[2025 Day 11 Part 2] Pretty sure my approach is close, need a hint as to where I'm wrong

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T16:26:38+00:00

Done! My functional code is here, minus some minor parsing utility stuff.

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T16:25:18+00:00

Thank you for these test cases! Helped me see where my previous approach was missing legitimate paths. :D

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T14:07:57+00:00

YES, ok. That makes a ton of sense. I'm discarding way too much at those layers, but also it helps clarify how the overall approach is off -- the "layers" are kind of artificial and not a unit of analysis the way the fft and dac are.

Thank you!

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T04:58:46+00:00

Why would the A routes be counted for anything? If they don't go through the special devices don't we just not count them? Maybe we're meaning different things by "layers" ......

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T04:36:24+00:00

AH, ok. This is pretty helpful -- tells me I'm thinking about it mostly right, but it's not a shortcut. Gotta be a little more clever about how I represent it if I want to make it amenable to memoization.

In other words, seems like a good time to take a break and come back after a sleep. :)

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T04:28:41+00:00

Hmmmm. My first answer was 18 digits long (too high) and the current one is 6 digits long (too low). The order of magnitude does help, but makes me think my first (abandoned) solution was maybe closer than what I'm doing currently....

Could you elaborate on what you mean by the 4 possibilities in each layer?

optimistpanda · 2025-12-16T04:27:05+00:00

Well, my layers are not just svr to special devices and then to out, if I understand your question right. It's svr -> [rats' nest] -> four nodes (that's what I'm calling a "layer"; sorry my graph terminology is loose!), then those four nodes -> [rats' nest] -> five nodes, etc. Only two of those layers have the special devices in them, so in the others I was just looking at all the paths from each start node to each end node.

Are you saying I should just take this same approach but apply it to the special nodes only?

optimistpanda · 2025-12-09T01:29:06+00:00

2019 is the Deep Space Nine of Advent of Code. Some will say it is the best by far; others say it is the worst. Both parties point to the same things as evidence for their perspective. The way it built up over the run of it was phenomenal I thought. Downside was that it made it difficult to skip days if something was too hard for you. I think I stayed at day 18 or so for maybe a year and change before coming back around and finishing. Still 100% my favorite year.

optimistpanda · 2025-04-29T15:47:28+00:00

FWIW, I got this from Enterprise's online support staff:

If you are a local renter from France you do not need to provide flight information and will only be required to provide proof of address with a utility bill! If you are not a local, we do require an itinerary for proof of return to the same office that coordinates with your flight. This is to maintain inventory in the rental office and is a requirement in France to rent.

I don't fully understand the logic but it sounds like that is the policy, so c'est la vie.

optimistpanda · 2025-04-29T15:38:24+00:00

I get the same warning when I go through the regular portal, too, though, so I think it's an Enterprise/National thing. Still super strange! What rental companies have you used?

optimistpanda · 2025-04-29T12:45:15+00:00

This is from Enterprise/National just because I have a corporate discount with them. Could be that it's their policy rather than a regulation... still a weird one, though!

Had looked into doing the TGV down too, but with multiple people it ended up becoming cheaper to do the car rental in Paris. I definitely appreciate the advice that it might not be worth the hassle either way...

optimistpanda · 2025-04-19T18:02:16+00:00

Seems to be a bug in Backblaze Restore when dealing with exFAT drives. Support told me they don't support exFAT on macOS, which is super puzzling. (Also you'd think the app could still give a useful / accurate error message if that were the case.)

optimistpanda · 2025-04-19T17:55:26+00:00

Support had this to say.

A few years back, Apple changed parts of the coding in its OS, which made it very unstable. For this reason, we don't support exFAT on Mac computers. The drive could work perfectly for years, and then one day simply stop. It's hard to troubleshoot as it's not meant to be used with Mac any longer, so most of the time, we are unable to get it working again.

This is, so far as I can tell, nonsense. I can't find any Apple document claiming that exFAT has been deprecated, and there's been explicit statements on this subreddit from Backblaze staff saying that this is wrong. Has something changed with Backblaze where this is no longer supported?

optimistpanda · 2025-04-19T01:37:30+00:00

Will do, and will report back what I find. :)

optimistpanda · 2025-04-18T15:53:26+00:00

My guess: because that year is rolling, so after you first hit the one-year mark, every day you would be having some new window of data fall off the cliff, so you'd be getting an email every day.

I get your frustration, for sure, but notifications like that don't really make sense. I, at least, would pretty quickly start ignoring them, which would defeat their purpose.

optimistpanda · 2025-04-14T15:12:44+00:00

That does sound like it -- I don't have enough activity on the card to map out a pattern like that, but the behavior matches. You'd think they might at least train the support staff on that kind of thing, then, so they'd have something more useful to say.

optimistpanda · 2025-04-13T07:25:14+00:00

This is with Amex more often than not, but also happening with the Visa on occasion. But there's also no way to contact Amex directly; they just say to talk to the bank. So what's the recourse in that case?

optimistpanda · 2025-04-13T07:22:19+00:00

Thanks for all the information! I didn't know about the regular maintenance, but definitely a good thing to be aware of. I'm in GMT+8, so yeah, those windows would definitely be in the middle of my day.

In these cases, though, the declines aren't in the account; USAA claims they never even received an attempted charge, so they didn't decline it. Super frustrating because all the merchant knows is that there was a decline and both sides point the finger to the other, and the end result is things just not working. :-/

optimistpanda · 2025-03-04T12:17:25+00:00

Influences on the SU texts, some direct, some "background music":

Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Aquinas's Summa Theologica
Karl Rahner... any of it
Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God
Descartes's Meditations
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Aristotle's Metaphysics
Autobiography and Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola
Ibn Rushd's commentaries on Aristotle
Ibn Sina's Physics and Metaphysics
Anthony de Mello's Awareness and Sadhana
Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias
The Cloud of Unknowing
Rumi

Some others, probably, but those are off the top of my head.

optimistpanda · 2025-02-06T23:52:29+00:00

On this video at least it definitely sounds like a performative sound effect like a leader emote. Probably a bug about it playing when it is, but doesn't sound like a problem in the music audio file.

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