Never in my life will I understand why Americans bleep out curse words. 🤔

@xuu@txt.sour.is Yay! We’re all slow! 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I hate that. Worse, these items show up in the RSS feeds as well. I don’t get the point of this at all. 🤷

One thing to note about #AdventOfCode: It is really, really important to inspect your input data.

Your data could be considered part of the puzzle description. By inspecting it, you can find clues and you might find out that you can make certain assumptions.

(I mean, what’s the alternative? There could be a list of allowed assumptions in the textual descriptions, right? That wouldn’t be a lot of fun, I think, as it would give away too much information about the solution. It’s more interesting to find those clues yourself.)

Another great #AdventOfCode puzzle today: Not that hard on modern CPUs but a challenge for DOS. That’s the interesting stuff I was hoping for!

@prologic uBlock Origin on Firefox, yes. I also wipe my browser profile on every shutdown – not sure if that makes a difference.

@xuu@txt.sour.is If only I could see them. All I get is Twitter’s login screen. 🫤

@prologic I still haven’t seen this and I sure hope it stays that way. 🤔

@jason@jasonsanta.xyz Do you have mutt’s threading view turned on?

set sort = threads
set sort_aux = date-sent
set strict_threads = yes

I find this to be very non-confusing. 🤔

@xuu@txt.sour.is Nice! 😊 I like it when those puzzles are solvable using pen and paper. Some of the other puzzles require you to write lots and lots of code, that can be really tedious.

(Yes, I know that it’s called “Advent of *Code*”. 😂)

@xuu@txt.sour.is Yes, exactly that. But: I do have more than 32 bits after all, when I use double or long double. 😲 I went with long double which has 80 bits even on DOS (63 bits mantissa, I think).

(I only wrote a brute-force thingy this morning, so I didn’t even think about doing anything related to polynomials or double. 😅 Even part 2 only took 55 ms. But for DOS, this wasn’t an option anyway, so I did the proper math while waiting for something at work. 🤣)

It’s still a bit surprising to me. Usually, AoC doesn’t require such tricks and most things fit neatly into 32 bits. Maybe there’s a better solution after all. 🤔 I might have a look at reddit.

Today’s AoC puzzle is a very simple problem on modern machines, but quite tricky for me: It involves a number that doesn’t fit into 32 bits. 🤔 I wonder if/how I can manage to port this beast to DOS. (I once wrote a “big int” library myself, but that was ages ago and I hardly remember it anymore.)

@xuu@txt.sour.is I see, interesting. 🤔 Now I’m curious if I could optimize my brute-force solution as well. 😅 (I wrote a “proper” solution in the meantime after watching a visualization by someone else.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What a great scenery. 😊 I hope the snow comes back soon. It’s all gone at the moment and well above 0°C.

@xuu@txt.sour.is And that is still a brute-force attempt? That’d be really fast. 😳 Are you doing anything clever or is your CPU just that powerful? 😅

@prologic Doing AoC competitively is super hard. I don’t enjoy this at all. I just happened to be quick these first few days. 😅

I rather set my own goals. Like the DOS thing this year. That is a lot of fun. 😊 (I just have to remember not to check the leaderboards. 🤣)

… it just finished and brute-force worked. 18 minutes of computing time on my 11 year old machine, single-threaded.

@xuu@txt.sour.is I ask myself that question every year. 🤣

To be fair, the first part wasn’t really that difficult. If you have A LOT of experience with these kind of problems/puzzles and if you have a proper framework, I imagine it’s doable. (I, on the other hand, spent about 40 minutes just writing my C code to parse the input.)

Some of these people record themselves and then post it on YouTube. It’s pretty crazy to watch. 🥴

The second part of the puzzle, was/is pretty hard, though. At least for me, because I haven’t found “the trick” yet. I’m currently trying to brute-force it while having breakfast. 😅 (But given that it took ~8 minutes for the first person to get both stars, maybe they brute-forced it as well. With a faster machine and multithreading, ~8 minutes sounds about right. Brute-force is rarely the answer in AoC, though.)

@eapl.me@eapl.me It’s been a while since I used QBasic/QuickBasic, but yep, I remember the experience being quite similar. 😊

@jason@jasonsanta.xyz I got it. I was already asleep yesterday. 😅

@jason@jasonsanta.xyz Sure thing. The address is on my website. 👌

It is a pleasure to work with the help system of Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 on DOS. The descriptions are clear and concise. There are short and simple examples. Pretty much every help page is cross-refenced and those links can be clicked.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Holidays up until next year, hm?

Exactly that. 🛌

@prologic Here you go: https://movq.de/v/dfb04df5c7/aoc2023-day4-part2.txt

That second photo is from our local pond. See all those tracks in the snow? Those are from the ducks and the other birds that stayed here.

This video is from a couple of days ago – just frozen, no snow yet:

https://movq.de/v/527a76bd19/VID_20231203_104847.mp4.mp4