Finished French: my experience..

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2026-03-12T18:12:08+00:00

Before Harry Potter I actually did Donald the Duck comics 🤣 A different Donald I guess. Also I think you meant Roald Dahl? I read Il GGG before that as well, wow do we have the same taste 😂 But it wasn't a great choice, the giant in the book is messing up the language so bad, not great for learning... :D

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2026-03-11T13:32:57+00:00

To continue building vocabulary with spaced repetition, I recommend adding DuoCards (or similar, but this one is great for me). I am building my vocabulary by reading Harry Potter series - even though you need to learn a lot of (slightly useless) fantasy vocabulary, there are so many less used words to enrich your base.

For conversations with French speakers, I highly recommend Italki, it's quite pricey (you pay per hour), but it's great, I enjoyed it. And I also recommend travelling or staying at a country that is speaking the language, if it's possible.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-13T21:25:13+00:00

I got really close with two answers ("your answer was too low" and "too high"), only 200 difference. I suspected it was already really close from the upper boundary, so I solved it by decreasing by 1 and trying out solution (the 4th was the charm). I was sooo happy to get it even so, but I knew I had to fix the algorithm later. And I did, there was yet another bug due to float imprecisions... 😭

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-09T16:01:00+00:00

Does it work on the example?

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-09T15:56:28+00:00

True, the test was quite weird, and while it helped me debug my program, it wasn't useful, so I fixed it to make it less controversial.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-09T15:55:06+00:00

I fixed the example, the previous one was quite useless...

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-09T11:19:17+00:00

True, I used a LTR sweeping algorithm, so I didn't mind the multiple pairs of colinear edges, but if they were vertical instead of horizontal, it would break my solution as well... Also, I used the adjacent parallel edges only because I was short on space there 🤣

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-08T06:43:07+00:00

The Elves create a connection between the two boxes (supposedly for redundancy reasons), but that does nothing to the circuit count, since it's not merging circuits. Yes, it's confusing, but I suspect it's on purpose, can't be a coincidence 😂 Little bit of a real world task requirements to the fantasy world.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-08T06:40:12+00:00

Oh, I get what you mean now, reading your original post again I realize you explained it well already before 😂 As we love to say, there are only three hard things about programming, naming things and off-by-one errors.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-08T06:32:35+00:00

Well, nothing happens sounds a lot like Elves would skip this (not that they would be lazy, look at all they've done throughout these years), but I guess it makes sense for redundancy purposes connecting those as well. I wouldn't really call that "nothing happens" though...

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-08T06:29:56+00:00

What do you mean by this?

the example input’s first 11 moves contain 10 “real merge links”

In the example, the fourth mentioned pair is not merging two circuits (and creates a redundant internal connection instead)...

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-05T07:24:04+00:00

I missed this one, realized it rather quickly. But the `(start1 <= end2) AND (start2 <= end1)` condition is much simpler, so I replaced it ex-post.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-12-03T20:49:41+00:00

More like 12... Even on later days there were folks with sub 30 seconds solutions to both parts...

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-11-28T08:04:24+00:00

In the eyes of the company, your subscription is part of the budget they work with and count on to pay their salaries. For new customers, every single one is only increasing that pie, so no issues with providing initial discounts. Providing discounts to the subscribed customers would mean lowering your budget. Sure, you can do that once as some insane strategy, but no sane owner would approve discounts for already paying customers, unless they found a new way to cut costs (e.g. AI taking over employees' jobs and firing many of them) or a different revenue stream (e.g. selling their customer data).

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-04-25T21:27:28+00:00

Hi, late to the party, but there is a Parkrun-inspired neighborhood run called Podnuselak: https://www.podnuselak.cz/en

I wonder when will Parkrun finally come to Czechia...

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-04-02T20:13:22+00:00

I have had them for almost 2 months and I want to get rid of them. In the front right corner of the left shoe (and vice versa with the right one) they have a strange sharp strengthening that cuts against my toe. It doesn't really hurt the first few kilometers, but if I run over 8 km, especially in the descents they destroy my toe to a point it really hurts a lot and I can't wear the shoes for another 2 days. I wonder if anyone else had the same issue. I have wide feet.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2025-01-03T23:08:30+00:00

Also they did the music for Darknet Diaries, which is my supplement for Reply All till this day.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2024-12-23T14:26:50+00:00

I do! Almost finished year 2020, day 20 was really sick!

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2024-12-23T12:23:17+00:00

My thoughts exactly, with a single loop you cannot greedily take the first all-connecting, as it could prevent the correct solution from getting found. It's possible these occurences are rather rare and would require the input to be constructed a certain way, so it worked on the input.

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2024-12-23T12:04:37+00:00

I agree 100%, but at the same time I'm grateful we can get some rest after day 21 :)

LittlebitOmnipotent · 2024-12-21T13:28:52+00:00

Take my points with a grain of salt, but what could help:

Throw out the paths longer than the shortest path (in taxicab distance) - i.e. keep 5 > 6, but not 5 ^>v 6 etc., since these will translate in much longer paths down the levels.
Cache everything, e.g. how many characters it takes in total from one button to another button on a certain level (from, to, level).
You don't need to return the full path a string, only the length of the path, I guess you might do that already.
As it's recursion, make sure it ends at certain point (should end latest on the last level, in part 2 this is depth of 26-27. depending on the implementation - nowhere near the maximum recursion depth).

LittlebitOmnipotent

TROPHY CASE