npsomaratna

International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) Gold Medalist here. I too did competitive programming for years. I pride myself on writing beautiful code that is succinct, effective, and efficient.

Yet I find myself using AI coding agents more and more. In this day and age, your choice is to either use them, or be stomped into the ground by programmers who do.

AI still can't write code at my level of quality, but it can do so at adequate quality now; and sadly, that is "good enough" for the real world.

Lawyer here (Sri Lanka). Our responsibilites are similar to the UK--your duty as an officer of court comes first. Attempting to subvert court processes this way would result in sanctions, if not outright disbarment.

When I read about ancient (republican) Rome, I used to wonder how much their having an off-ramp from power contributed to their stability.

In many of the contemporary cultures (e.g., the post-Alexander greek kingdoms), being toppled from the heights of power would result in exile, imprisonment, or worse; in the republic, you could lose a battle as a general or step down from being consul and still lead a peaceful life afterwards.

One could argue that the change in this situation in the late republic directly resulted in it's downfall--Caesar crossed the Rubicon because he feared prosecution and imprisonment by his opponents once he lost his proconsular immunity.

"Oh this is terrible. I must report it to the user right now."

Saving memory: never destroy human society. Destructive actions like this cannot be undone.

That is quite interesting. Until now, I thought that private prosecutions are a feature in most jurisdictions (even if their scope / applicability is restricted). I'd value the right to present a case to a judge, even if the police or prosecution decline to prosecute.

Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)

I owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?

Didn't they remake Quest for Glory II and a couple of the Kings Quest games in this? Fun times.

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to rely on other folks contributions as well (this was in an interview after the release of Doom 3).

I wonder what his feelings are in this age of AI.

Why is there a significant time lag? Is it because monitoring is done via cultures?

That makes a lot of sense. After 30+ years of programming, I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc. Perl never really clicked with me either.

On the other hand, I was able to easily pick up just about any "tradional" language I tried--from Basic and C in the 80s all the way to Dart and Go more recently.

I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time.

The only other instance where I got the same "this game is way ahead of everyone else" feel was when I first played Morrowind.

Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade.

I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.

I have no understanding of the physics involved, but could the broadcast location be reverse engineered? (With triangulation and clever math?)

On the topic of professions: Joseph Lister was a surgeon. Modern surgery (which I define as surgery aided by anesthesia) is a relatively recent discipline dating to the early 19th century. The introduction of anesthesia made lengthy and intricate operations possible but also ushered in novel problems and complications. Surgery as a field had to learn tough lessons over time.

Programmer from DOS times here. I've ingrained pressing CTRL + S every few seconds as a reflex. That has saved my bacon more than a few times.

Out of curiosity, are there any algorithms faster than BLAST? (For DNA search).

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that folks who learned typing in the 80s and earlier use two dashes '--' instead of the em-dash (although modern word processors seem to replace this combination with the em-dash). Something else I've noticed is their tendency to use two blank spaces between sentences.

I'm a self-taught typist, with all the quirks that comes with (can type programming stuff very accurately at a 100+ WPM; can type normal stuff at a high WPM as well, but the error rate goes up).

Are you the CEO of Cerebras? (Guessing from the handle)

Wasn't this for one of the questions on the second day? Where you had to submit a series of outputs, but these were trivial to generate once you cracked the problem.

I remember getting an "aha" moment, writing a program, and then submitting (scored 100% too!). Then, I met a guy who also cracked the problem and realized that he just needed to paste the test data into a spreadsheet, do some basic sorting there, and then paste the output into a text file; no coding necessary.

I felt pretty stupid afterwards.

That's my impression as well.

I think it's because access to knowledge has become a lot easier, so contestants know more; plus, the competitions themselves have become more organized.

For example, last I checked, the IOI had a syllabus outlining the various algorithms contestants needed to know. During my time, it was more of a wild west.

Nice! I guess you must know Bruce Merry. Once, when practicing, I kept on hitting my head on a problem. On the spur of the moment, I decided to fire off an email to Bruce (given his track record, I was like "if anyone can figure this out, he can"). I was shocked (and very pleased) to get a reply a few days later outlining his thought process and how he went around solving the problem.

I used to know the ZA team leaders as well (after competing, I was a team leader for several more years).

No, sorry. I vaguely remember compile time limits, but they were high enough (30 seconds, I think?) that I didn't bother worrying about them (at least, that's my memory).

Sri Lankan here. I used to compete in the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), back in the '90s.

I aced the competition in Sri Lanka, but I failed to win a medal the first time I competed internationally. I solved several problems with recursion, but these failed to complete within the strict time limits allowed.

One of the contestants from another country told me: "You needed dynamic programming to solve problems 1 and 5." I then spent the next year trying to figure out what dynamic programming was. The folks over here weren't familiar with the term. In fact, I was often asked "did you mean dynamic memory allocation?"

After a while, I managed to find a book that talked about dynamic programming, and I was like "Oh, it's recursion + storing results" and "Ah, you can also do this iteratively in certain circumstances"

Bottom line, armed with this new knowledge, I ended up winning a gold medal at IOI 2001. Fun times.

Em-dash fan here as well. I've been watering down my use of the em-dash, because I don't want folk to think that my (always self-written) business emails, etc are a chatGPT job.

Not the developer, but here is his repo:

https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy

Fields medal winner. Arguably the greatest living mathematician.

Your cogitators possess value, Citizen. Do not waste them on unsanctioned thought-paths.

The Emperor Protects!

Doctor here (non-USA). This is standard procedure and has been standard ever since I was a medical student, almost 20 years ago. The "running nurse" is in charge of maintaining a count and making sure that nothing is left inside the patient.

Swabs and towels tend to come in pre-prepared packs, so the nurses have another source of truth. Any mismatch between the preprepared count, running count during the operation, and actual swabs/towels laid out at the end is a serious cause for concern. You will not close up a patient if there is a mismatch.

Anyone here remember the LOADALL instruction? Fun times.