Does anyone know what is the theme of this year? If it's VM or anything low level then it's fun.
It’s only ever elves finding and losing things
Advent of Code 2024
221–230 of 580 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
There are some "filter" days for sure, usually those are when the solution needs a major leap in your approach such as concurrency, dynamic programming, or geometry equations.
It's usually not concurrency FWIW, it's almost always algorithmic in nature. On a modern machine, even highly concurrent* code would only execute 10-20x as fast and you could just wait a bit.
One common AoC trick is that you can brute-force part one (e.g. O(n^2) complexity or worse), but part two scales up `n` to make that intractable.
*ignore my sloppy conflating of concurrency and parallelism
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#223Am 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.
I wouldn’t use an AI to solve the problems, but I wonder if an AI could give good feedback on a solution I cook up?
That's what I've been doing with some older AOC puzzles. I solve it, then paste my solution into Claude and ask for tips on making it more idiomatic. It's been pretty nice so far. I learned about Haskell Arrows which I would probably have never come across otherwise.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#224Work on a side project this December instead of doing this. Solving advent of code just keeps you in your comfort zone. Creates a false sense of accomplishment. Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't.
Learn to let go of the constant need to be productive.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#225I read the entire page and I don't see anywhere that it actually lists what the puzzles are, I'm so confused.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#226I use it to learn new languages - this year it's Ada -
https://blog.adacore.com/announcing-advent-of-ada-2024-codin...
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#227Work on a side project this December instead of doing this. Solving advent of code just keeps you in your comfort zone. Creates a false sense of accomplishment. Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't.
> Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't.
So if some activity [work] doesn't contribute to your ability to never have to work again [retirement], you shouldn't do it?
What if I've retired, am I allowed to do AOC then? Or then does the first rule of, only do something the future you would be proud of apply?
What if all of the things I'm proud of are just a false sense of accomplishments? How do I know when I'm actually allowed to be proud of it, or if it's just a false sense of pride?
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#228I’m attempting to make my own language for solving the puzzles as I go along.
I did this, and it's been very satisfying! Here's where I'm at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r99-nzGDapg
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#229Last 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.
I got stuck on the graph-cut puzzle for FOUR MONTHS. I had to write a force-directed graphing engine to find the longest three edges to cut.
After I solved it I looked at other people's solutions and they used Meta's proposition solver in about 10 lines. Seemed like a massive cheat to me.
Re: Advent of Code 2024
#230Work on a side project this December instead of doing this. Solving advent of code just keeps you in your comfort zone. Creates a false sense of accomplishment. Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't.
> Redirect all the positive energy to something that will make you proud when you are old or help with an earlier retirement. This won't. So if some activity [work] doesn't contribute to your ability to never have to work again [retirement], you shouldn't do it? What if I've retired, am I allowed to do AOC then? Or then does the first rule of, only do something the future you would be proud of apply? What if all of t…
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