Hey that’s me! Congrats to everyone!

Is it for sure Microsoft?

Not an algorithm or theorem, but specializing to the input is a good general tip to at least get an answer ime

In terms of algorithms: flood fill is useful, a few other graph algos like min-cut/max-flow come in useful sometimes.

There are a lot of people participating. Some of 'em are bound to be really really good, and also get lucky!

The timeouts are 1 minute for the first 5 attempts, then 5 minutes.

People are just really used to AoC’s format and use languages/frameworks that are extremely concise

I’ve got a really nice setup with benchmarks, auto-input-fetching and solution upload and such, written in Rust, so I’m sticking with that. I kinda wanted to try Odin, but december really snuck up on me, and I didn’t have time to set it up or really get familiar with it.

Iterators and slicing and such are all just… so nice for parsing streams.

“The transgender topic” is already weird as a statement (kinda like “the gay agenda”, it comes off as only considering it as a political statement?), and “clearly promoted by the bourgeoisie” implies it’s bad.

“As far as […] lgbt flags on government buildings”: it’s… not far at all? Again, weird statement.

“Biological male” is both wrong for the boxer (she’s cis) and generally used for transphobia (trans women on HRT aren’t biological males by any reasonable definition). It’s also generally conspiratorial.

Overall it’s not explicitly transphobic or bad to me, but it shows at minimum a very misinformed perspective.

Here’s an archived version of that medium link that doesn’t cut off: https://archive.is/FNqUx (and that loads super fast)

But there’s no “biological” reason for that. In the same way, skirts/dresses being for women and suits/ties being for men, leg hair, haircuts, voice, mannerisms, emotional availability, all get tied one gender or another.

We, in our society, have associated some properties to one of two genders. Some of these properties tend to be associated to one sex (sex being a more “biological” thing (but still not binary or unchangeable!)), but many of them are just expectations we put upon people. This is what “gender is a social construct” means; that the general understanding and intuition about gender is constructed by the society in which we live. Different societies may have more than 2 genders or completely different sets of associations.

Unfortunately these categorizations are bad for a significant portion of the population, including trans people, gender non-confirming people, but even cishet people; how many times have you heard of some act making you “not a real man” (eg crying for a movie)?

I’m not an OS dev, I have no idea how stuff this low-level works.

I’d suggest some kind of “press this key to view debug information” text (or make it documented but not visible, to avoid people just pressing whatever button is written on the screen)

Hosted on poast, though, which is defederated from literally everyone decent for a good reason

I’ll stick with AP for now but I’ll keep an eye on it, then.

Nostr is culturally vaguely american, and it’s hard to distinguish the libertarians from the Trumpists there (I’ve seen several posts saying “Trump will be better for Bitcoin”, for example). Libertarians and republicans both sell themselves as “small government”.

“Leftist libertarians” generally call themselves anarchists, in my experience.

I checked out Nostr relatively recently and it seemed to me it was full of cryptobros and extremely right-wing people (libertarians, Trump fanatics. A ton of racism and queerphobia, also a bunch of conspiracy thinking). Has anything changed?

Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can’t find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total “Cost of revenues” was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they’re definitely making a profit.

Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

Just to offer some support, you’re right and those are good questions

Fair. Powertoys is really extensive. I quite like Pop (or gnome’s? Not sure) tiling window manager though.

PopOS’s COSMIC menu is like that I think (you can search files, the web, even stuff like turning volume up and down)? But I’ve never tried to run it outside of PopOS.

Having read a significant portion of the base WASM spec, it’s really quite a beautiful format. It’s well designed, clear, and very agnostic.

I particularly like how sectioned it is, which allows different functions to be preloaded/parsed/whatever independently.

It’s not perfect by any means; I personally find it has too many instructions, and the block-based control flow is… strange. But it fills a great niche as a standard low-level isolated programming layer.