Isn't it also true that the deeper and thicker the quagmire, the more tokens one will have to use to wade through it?
This seems like a path to eventual LLM lock-in once the codebase gets messy enough. These things could end up being like 0% interest credit cards for technical debt. I guess it all depends on how the token usage scales over time. My guess is it will be steeper than linear.
I don't think there are good analogies to physical tools. It would be something like a nondeterministic version of a replicator from Star Trek which to me would feel much closer to a slot machine than a CNC mill.
Lots of hair splitting in the comments. The service is so unreliable at this point that I don’t trust them to not train on private repos even accidentally. You’re one vibe-coded PR away from having all your data scooped up regardless of any policy or intention.
I can't even imagine what these exams would look like. The entire profession seems to boil down to making the appropriate tradeoffs for your specific application in your specific domain using your specific tech stack. There's almost nothing that you always should or shouldn't do.
I blame the experts. It's their responsibility to explain things to the public and engage in forums that the public is paying attention to (e.g. podcasts). They don't have to bloviate about everything under the sub, but they do have to be able to break down and communicate their ideas to the non-expert public. Failure to do so creates a vacuum that is filled by the Marc Andreesens and Peter Thiels of the world.
Yeah I definitely struggle with this. You need downtime to relax but it's easy to "over relax" just like it's easy to oversleep or overeat or overdo any other number of things that are healthy and necessary but only at the right amplitude and frequency. I think that's why it can feel so good to be in a rhythm. You get a nice oscillation going that rides the wave of momentum instead of some monotonic rise or fall that is going to lead to burnout or stagnation.
This is the first time I've heard anyone argue that a food product must be good for you because Americans are consuming a large amount of it. How on earth could you come to that conclusion given how unhealthy our population is?
Have you ever tried the LeetCode live competitions? I found those to be really fun with a great community. Just grinding problems in isolation can definitely be depressing.
I agree generally, but I feel like we're slowly coming to realize that maximal leisure and safety might not necessarily be the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life.
> Do folk genuinely get asked problems like that in technical interviews these days?
No idea! I'm still in interview prep mode though so I'm doing the LeetCode contests every weekend. Even if practicing problems like these is over-preparing I think it's probably a good idea for me because I imagine I'll be much more nervous and less performant during an actual live interview.
> Is there supposed to be a linear time solution?
Yes! Using a monotonic stack to find the "pivot points" of the contiguous subarray groups as well as both a prefix-sum array and prefix-product array to calculate the sum of all subarrays in each group in O(1) time after initially building the arrays in linear time.
There are some great explanations in the discussion section. This is one of the few problems that I got stuck on and wasn't able to solve on my own after a couple days of trying. The LeetCode community is awesome though and getting to see how other people solved the problem is a great educational resource.
I feel like they're quite possibly the most deceptively simple data structure I've yet to encounter. That is to say that for me at least there was/is a wide gulf between simply understanding what the data structure is (doesn't get much simpler than a stack!) and when/how to actually apply it.
This seems like a path to eventual LLM lock-in once the codebase gets messy enough. These things could end up being like 0% interest credit cards for technical debt. I guess it all depends on how the token usage scales over time. My guess is it will be steeper than linear.