171–180 of 580 posts
But no, last year I lost all momentum on my side projects and my gf thought she'd lost me to the elves.
Completing it on time was rewarding but I can't go back.
But I can hear those elven bells a jingling...
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There's a graph here of the "hardness" of each day/task, based on how long the 100th place on the leaderboard used. https://aoc.xhyrom.dev/ So it's not linear, and also based on your own knowledge. So perfectly fine to skip some days and still it's possible to solve some of the next ones!
Cool, it would be nice if that one aligned the days which were on weekends, as those tend to have harder problems.
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Are we using enshittification for everything we don't like these days? We invented calculators, those really enshittified manual arithmetic puzzles. Private boards for this stuff makes sense anyway, it's the Internet afterall.
Using LLM for this kind of thing is like using cheats or aim assist for online games. So yes, this is prime example of enshifittication.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
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I think you need all stars to do the final puzzle.
I might be mistaken but I believe the final day has only one puzzle, but the 50th star (a.k.a., the second star of December 25th) is given for having solved everything else. I don't think any puzzles are "locked".
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Sounds sensible. It's important to set boundaries, and enjoy time off. For me Advent of Code is a slippery slope. The difficulty ramps up so at first it's easy, then it's rewardingly difficult. But then before I know it, it takes wayyyyy too much time. The danger is being emotionally invested by then.
There's a graph here of the "hardness" of each day/task, based on how long the 100th place on the leaderboard used. https://aoc.xhyrom.dev/ So it's not linear, and also based on your own knowledge. So perfectly fine to skip some days and still it's possible to solve some of the next ones!
Last year I got stuck on Day 12 for a full week, and thinking about how to solve it consumed my every waking moment. I think this year, I'm going to be kind to myself and not participate so I can really enjoy the winter break from work.
Ah yeah I've been there! Having done it a few years now, I've found that the approach that works for me is: if it starts looking like I'll be stuck on one for more than a few hours, I'll skip it and move on. Otherwise I'll accumulate an insurmountable backlog that becomes more of a depressing chore to think about, than a fun little christmas tradition. I'd rather have a mostly-complete set of problems by the end of t…
Every year except for one has been kind of the same pattern for me:
Day 1: this year, I'm just going to solve the problems. No futzing around.
Day 3: but it would be kind of neat to turn the solutions into a reusable AoC library. Just something minimal.
Day 5: and I should really add a CLI harness for retrieving the problems and parsing the input files.
Day 6: and testing of course.
Day 7: maybe I'll skip today's problem (just for today) and keep improving the framework.
Day 358: oh neat, Advent of Code is coming up.
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>Participants have 36 hours Looks like it is for young people who have dedicated time for it everyday. Personally I would like to do anything like this with no time limit and probably no monetary prizes. I think the only value of those puzzles is to fire up rarely used neurons that hopefully are still there after another year of shipping corporate products xD. I might appreciate fresh point of view from young people…
Because only young people can make time for things. There are plenty of professionals with jobs and families making time for AOC because they enjoy it. Doing the problems at the same time as everyone else is a VERY different experience from doing them whenever you'd like. If you don't want to make the time for it, power to you. I'd recommend most people to drop off after the first 10ish days. But don't delude yoursel…
Imho: I worked with code that has long history for my entire career. If the goal is to look at some objective quality of solution then I do not believe in time limits. The longer I work the more things getting patches/updates/remasters and value of better code goes up and value of arriving at any kind of solution overnight goes down.
Am I alone in thinking that measuring time to get answer is the worst possible metric? I have not participated because of that (yet). If there is a community for those who use other rules to compare actual solutions instead of answers I would be interested to hear about it. I am coming from low level C++ gamedev side so I understand that most people here use different tools to solve different problems.
9 seconds to get both stars is absolutely insane - there had to be some AI assistance here. Come to think of it, a pipeline that feeds the problem text into an LLM to generate a solution and automatically runs it on the input and attempts to submit the solution, doing this N times in parallel, could certainly solve the first few days' problem in 9 seconds.
Caring about the leaderboards is the problem. Are you (impersonal) seriously doing AoC for clout or something?
In particular the LLM cheating isn’t just by conjuring a solution: humans don’t get ASCII characters pumped directly into their brain, we have to slowly read problem descriptions with our eyes. It takes humans more than 9 seconds to solve AoC #1 purely because of unavoidable latency.