.

@cdsmithus @SolaireWTS @financedystop Maybe my thinking of how one should learn is just outdated, but I don’t see a way to build any sort of foundation with this system. If you have to know division to learn multiplication, I have to assume they’re teaching division with multiplication. There’s no progression there

Mom is stunned at how difficult they are making elementary school math and she has a point

@gkcs_ Unpopular opinion: I prefer Google Drawings as my project management tool.

I have moved from JIRA to Google Sheets, and the planning seems to be simpler. Maybe I am not able to understand how useful JIRA is. Could anyone explain the benefits? We are a startup of ~15 people, looking to manage tasks on a daily basis.