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Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

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Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#31

Post by qikcik »

gurachek wrote: post #20

Your "no compiler" rule on day 3 taught you more than the LLM did. The LLM made concepts click. But the binary search vanishing under interview stress proves that understanding something and being able to produce it under pressure are totally different skills. Nobody talks about this enough in the "just use ChatGPT to learn" discourse.

You are 100% right. For me, the most important thing is that the LLM teacher allowed me to break through my algorithmic ignorance in just one week.

The rest is somehow orthogonal to the LLM and is just pure practice. It is very easy to procrastinate with an LLM without actual practice.

It allowed me to actually see the problem space and something like the "beauty of classical algorithms". It shifted my "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns". I had failed so many times to achieve exactly that without an LLM in the past.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#32

Post by gurachek »

qikcik wrote: post #31
gurachek wrote: post #20

Your "no compiler" rule on day 3 taught you more than the LLM did. The LLM made concepts click. But the binary search vanishing under interview stress proves that understanding something and being able to produce it under pressure are totally different skills. Nobody talks about this enough in the "just use ChatGPT to learn" discourse.

You are 100% right. For me, the most important thing is that the LLM teacher allowed me to break through my algorithmic ignorance in just one week. The rest is somehow orthogonal to the LLM and is just pure practice. It is very easy to procrastinate with an LLM without actual practice. It allowed me to actually see the problem space and something like the "beauty of classical algorithms". It shifted my "unknown unkno…

Yeeah, LLMs are the perfect procrastination tool because they feel productive. You're "learning", you're "exploring", you're having this great conversation about the problem. And then you close the tab and realize you never actually wrote anything yourself.

The best procrastination device ever built because it validates you the entire time. Great post, even beyond the algorithms example.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#33

Post by traceroute66 »

wiseowise wrote: post #24
traceroute66 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you call "slop" is a far better education than what 99% of children in the world receive. I'm talking about university education here. Where the hell does the clutching at straws "99% of children in the world" argument come into it ?

> clutching at straws > as if he wasn't the one who clutched at some mythical "the university" Next you'll tell that anything below Ivy league isn't considered university and kids should've known better and used their damn head™ really hard to be born in better families to be able to get real university™ education.

> Next you'll tell that anything below Ivy league isn't considered university

I know professors from across the spectrum and I most certainly do not consider Ivy League should be placed on a pedestal.

That is all I am willing to say on that subject. Let's not drift off into personal attacks, please.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#34

Post by jevndev »

autotune wrote: post #30
TrackerFF wrote: post #27

Note: I haven't done any tech interview in 6 years. I'm kind of surprised they still do leetcode-style questions on remote interviews these days. I thought those types of interviews would be 100% gamed by now.

They don't, at least in the SRE space. I have been interviewing for 6 months without a single coding challenge or LeetCode-type challenge. Though I would passively avoid companies that offer them, as in I would avoid them if offered, I have yet to be offered the chance to avoid it in an interview.

Unfortunately this practice is prevalent still. Recently I’ve been applying to jobs in the two industries I have experience in (algorithmic robotics and fintech) and nearly half of the companies that I’ve heard back from start with either a timed leetcode problem or an HR interview which is immediately followed by a timed leetcode problem. It’s exhausting.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#35

Post by traceroute66 »

wiseowise wrote: post #21
traceroute66 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM is going to change schools and universities a lot, teachers, tutors will have to find themselves in the new reality, as they have a strong competitor with infinite resources and huge knowledge, patient and ready to work with every student in a distinct way, according to student's needs, level, intelligence, etc. No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have any university professors amongst your f…

> No it won't. It really, really wont. You clearly don't have any university professors amongst your friends or acquaintances. Maybe some fancy professors in their cushy Ivy league ivory tower won't, but a lot of teachers that work for minimal salary sure will. > Because the reality is that LLMs are nothing more than a party trick, a stats based algorithm that gives you answers within a gaussian curve. A lot of human…

> LLMs will reply to their best abilities

Which includes hallucination, reward-hacking, over-confident delivery of completely wrong answers etc.

> HAVING AUDACITY to disagree over a topic.

When we are discussing a long-standing centuries-old textbook mathematical formula which is internationally recognised there is no disagreement to be had.

If an LLM hallucinates and tells a student that the textbook mathematical formula is wrong, and the student has the audacity to complain to the professor on that basis, I see no issue with the professor firmly challenging the student. University is there to foster learning and reasoning using your own brain, not outsourcing it to a hallucinating LLM.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#36

Post by mgraczyk »

TrackerFF wrote: post #27

Note: I haven't done any tech interview in 6 years. I'm kind of surprised they still do leetcode-style questions on remote interviews these days. I thought those types of interviews would be 100% gamed by now.

Still plenty of signal. You'd be surprised at how badly most people do at very simple questions.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#37

Post by autotune »

jevndev wrote: post #34
autotune wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't, at least in the SRE space. I have been interviewing for 6 months without a single coding challenge or LeetCode-type challenge. Though I would passively avoid companies that offer them, as in I would avoid them if offered, I have yet to be offered the chance to avoid it in an interview.

Unfortunately this practice is prevalent still. Recently I’ve been applying to jobs in the two industries I have experience in (algorithmic robotics and fintech) and nearly half of the companies that I’ve heard back from start with either a timed leetcode problem or an HR interview which is immediately followed by a timed leetcode problem. It’s exhausting.

Interesting. I am going for a broad search rather than being targeted. Maybe it's as you say, an industry specific problem. At my last fintech job they just quizzed me a bit on Terraform and asked me about experience, though that role ended up being a disaster later on.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#38

Post by saltcured »

culopatin wrote: post #23
traceroute66 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "AI slop" as your main reason, which is being more and more eradicated. The slop is the hard truth. As I made perfectly clear in my original post. My university professor friends get handed AI slop by their students each and every day. There is no "eradication of slop" happening. If anything, it is getting worse. Trust me, my friends see the output from all the latest algorithms on their desk. The students think th…

I think you're missing the point. The conversation is not about what students give the professors, it's about how students learn. This obviously requires someone that wants to learn.

Sweep aside the misunderstanding about students trying to "cheat" with LLM output instead of engagement in the topic at hand. I think there is a secondary debate here, even when you understand the original intent of the post above. It still boils down to the same concerns about "slop". Not the student presenting slop to the existing teaching system, but the student being led stray by the slop they are consuming on their own.

Being an auto-didact has always been a double-edged sword. You can potentially accelerate your learning and find your own specialization, but it is an extremely easy failure mode to turn yourself into some semi-educated crank. Once in a while, this leads to some renegade genius who opens new branches of knowledge. But in more cases, it aborts useful learning. The crank gets lost in their half-baked ontology and unable to really fix the flaws nor progress to more advanced topics.

The whole long history of learning institutions is, in part, trying to manage this very human risk. One of a teacher's main roles is to recognize a student who is spiraling out in this manner and steer them back. Nearly everyone has this potential to incrementally develop a sort of self-delusion, if not getting reality-checked on a regular basis. It takes incredible diligence to self-govern and never lose yourself in the chase.

This is where "sycophancy" in LLMs is a bigger problem than mere diction. If the AI continues to function as a sort of keyhole predictor, it does not have the context to model a big-picture purpose like education and keep all the incremental wanderings on course and bound to reality. Instead, it can amplify this worst-case scenario where you plunge down some rabbit-hole.

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#39

Post by stephen_cagle »

> Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array

I've seen that problem in an interview before, and I thought the solution I hit upon was pretty fun (if dumb).

  class Solution:
      def findMin(self, nums: List[int]) -> int:
          class RotatedList():
              def __init__(self, rotation):
                  self.rotation = rotation
              def __getitem__(self, index):
                  return nums[(index + self.rotation) % len(nums)]
  
          class RotatedListIsSorted():
              def __getitem__(self, index) -> bool:
                  rotated = RotatedList(index)
                  print(index, [rotated[i] for i in range(len(nums))])
                  return rotated[0] ', rotation)
          return RotatedList(rotation)[0]
I think it is really interesting that you can define "list like" things in python using just two methods. This is kind of neat because sometimes you can redefine an entire problem as actually just the questions of finding the binary search of a list of solutions to that problem; here you are looking for the leftmost point that it becomes True. Anyway, I often bomb interviews by trying out something goofy like this, but I don't know, when it works, it is glorious!

Good luck on your second round!

Re: Brute-forcing my algorithmic ignorance

#40

Post by nico »

Recently had a coding interview in which I was allowed to search online but not use any AI. On the first google search, the interviewer realized that the first result is now AI generated and said I couldn’t use anything from there. So I had to just click on different links and piece together what I needed from inside the pages
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