Tryhards ruin everything, part n
Make a fun little christmas calendar to bring joy to the people, get turned into a gamified warzone where people use AI and bots to try to get onto the global leaderboards - possibly because getting on them might net you a job at FAANG
People - the reason why we can’t have good things.
I know this is an outsider position, but I always felt that the AoC leaderboard was a mistake. Very few people had the time, the commitment, and the capability of making it on there in a meaningful fashion, and it put an emphasis on something that didn't match the vibe of the event at all. If speedrunning the problem solving was the point, then why package every episode into an enjoyable little story?
This also ties into the comments that AoC has become moot or was "ruined by LLMs". If you enjoy solving the problems, nothing should have changed for you. What's the difference if a given problem was already solved by an LLM, or a group of IQ 200 superhumans from MIT for that matter?
As time marches on, there will eventually be absolutely nothing left where an unaugmented human outperforms a machine. That doesn't mean you have to stop enjoying things. In a few years at most, all programming will be purely recreational.
> In a few years at most, all programming will be purely recreational.
That's a bold prediction given how much LLMs suck at programming today (and haven't really improved, either). I'm willing to believe that we will someday invent an AI that can program better than humans. I don't believe it'll be within a few years, because the current architecture shows no signs that it'll ever be able to get the job done.
I liked the leaderboard prior to AI. Was fun to click through to various profiles and see who was in there and what their solutions looked like.
Fun part is that world mostly doesn’t really work like that and they don’t really get the job.
You can put that on your resume and I guarantee nobody will check.
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The temptation to start a competative private leader board will be great, just for the mentioned reason. I have a reference my scores in my CV. The competative part of AoC is one of the things that I find attractive and also has taught me some valuable lessons about coding, like taking some time to review the code the first time before submitting. I experienced several times that I spend of time to debug a small bug due to a minor error, that I could have caught had I spend some time reviewing. Especially with the first puzzles, I try to get it right the fitst time with respect to compiling and execution.
I will search for a pure C private group to join that only allows a small library for things like reading the input as an array of strings.
On your CV ? Has any recruiter or hiring manager ever commented on it, or said the mention gave you an advantage ?
No, but I don't care. I guess that most hiring managers do not know what AoC is.
Next week, I will be 64, and I am no longer searching for a full time job. In the past decade I only worked for 24 or 30 hours per week. I am financial independent and plan to only work freelance if there is some opportunity. Currently, I am not actively searching for a job.
I have created a private leaderboard which you can join with `1563228-d419ba6d.`
The basic rule is: you are only allowed to use code you wrote yourself. That does include code you wrote before the start of the contest, for example, standard functions you wrote for earlier AoC editions.